Simon
MacHale

BACKDATED - The Story:

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“It’s too late, I’ve missed my chance, I’m too old now”. These are the kind of phrases that have haunted me for years in relation to ‘releasing’ my music. I have never really had a problem with creating songs, writing and recording them. However, getting them to the stage where I’d be happy to officially release them has always been a problem. They were never ‘ready’, most were recorded at home with limited equipment, and my even more limited mixing skills. I felt perpetually in limbo because these songs were always so dear to me but I thought of them as ‘demos’ within this paradigm of ‘demos’ vs ‘studio recordings’ - a hangover from growing up in an era when an official release had to be recorded in a professional studio and then released by finding an interested label.

Even though I saw these conventions completely eroded through the advent of independent labels, and the staggering advancement in home recording technology, I still remained stuck with this old psychology of how one must go about bringing music into the world. Coupled with these were the unquestioned ideas that an artist must also organise live dates, press releases, and spend half their waking hours emailing promoters, bloggers, and radio stations in order to give true status to their ‘releases’. None of these things have ever really appealed to me, and are usually the source of further anxiety and pressure.

I have been writing and recording my own songs for the best part of the last twenty years (beginning around 2000, and before that with my band Midas Touch). For the vast majority of that time, I believed I was always ‘in preparation’ for releasing music. Only in the last two years or so has the penny slowly dropped for me in terms of reimagining the entire process I have been engaged in: What if my ‘demos’ were not ‘on the way towards something’ but rather that they were the ‘thing’? I have often said that I rarely get more pleasure in music than in the moment when I first come up with a musical idea and start to record it, and add harmony parts. To capture this process in a recording is extremely precious, and often, to try and recreate that feeling later (even in a professional recording studio) is seldom possible. 

In early 2019, I slowly began to trawl through twenty years worth of ‘demos’, many of which were buried on old hard drives, data disks, etc. I asked myself: what if I could organise them chronologically ‘as if’ they had been released over that two-decade period, and present in one crazy moment all the albums I had never put out? All in all, I ended up creating spreadsheets with a total of 20 new albums / EPs - eight of which come chronologically prior to my ‘official releases’ Nothing But This One [2013] and Let Down Those Old Defences [2014], and twelve of which date from after, up to the present day. These were given retrospective titles that tried to reflect the place I was at (either physically or emotionally) at the time the songs were written and recorded: Early Music [2000–2006], Simes & Bux [2003] Ceannt Fort [2008], Sibling Revelry (2000), Basel Acoustic [2010], Basel Electric [2012], Blochmonter [2015], Hypothetical B-Sides [2016], No Way Back EP [2017], Beaumont [2018], Times of Transition [2019], Cordal EP [2019], Fundamental EP [2020], Maryborough Hotel [2021], Just Look At What Humans Can Do [2021], Stored Inside Us [2023], When Will It End EP [2023], and Learning To Say No [2024]. Many titles are simply the name of the place I lived at the time: Ceannt Fort - a housing estate in Dublin, Basel, Beaumont (also my old primary school) is in Ballintemple, Cork, and Cordal is a house I rented in Bishopstown, Cork. 

My philosophy was to try and alter as little as possible with these old recordings - to simply clean them up, boost what I could in terms of the listening quality, and give them them the closest I could in terms of mastering (I had considered hiring a professional for this, but eventually realised the volume of material I have would make this unfeasible). For many of the recordings (Early Music – Basel Electric) the recordings existed only as a mixdown i.e. no stems but just a single audio file of the whole track. For most of these, the best I could do was EQ them and boost them so that they were listenable. These recordings date back to my very first experiments with multitracking (I have a suspicion that ‘The Crow in Your Dreams’ was even recorded using a double cassette deck!), and the majority of the others on ‘Early Music’ were recording using old software like Making Waves, and N-Track Studio on a PC. Some of these early recordings are interesting in that they made use of original samples - for example, the basslines on ‘American Indie’ and ‘Solid and Gold’ use a recording of the sound emitted by the pump of a coffee machine (a note somewhere around the low G of the bass clef). I then ‘played’ this note as a bass instrument by pitch shifting it around. Multitracking was something I learned gradually through Adobe Audition, Cubase, and Logic, and eventually Ableton Live.
Most of these project files were lost, and so mixdowns were all I had to work with for the music that dates up until around 2014.

For the later material that still existed in project files (i.e. the stems were accessible), I very often spent hours editing, re-balancing, and sometimes even re-composing. Some material needed so much reworking to make the song listenable, that I did occasionally end up recording the vocal line again, in order to make it audible. On these occasions, I mainly left the original vocal in place underneath, so songs like ‘An Object That I Love’ and ‘Dreaming of You’ (both on Hypothetical B-Sides) have a doubled main vocal line. Other tracks like ‘My Monica’ and ‘Tinder Box’, were given major reworkings as soon as I opened up their original project files. The editing process became part of the creation of these tracks, and my preference was always to use the original source material wherever possible. In ‘For the Birds’ (No Way Back), I found a slightly newer unfinished version of the track with a drum beat and cleaner main vocal, and decided to combine this version with the original demo, again resulting in a doubled vocal line effect. In certain places, the main vocal line had to be reconstructed by taking the high vocal harmony and transposing it to the correct pitches. This somehow felt more organic than re-recording the vocal part four years later. ‘Dogs Bark’ is another interesting example - it was a text written by a friend that I had never fully managed to set, and didn’t consider it a song of mine. When compiling the albums, I by chance came across an unlabelled recording which turned out to be just the first verse and chorus. Hearing it years later, I actually liked it and decided to compose the rest of the piece there and then. So on this track, the first minute or so is the original recording from 2014, after which it switches to my 2020 recording of the newly added middle and end of the song. The desire to keep some connection to the recording from the original time of composition results in a strange contrast in tone but one that I decided could be ‘part of the arrangement’. This concept has appeared again and again throughout the compilation process: juxtaposing different recordings of the same song to create a patchwork effect, with contrast automatically built in as a result.

The whole process has made me question what it actually means to officially ‘release’ something. In days gone by, it surely did mean booking time in a professional studio and/or seeking a label or distribution deal. Whereas nowadays, the DIY nature of things surely means that once a recording has been posted online, it is ‘released’ and does not need to go down any other official channels. Of course, gaining commercial success will always involve far more than just recording something and posting it online, but the part that I am interested in (i.e. the recording) can surely be done without anyone else having to green-light it, a lesson it took me a long time to learn.

And so I guess this collection of albums is dedicated to anyone who might think it’s “too late” or that they’ve “missed their chance” to do something with their passion in life. Of course, you cannot go back in time (no way back) and do things at the moment you might have wished you’d done them, but you can end up with something very special - part of which is the documenting and recording of the process itself, so that the emphasis is no longer on reception or critical approval - by basically taking a journey with yourself, documenting and recounting your processes, your emotions while doing it, the things that got you down, as well as the things that gave you joy. Have fun!

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Simon MacHale, June 2020 (updated September 2024)