30 years. no album. endless demos.
Hello internet. My name is Rorow. I’m 33 years old and I’ve never once made and released an album, even though I’ve been making music for my entire life. So, I wanted to make this video to talk about what exactly makes an album an album and why I’ve never considered anything I’ve done an album. So, first of all, when I think of an album, I think of a body of work that somebody made. You know, normally there’s a concept behind it. It doesn’t have to be like a concept album, but there’s sort of a vision and you know, you make it within the course of a certain amount of time. Put it out. It’s about an hour long, you know, 30 minutes to an hour. Cohesive track list, not too short, not too long, depending on the length of the songs. You know, there’s an album art. There’s all this stuff that goes with it. Um, I’ve put out music in the past that’s been, I guess you could say, album length, but they’ve all felt like like compilations to me almost of the music that I’ve made from a certain period of time. Now, maybe some people would consider that an album, and that’s totally valid. I just don’t see it as an album. And I think the problem is I really enjoy when other artists have like a more defined concept behind their art and behind their albums. You know, again, doesn’t have to be like a concept album, but there’s like a clear vision. You know, like 808s and Heartbreak is a perfect example. Like there was a clear vision behind that album. There was a clear sound, a clear distinct style that Kanye was going for. And I just don’t really know how to do that. I don’t I don’t think my artistic brain works in that way. I’m not really able to come up with a concept and then create it. I sort of just have always made music and just kind of made whatever I wanted in the moment and then figured out releasing it later, which I think a lot of artists also do that, but it makes it harder to have like a cohesive idea behind your project if you’re making music that way. Now, I will say I’ve done it with maybe shorter projects like a EP or something where I’ll I’ll have a bit more of a focused vision, but it never comes out being more than like a handful of songs. You know what I mean? Anytime I end up making a longer project, I my pro this is all right, let me just explain my process because this is kind of how it’s been and maybe it’ll help you guys understand where I’m coming from. So, I do what I would call either batches or folders where I’ll just fill up a folder with either beats or song ideas or little scratch demos or something along those lines. In my mind, I’m like, I’m going to make an album out of this folder. You know, I’m going to just keep making music, fill up this folder, and then eventually I’ll have an album. But it never really works that way because I probably release less than 10% of the music that I make and I’m pretty uh I can be pretty critical of choosing what I want to put out into the world. You know, there’s certain music that I make and I enjoy making it, but I don’t necessarily want to release it or even finish it. That’s a big part of it, too, is like actually finishing the music, but we’ll get back to that in a second. So essentially when I’ve made what I consider albums in the past, I’m filling up a folder or a batch with songs and then I kind of take, you know, a couple songs out of it, put it into a new folder, start a new batch. And I do that a couple times, you know, three, four, five times until I have what feels like a cohesive body of songs that I can put out as a project. But again, it almost feels like I’m making a compilation of my own music, of my own like unreleased music that I think is the best. Um, and I don’t know, there’s this whole weird idea behind like the debut album with musicians where, you know, there’s artists that’ll put out like multiple projects that do really well commercially and then all of a sudden, like three years into their career, they’ve already put out four long projects. They’re like, “All right, this is my debut album.” And it’s like, “All right, bro. What does it even mean at this point?” You know, like, I’m not really of the mentality where singles are the singles are king and singles should be the priority because of the fastmoving internet. I don’t really like that. I’ve never really been specifically into singles either. I have put out many singles in in my career or in my whatever not career, but when I’m getting into artists, I’m getting into albums. Everybody gets into albums. There’s always an album that you really like, you know, and I don’t think that albums will ever die because it’s a format that makes sense to artists. It’s not just for consumers. I would argue that singles are for consumers, you know, cuz it’s like just getting something out there faster instead of waiting and being patient, you know, but again, I really don’t know if I know how to make an album. I don’t know how important it is to me that I do make an album, you know? It’s it’s never something that’s been like necessary. And part of me feels like since I’m, you know, I’m in my 30s now. I’ve been making music my whole life. Music has been the most important thing to me. And I’ve never really made anything that I consider an album. Like never once because I don’t know, maybe it’s like a like a write not like a writer’s block thing, but it’s just like a the word album in my mind just kind of puts a block there. It’s sort of similar to like you hear a lot of people that are writers, you know, they write books. I’m doing a lot of air quotes today. You can you can ignore that. where they’ll be working on their first novel for 10 15 years or they’ll they’ll say that they’re writing a novel and they’ll just never ever put out a novel. You know, they’ll write one, they’ll rewrite it, they’ll start a new one, they’ll rewrite it and they’ll never put out a novel because putting out your first book is huge. And that’s kind of how I see albums, you know, and it’s like I’ve changed my artist name many times over the years, you know, feel free to dig that up if you want. It’s it it’s out there available for you to find. I’ve changed up my style many times where I felt like, you know, I couldn’t mix too many styles together on one project. But then sometimes like mixing sounds together is a cool thing to do on one project. You know, it shows your range as an artist. It shows your fans like what you’re capable of doing and it’s just a broader range essentially. So, I don’t know. Let me know what you guys think. This is just something I’ve been thinking about a lot. How important is it to make an album? How important is it to put out your first album, your debut album, whatever you want to call it? Do albums matter? Is there really a difference between an album, what I’m calling like a compilation? Let me know. I put out a new video every Sunday. So, if you like this video, you can come back next week for a new one. and I will see you then.
my new song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzBF8yQWKdo
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new video every sunday 🙂