So it’s finally come to this - an ACTUAL release, into the wild, of one of my original songs.
Why did it take so bloody long? Perfectionism; self doubt; lack of organisation; inherent laziness; Astrological signs urging me to defer the release? Some of these reasons, if not all.
But as my lovely better half has put it, it’s best to seek PROGRESS over PERFECTION. And so here we are, with my latest single The Greatest Gift about to smash it’s way onto all the major streaming services in the UK and beyond…
This song opened so many doors for me way back in about 2007-2008; I’d always finish the live sets with it and coax a little audience singalong out of the usually quite accommodating crowds. I went up to Newcastle to work on a version with a pretty big-name producer in what had been the old Tyne Tees studios. But the version I’m releasing is the original recording I made, with me playing absolutely everything mesen’. I don’t think I could really better that original recording, there’s nothing like the excitement of that first spark.
And herein lies a bit of the backstory as to why it’s only being released now - my own incessant fickleness and the incredible speed at which I move on to my next harebrained scheme/song/adventure. I find it fairly easy to come up with those initial ideas (as any of my close friends will tell you) but find it next to impossible to ever fully finish something. I’ll often fall out of love with a project way before it’s reached completion, and started demoing up new songs for a completely different concept.
So the Lost&Found project is a way of me reconnecting with music I was ‘done with’, had moved on from and was fairly happy to leave in the past. The problem was because I was happy to leave it in the vault, I thought it had no value any more. But as more and more people were asking me about those songs, and why I’d never released them, I realised I didn’t really have a very convincing excuse.
So I’ve been having fun in this 2020 period of downtime and reflection trawling back through these songs, seeing where I’d gotten up to with them and just exactly how close they were to something I’d be happy to release (with the forgiving hindsight of about 10 years of distance).
I’ll go into more detail about some of the things that kicked me off the path I was heading on in a future post, suffice to say that the songs on Lost&Found constitute what could have been an amazing debut album around about 2008-2009. I’m hoping they’ll constitute a pretty fantastic album for 2021 as well - there wasn’t anything particularly ‘2008-y’ about the songs back then either!
Maybe it’s showing my cards a little early, but here’s the running order I’m thinking of at the moment;
The Eureka Song (co-written with the wonderful chanteuse Sophie Delila)
See Miss America
The Greatest Gift
Victoria Has a Secret
Running Out of Time
Cinnamon Sun
Took Me Too Seriously (a co-write with the fantastic Ben Mark and Jamie Norton)
Don’t Go
Get Up Get Moving (of which there may be a contemporaneous music video to share)
This Is The Last Time (a co-write with the brilliant John Fortis who I can’t get in touch with!)
Nothing Like You
Leave On A High
All Good
Mr Inconsistent
Quite the rundown - maybe there’s a few titles in there you recognise? Some were staples of the live sets - I loved kicking the shows off with The Eureka Song. Still a belter I reckon :-)
The thing that pulled me back to start/finish this project was having the lines from the breakdown of ‘The Greatest Gift’ relentlessly repeating in my head when I couldn’t sleep one night this December just gone;
“The best piece of advice I ever got was be exactly who you are, not who you’re not and things may turn out better than you thought; don’t be afraid to reveal who you want to be…”
That sentence - when I understood why it was nagging at me - buoyed me up something special, and it made me reframe the whole enterprise of revisiting music from my own past. In a weird way, I sort of owe it to the Gillan from 2008 to bring this thing together and get it out into the world. Christ knows that useless twerp wasn’t about to, although I’ll forgive him for it now.
There he is, the work-shy fop. Get a haircut! And a proper job!
So, if you’ll indulge me a little, I’d love to set these songs free before I move on to anything else, starting with a song that still means a great deal to me, ‘The Greatest Gift.’
You can follow this link to pre-save or stream/buy it - depending on whether it’s before or after the launch date, the 8th February 2021.
All the best - your friend in time,
Gillan