In praise of the slow burn

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Good things come to those who wait. Or so the saying tells us.

But the music industry always seems so fraught with the idea of right here, right now, maintaining momentum and looking over your shoulder at the next big thing, hot on your heels ready to announce your obsolescence as soon as you dare to hit 30.

In a world where Spotify demands that you release a track a month to feed the algorithm, it’s hard to maintain a different way of working and the pleasure and craft of allowing things to marinate over time. The art of pursuing something more slowly cooked but perhaps more tender.

This was at the forefront of my mind this week as I had a conversation with an artist on the verge of completing their debut album that had been delayed and detailed by a serious of unforeseen circumstances.

I’ve always been a huge believer in “paying it forwards” and I find it one of the most rewarding parts of making music in that very occasionally I can pass on some pearls of wisdom, or at least the benefit of hindsight with regard to my own career over the last eight years in the vague hope that it might help someone else to navigate some of the perils the music industry has to offer.

What I tried to convey to this person was that I too had felt the urgency and pressure when I started out. At first, it was the protracted process of making my debut album that took nearly 4 years from the inception to the final release in 2016 and then the seemingly ill-fated follow up that was delivered to the label in 2019 but didn’t get end up getting released until 2021. Or the collaborative album that I made with Bernard Butler, In Memory of My Feelings, that took many years to see the light of day.

I’ve got very good at waiting you see.

And what I have learnt, while trying to perfect the art of patience, is that things will sometimes align a lot more slowly than you would like.

I often think back to 2021 and wonder what reception The Art of Losing might have got if it hadn’t been released mid lockdown amidst the horror of Sarah Everard’s murder. Might it have missed the mark and not resonated with people in such a deep way had everyone had less time on their hands to contemplate their own mortality and the tidal wave of loss around us?

This summer I was meant to be finishing the new third album of originals, but a series of personal factors reared their head so that it was all I could manage to just focus on spending the summer playing live with the Manics. And what a time I had getting to share a stage with my favourites.

As far as the album goes, I let go more easily this time of the idea that there’s a fixed schedule or expected timeline that the new record should appear. And now, as I mull over how to gather the necessary funds to finance the mixing of the album (by far and away always the most expensive part of the record making process for me), I know deep down that somehow this extra time will mean that there will be a richness and depth to the songs that might not have come otherwise if I rushed along to my original schedule.

The additional time I have had to reflect and rejig tracks has already led to extra small details being added, special guests being waited upon, and even new songs forming that might not have been “birthed” in time otherwise.

Some of my favourite albums and artists have been born out of “late starters” (John Grant) or slow burners (Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine). Perhaps it’s the literature lover in me that is more familiar with the idea that the quality of something can more often be equated with the long gestation of its creation - Marcel Proust’s infamous A la recherche du temps perdu took him 13 years to write, running to over 1.25 million words in its finished form.

In the world of literature, it’s not uncommon for works to have fraught and protracted period of gestation. From Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (10 years in the writing) to Ezra Pound’s Cantos (57 years in the making and never completed), some of my favourite pieces of literature have their brilliance rooted in their lengthy timeline of creation.

While the current economics of music means that it’s trickier than ever to finance the time and concentration that it takes to make something with the weight and meaning that great art deserves, I am very grateful for my small but growing community of Patrons that are significantly contributing to the slow formation of new music.

If you’d care to join them and help to fund the mixing of the new album - which will be undertaken by Dave Eringa - you can join my Patreon here for less than the price of two coffees a month, and revel in the satisfaction of knowing that you have made a significant contribution to the creation of the new album. Patrons will even get their name mentioned in the liner notes of the new record!

So, as the days begin to get longer again, and I slowly move towards the finish line on the new album, rather than worry about ground lost or momentum slowed, I will instead, I hope turn to the words of Cormac McCarthy:

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”