Rory Lawford
December 13, 2023

I’ve spent a lifetime gigging everywhere from rundown dive bars to main stage opening slots for arena rock legends. Yet, after literally thousands of shows, it’s always been in cover bands playing someone else’s songs. Never my own.

For years I had talked about “Someday, I’m gonna put out my own record”.  “Someday I’m gonna do it”.  “Someday…”. Yeah right. 🙄

I’d sit down at my computer with a guitar for a night and record a riff, and turn it into a crappy (but fun for me) sounding little instrumental mp3 I’d transfer to my phone and listen to cranked up in my car. Then the next day would come and I’d lose motivation or whatever and then nothing would happen again for months. Or years.

Inspired by a pandemic

A few months into the global Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself with extra time on my hands (as most of the planet did). So I decided to take one of those old song ideas and actually try to properly record it as a REAL song just for fun. Still had no lyrics of course, but I knew where the verses would go, the choruses, the bridge, the obligatory guitar solo. So I pieced together the software drum MIDI bits into a complete drum track, plugged in the guitar, and hit “record”. Then another guitar track, then a bass guitar track, then a wanky wah-drenched guitar solo. I mixed it into something that almost sounded like a real song – minus any words.

I bounced THAT down to an mp3 and listened to it cranked in my car on my morning commute after taking the kids to school, and as I drove I’d babble gibberish over the music. Nonsense words as I grasped at trying to find a melody and a turn of phrase.

One morning’s drive, I blurted out a line of lyrics that stuck. I liked it! It had a melodic hook I could remember well enough to repeat it and the words expressed a sentiment that was universally understandable lol. I had the house to myself that weekend, so I grabbed a pencil and notebook, and the lyrics almost wrote themselves. I went downstairs to the makeshift studio in my basement, plugged in a mic, and started singing. Then I listened back. It didn’t completely suck!

More encouragement

Feeling foolishly brave, I posted it to my Facebook for my friends to hear. The feedback seemed that it wasn’t just friends being kind, people actually seemed to think it was maybe a good song? So in a lunatic moment of hubris, I announced on my social media that I was going to write, record, and release an all-original solo EP that summer.

You know the funny thing about stupidly making such public announcements, right? You have to follow through. So, that’s when the real work began. Turns out that, for me, writing songs was a lot harder than “just go ahead and do it”. 

The work

So is recording and mixing by the way. I found out there are reasons that the folks who do these things professionally get paid a lot.  So I enrolled in “Youtube University”, devouring hour after hour after hour of producing, recording, and mixing tutorials on Youtube.  

I missed my announced summer release date. By a lot.  But I kept working at it. Sitting and writing and re-writing. Recording and re-recording. And mixing. Mixing, mixing, mixing, mixing. One day while working on stuff with a YouTube video playing in the background, I heard a famous record producer say, “It’s better to get it done and release it than to try to get it perfect and thus never release it. 

So I listened back to everything I had, and decided that “yup, it IS better to get it done and put it out, because it will never be perfect”. I am a hack who’s still learning what these things even do. My songs aren't all that by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, and I STILL barely know how to use ANY of the audio gear or software I have. So I packaged it up, sent it to the distributor, and set a final release date for all of the major streaming services. 

Dreams do come true

Did it set the world on fire? Nope. Did it get on the charts? Nope. Did it get on the radio? Well, the local community radio station played a track from it at least once so… no, not really. Did it get a million streams? Nope, just over a thousand. But that’s not what I had done it for. I’m proud of the dedicated learning I took on, the work and sweat I put in, and that the end result didn’t suck. When I listen back to it in my car on full blast, I can rock along with it proudly. And I can at least say, “I did it once. I made a record. Just like I dreamed of as a kid. I did it.”

www.rorylawford.com

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