CHAOS, DEADLINES & NO TIME FOR PERFECTION
A few years ago, I released 52 singles in 52 weeks, finishing recording projects spanning almost three decades.
What began as a challenge to finish old songs became an exercise in deadlines, imperfection and, ultimately, letting go.
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In 2022, I started the year with three completed but unreleased singles — and almost three decades of recording projects that had never quite made it across the finish line. There seemed to be more than enough material there to release one single every week for a year.
As it turned out, having enough songs was the easy part.
No new projects were started to make up the numbers. Every release came from a production already underway — some recent, others reaching back to songs written in 1995 and recordings made in the late 1990s.
Finishing them was another matter.
Some needed little more than editing, mixing and mastering — or, in a few cases, remastering. Most needed bass, guitars, drums, vocals or some other missing piece. Old recording sessions had to be recovered and rebuilt. One song — the oldest of them all — finally got the bridge it had been waiting nearly three decades for.
For most of 2022, life became work, music, copious amounts of coffee and not nearly enough sleep. Nights disappeared behind the mixing desk, sometimes quite literally falling asleep at it. Finish one track, get it off to the engineer, then immediately work out which project could possibly be finished next. And every one still needed cover artwork before it could go anywhere.
Releases had to be prepared weeks ahead of time to allow for distribution, and toward the end of the year even further ahead to beat the Christmas and New Year rush and extended processing times.
By October, most of the easy wins were gone.
“There were still plenty of songs I’d rather have released, but some of them deserved more attention than the deadline would allow.”
So the search became less about finding the next song and more about finding one that could actually be finished in time.
“I sometimes felt like I was polishing a turd. Some of the songs make me cringe just seeing the title now — but they had to go.”
Perhaps that was the most valuable part of the whole exercise. After decades of holding onto recordings, revisiting them, changing them and leaving them unfinished, there was suddenly no room for perfection. They had to be finished, released and let go.
What started as a challenge to finish old songs gradually became something much more personal.
Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two releases.
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