So yesterday, I was driving KO to kung fu, listening to BBC Leeds in the car, when in a surreal moment, Andrew Edwards started speaking to Kate Hardcastle (Insight With Passion) about me??!!! (“LeeSun, an artist whose track we played a few weeks ago”).
He went on to relay how he’d downloaded my song and I’d got in touch with him and offered to send him a bonus track. He called this “good customer relations, a new way of operating”. And Kate agreed, and said how one has to be “business savvy” now in the music industry!
Business savvy? Customer relations? More like expressing gratitude for a drink of water in the middle of a drought!!! It probably is very bad marketing to confess this, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have downloaded my music over the past 12 months. And I have the common number of digits on each of my hands.
When someone downloads my music, I feel such amazement, surprise, and gratitude, that I usually send an email gushing my thanks and offering more music for free. I’m not at all business savvy. I’ve just been working hard for quite a long time with very little acknowledgement from anyone other than myself. So the smallest gesture of appreciation touches me deeply. I will remember these small gestures for the rest of my life … how a few very special people encouraged me when I most needed it!
Here’s yesterday’s show, containing the most startling and surreal moment of my music career so far — turning on the radio and by chance, hearing someone talking about me??!:
Anyway, so much has been going on since I last posted on here.
MILESTONE: I did a radio session on Michelle Dalgety’s Yorkshire Music Collective Show on BCB Radio.(My first radio session ever!)
MILESTONE: I also did a session on Alan Raw’s BBC Introducing show. The remarkable Toby Noble played guitar for me for both of those sessions. (My first BBC radio session ever!)
And I’ve been working on recording the new album with Si McGrath at Eiger Studios with a few sessions here and there each month since last August. Finding time when 1) Eiger is not booked 2) Si has time 3) I have time is a bit like mining for gold. It is a challenge! But we’ve been persevering, and we’re nearly finished 19 tracks!!!!!!
The trickiest part, for me, is letting go of a track, saying, “Okay that’s done, I don’t need to do any more work on that.”
MILESTONE: Last week, I said that, with great reluctance, pain, and exhilaration, for THE FIRST TRACK to be signed off for mixing!!!! It’s “Mother Dear” which Toby and I attempted at 3 different recording sessions before I finally got a take I was happy with. That happened in November. And then came the task of getting children into the studio to sing on the track. And that happened earlier this month, over spring break!! So …
MILESTONE: Recorded a children’s choir on one of my songs!!!!
The track is sounding SO CLOSE to how I imagined it when I wrote it. It is incredibly weird to hear it, this thing that was born inside me, and is now alive and kicking in the real world. This is the closest I’ve ever come to producing a bit of music that sounds like how I imagined.
But I digress from the original topic. What I REALLY want to say is, THANK YOU BBC INTRODUCING. You are an oasis in a desert, a morsel of sustenance in a famine, and I am so grateful for all you do, for all the risks you take, to champion new music.