Marketing and publicity are not my things. I understand they probably should be, but it's an area of my business that needs work. It's great then, when an opportunity just drops in your lap.
Before Christmas I was contacted by the Nashville Voyager. It’s an online magazine and website that celebrates Nashville’s most inspiring people and stories. How they found me, in a small seaside town in Sussex, is quite frankly a bit of a mystery, and it’s not one that my contact could particularly answer.
There are two possibilities, but both seem pretty unlikely to me. The first is that somebody heard one of my songs on an internet radio station in the States and liked it enough to get in touch. I’m not saying that I find it impossible to believe that somebody, somewhere might like one of my songs, it’s just that with the musical output of the Nashville area, it seems unlikely that my voice would stand out above a thousand or more others. It feels like a nice idea, and ‘Fox In The Hen House’ does still get about a dozen plays weekly on internet radio in the U.S. even seven months after release but…..
The other possibility is more like an ‘in joke’ really. As you might know, I do the more serious WestingWay recordings in Jeff’s shed. Historically, studios have epic sounding names and ‘Jeff’s Shed’ seems somewhat underwhelming…. So given Jeff’s surname, I tag my location on Instagram as ‘Clarksville TN’ on occasion. This is of course factually incorrect, it’s just a bit of fun, but Clarksville, (the same Clarksville as The Monkees song), is a neighbouring city to Nashville in Tennessee.
Musical interlude follows....
Anyway...
She wanted to interview me as an ‘inspiring creative’ (her words, not mine) and did I have time to participate over the next few weeks. Well…. Gift horses, mouths, etc, I said that I’d love to, and so she sent me a preview of the questions.
The third question was ‘How long have you lived and worked in Nashville?’ A bare faced lie didn’t really seem in order for my first international interview, so I confessed. The confession led to a profuse apology on their part, and a promise that I would be contacted by their sister publication ‘Canvas Rebel’ as they were ‘non geographically specific’.
Christmas came and went and eventually at the end of December I was contacted by Canvas Rebel to do the interview, which I did. It then went quiet for about four weeks, and I’d kind of forgotten about it, thinking that they obviously contact loads of people and somebody had decided that I wasn’t interesting or photogenic enough to be featured…. This week however, the article was published….
So if you’re interested in some random thoughts on how I started with music, what I do, resilience and how to support artists in their endeavours, this could be the article for you. Anyway, I got a bit of a kick out of doing it, and it’s another little story for the story woodpile. Today Bognor, tomorrow…..who knows…..? Littlehampton?
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