With just under three weeks to go until “Brace For Impact” is released, Pledge Music asked me about “how things have changed since the last release; the ups, the downs and lessons learnt from releasing my music independently”. Excellent questions!
“Key services in this country like the NHS and education have been decimated by our government, so I can’t even begin to complain about the lack of proper funding for the arts until that mess is sorted out. Patronage and crowdfunding takes things back to the times when troubadours travelled around singing stories and being paid with food and a roof over their heads; thankfully there are a lot of people out there who value what we make and want to be part of it.
To have 1100+ Pledgers already with three weeks to go until release day – more than double the number for my last album – is incredible. I’m so thankful to my supportive audience for showing up and enabling all this to happen – because of them this record has a very good chance of bothering the UK charts, which would be a massive achievement for a 100% independent release.
What I make is most definitely art but the format it’s sold in is a product, and every aspect of making the art has fixed costs (housing, food, power, equipment, staff, manufacture etc), so without selling my music, I couldn’t make any more art (or eat). Crowdfunding straddles the cavernous expanse between what I’m doing – creating my own musical world and communicating honestly with people through words and sound – and what commercial music makers are doing and enables me to keep things going. I absolutely could not have made this album without raising money through PledgeMusic, and that’s not because I’m an unsuccessful artist – my project is sustainable, it’s just not possible to hang onto the lump sums you need to front to make an ambitious record.”