I’m doing something unusual for me tomorrow. I’m releasing some musical recordings that I’ve been working on since the beginning of November.

The main oddity in all of that is that I gave myself a release date ahead of time and have finished the work a couple of days ahead of it. My custom has been to make things quickly and just put things out there as soon as they’re done, because earlier on in life I found that deadlines would always be missed and then I had the awfulness of delivering late and often it felt like just not delivering at all would be preferable.

In reaction to that, I developed this style of producing material in the now – rough and ready, improvised, immediate – maybe you’ll like what I make today or maybe you won’t but don’t worry, there’ll be something new along tomorrow (or maybe the next day). It suits work that is performative, but what if I don’t have the capacity to put on a performance today? And for my writing, over time, if I (or anyone else) ever wanted to draw stuff together and make something new out of it, or develop ideas at length it’s been difficult and disjointed – it’s made to be read now(-ish), like you just bumped into me and we went for a coffee or like I left you a really long voicemail. That’s why I found my voice in blogging and podcasting and then Twitter. There’s polish, but it isn’t used to improve the individual items, it’s spent on the practice of being able to create rough and ready items that are just about good enough and which might, if you’re lucky, have some charm for showing some humanity in this world of slickly, machined “content”.

And there’s a defence in there too, that you’re being brave and putting stuff out there and of course if people don’t like it, you can hide behind the fact that you didn’t put much work into it anyway.

And yet. And yet I yearned to make something that had clearly taken some time and effort, something that wasn’t just the first or second take. The most recent breakthrough came at the end of October when I decided that I’d set myself a “30 days of making something” challenge – no project plan or milestones but a simple plan to do something towards a project every day in November and allow that to be enough. The first thing off the top of my head was to work on these songs, to make something more than a demo and to implement ideas I’ve had about making music ever since I saw someone making weird shit with a portastudio.

The practice became just letting myself do something towards it today, rather than trying to get it to a particular stage or be able to share the latest half-baked version. I had four songs. Some days I did something with all of them, some days I focused on the tiniest part of just one. But I kept going through November, just ticking off the days. About half-way through I thought perhaps it would all be ready for release at the beginning of December. That soon evaporated as a goal, but I was OK with it. I’d succeeded in the actual goal, which was to pay attention to something every day for thirty days. The day job got in the way at the beginning of December and then I had a viral wipeout over Christmas, so in the new year I edged towards the idea of fixing 1st Feb as release day. That gave me something to work towards, which was eminently do-able and suddenly it was last weekend and everything was pretty much done.

But also I’ve been working alone on this. I know that the songs are alright in themselves (they’ve all been out in the wilds of YouTube for some years and I’ve worked them out live, with audiences of varying sizes and levels of friendliness) but the only other person who’s heard them in this form is my wife and as she’s pretty much guaranteed to be positive about them, I’m now feeling the first-night nerves of unveiling something in public.

What I’m ignoring though is the fact that I’ve been working on this for a while now. And you can’t work on everything all the time, so you do a bit on one and then come back to it a few days later and that’s a collaboration between “past you” and “now you” – sometimes nothing has changed in you in relation to this thing, but most often you will hear something new or have another idea while doing something completely different that means you can come back to it fresh. So I’ve not been working alone after all, but it’s not just a collaboration between teenage me day-dreaming about multi-track recording on cassettes, with ten-years-ago me writing silly words on napkins in Pret a Manger and me sitting in my front bedroom in front of a microphone with my ukulele, it’s all the bits in between that have fed me and the material and continue to do so.