I’ve written a new song. Well, to be accurate I wrote a new song several months ago and started to record it. Leaving aside the health issues that prevented me from actually singing at the time and still leave me sounding like a frog in a bottle, I started to put the song together.

My recording process isn’t the quickest. I don’t dive into a studio with a bunch of highly talented musicians and a producer with gold-dust ears, I sit for hours at a computer slowly building the song track by track, adding and subtracting ideas as I go along. But gradually things come together and eventually I have everything I need all done and recorded.

Then I hand it over to my producer, the talented Mr Jermaine Nelson-Williams, who listens to me whilst I tell him what production ideas are going on in my head and he goes off to both try and include those ideas and add some more of his own. For some reason this time that process took forever. I didn’t want many changes to the first draft it just took it’s time as things sometimes do.

In between I get the artwork ready and map out in my head what the basic video and visual ideas around the song will be so that there’s some consistency when it comes to marketing the song later.

Finally I have my produced and mastered song in both WAV and MP3 formats and I can prep the song for release. That means uploading it to my distributor CD Baby, making sure to go through the 101 questions they ask, pay for the thing and keep a very watchful eye on my account to ensure that there’s nothing I’ve missed or some hidden question I need to answer.

The clock is now running on release date and this time that will be midnight on Friday 9th December. I’ve started pulling the video together, make sure I’ve got the artwork in all the formats needed for social media and I can start to count down the days.

Realistically we’re something like four or five months since the original concept for the song was born and that, these days, is pretty quick. The song is about three and a half minutes long and will be one of around 100,000 released that day alone.

In bedrooms and studios all over the world there are people doing pretty much exactly the same thing day after day, night after night. If we’re very lucky you, dear reader, might give us a few minutes of your time and have a listen to our creation but how likely is that?

So why on earth do I and people like me do it? I can’t answer for everyone else but it my case I both enjoy it and strangely need to do it. One day I might explain exactly what I mean by that enigmatic answer.