Creative Process Naked: dispatches from the inside

It seems that nowadays, people like to get more of a look behind the scenes, rather than simply consuming the finished product. They want a sense of the real person — the artist at work, making something.

It’s taken me a while to get my head around this, as I grew up in the time of the album.

£5 pocket money, all spent on a record. No downloading individual tracks, just the whole shebang — vinyl disc, cover with artwork on the front and back, and, if you were lucky, a printed inner sleeve with all the lyrics.

An album was a journey. A whole experience. Something to be savoured.

The current music scene, as I see it, is a near-infinite ocean of sounds. Easy access via streaming means we can listen to pretty much any recording ever made, from all over the planet.

Wow! That’s very cool — but also quite overwhelming.

I mean, where do you start?

Add to this the influx of AI-generated material and you get a very, very wide range of possibilities, but perhaps not so much depth. And I think that’s where the importance of seeing behind the scenes comes in.

A song or a track can come more alive when you know something about the person who made it. It’s not simply something that was generated in a few seconds from a few prompts. It has emerged from a person — this person — with lived experience, passion, curiosity and uniqueness.

And that adds richness and depth.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to start sharing some of my own behind-the-scenes process.

I’ve not had much success with Instagram, so I’m going to give YouTube a proper go, as well as hopefully posting the videos here on the Earthrise Music site.

I’ll share works in progress, experiments, ideas, mistakes, happy accidents and whatever else seems worth showing. Not just the finished tracks, but some of the journey that gets us there.

Welcome to the creative process — naked.

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