Waterfalls, Rivers and Lakes

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Hola from the madness of Watford where I am currently staying before I fly back to Malaga tomorrow. Dara and I have been ships in the night recently, one leaving the car at the airport for the other to pick up as we both fly back and forth for work. But I'm looking forward to getting back and spending 7 blissful weeks without travel where I can really get stuck into my routines. It's hard to keep consistent with our podcasts when things get busy so I'm very grateful to past Mish and Hana for recording a whole batch of podcasts back in November. I've asked Claude to summarise the content in this blog but sadly have no time to edit it as I would wish to so please don't judge me too harshly for the copious amount of "actually"s...

Waterfalls, Rivers and Lakes: Knowing What to Release and When

If you've ever found yourself staring at a folder of half-finished songs wondering whether to release one, four, or all of them at once, this episode was written for you. Mishkin and I spent a good chunk of time on this one because it's a question that comes up constantly, and the answer is always more nuanced than people want it to be.

The TLC reference in the title is a bit silly, but stick with it — it actually holds up as a framework. Singles are your waterfall: short bursts of momentum, a drip-feed of presence. EPs are rivers: a bit more scope, things starting to flow and build. Albums are lakes: somewhere people can actually sit down and stay a while.

The single

Releasing singles makes a lot of sense if you're still finding your sound, or if you're a solo artist who just needs something out there so that when someone sees you live and reaches for their phone, they can actually find you. That's the reality of it now - people aren't going to the merch desk first. They're adding you to a playlist. So you need to exist on streaming.

The single-every-six-to-eight-weeks approach, if you can sustain it, builds momentum in a way that feels tangible. You've got something to talk about, something to promote, something to send to local radio. But it does assume a fairly consistent output and a fairly consistent sound, and if you're someone whose music doesn't fit neatly into one lane, a single can get you pigeonholed before you've had a chance to show anyone the full picture.

The EP

An EP gives you room. It's almost as cheap to record as a single if you're prepared and spending a day in the studio, and what you get for that is the ability to take someone through a journey rather than just hand them one data point. For artists whose songs are diverse — emotionally, sonically, thematically — that matters. You only get one first impression, and if your music can't be reduced to one song, then reducing it to one song is a mistake.

The move we talked about on the episode, and one I'd genuinely recommend if you've got the budget, is doing both: releasing two or three singles in the lead-up to an EP. You spend a year building anticipation, your two strongest tracks are already out there doing work, and then the EP arrives with some context around it. That's a waterfall becoming a river, and it's a really solid way to introduce yourself.

The album

Albums are enormous. There's no version of making one that isn't time-consuming, expensive, and occasionally terrifying - particularly the part where you have to send the mix to someone and then wait for them to tell you what they think.

But albums are also the thing. They're where you actually get to say something at full length, where the body of work accumulates into something people can return to. Mishkin made the point on the episode that singles are sometimes sketches - and I think that's right. They can have real depth, but they're rarely the whole picture.

If you're in a band that's been playing for a couple of years, you've got the songs, and you know what you want to say, an album is worth the effort. Nine to fourteen tracks, a running order you've actually thought about, a couple of trusted people to listen back to the mix rather than the entire extended network. That last part is important: too many opinions on a mix is genuinely one of the most demoralising experiences available to a musician.

One thing that helps with the financial side of it is staggering the mixing — sending tracks off one by one over months rather than handing over a lump sum for the whole thing at once. It's slower, but it also means you're sitting with each song a bit longer, which tends to produce better decisions.

A note on multiple projects

We went into this on the episode too, because it's relevant to all three formats. If your main project is slow-moving — whether that's because of budget, logistics, or the number of people involved — being in other projects is not a distraction, it's a pressure valve. It keeps you creating, it builds your body of work, it develops you as a songwriter, and it means you're not fixating on one thing to the point of burnout. There is also the very practical matter of PRS tune codes sitting quietly accumulating streams while you're busy doing other things. That's worth thinking about.

The full episode is out now. As always, you can find it by searching Wingspan: The Highs and Lows of Being a Musician or clicking here