Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
Hi Gitika, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
I’ve been well – busy, a bit astonished, and very grateful. It’s been a full season of making, finishing, and finally letting things go out into the world. A lot of it has been very unglamorous in the best way: headphones on, endless folders, and cups of tea going cold while I’m naming files, forgetting where I put them, renaming files, forgetting where I put them, starting spreadsheets, hating spreadsheets, not finishing spreadsheets.
You’ve released thirteen albums simultaneously, unintentionally breaking the world record in the process. When did you first realize the scope of what you had created, and how did that realization sit with you emotionally?
It was a curious feeling. I’ve been writing songs all my life, but for the last five years I’ve followed a disciplined practice of writing one song every week – so I’d amassed around 290 unreleased songs. At some point I looked at the list and it felt less like “songs” and more like a whole landscape. Someone said to me that even if the songs have a roughness, listening is what polishes them, and that really helped. The moment it became thirteen albums, I remember thinking, oh, this is a proper creature now.
This project grew organically from an idea for nine albums into something much larger. What guided your decision to keep going rather than impose a stopping point?
I just kept finding more songs I wanted to give a chance to be set free. There are still 159 “down the back of the sofa,” so to speak – files I hadn’t opened recently, little sketches with a verse and a chorus that deserved daylight. I also wanted it to feel like a body of work, not a carefully rationed drip-feed. And honestly, the idea of accidentally passing a world record tickled me – like discovering an extra door in a house you already live in.
You’ve described the albums as the result of a sustained songwriting practice rather than a commercial release cycle. How did removing the pressure of “release strategy” change the way you wrote and recorded these songs?
It gave me permission to have fun. It wasn’t always easy, but there was no need to write “good” songs – ha! Some weeks the prompt would produce something gorgeous, and some weeks it was more like scribbling in the margins just to stay alive.It has been brought to my attention that my lyrics move from serious subjects to light, erring toward the comedic and the flippant I think many creatives judge the work while they’re making it and abandon it before it’s finished. I remember a famous animator saying something like, works of art are always abandoned, never completed. Weekly practice helped me complete things and keep moving the day would come and I’d hit share whether I felt ready or not.
Many of the songs function as messages from you to yourself – snapshots of specific days, feelings, and moments. What is it like now to listen back to five years of your own inner dialogue?
It’s poignant – sometimes sad, sometimes funny. Often a song was a release, a kind of therapy, or a reminder to myself about the real meaning of life. I’d be reading a book and one line would jump out, so the song becomes tied to that book and that moment – I can hear a track and suddenly I’m back in that chapter, on that sofa, in that exact mood. The last five years have been a mixture of good times and no picnic – some real shit storms. Occasionally it’s painful when a song takes me straight back to a particular event, like opening a drawer you forgot you’d stuffed full of letters.
The first twelve albums form a chronological musical record, while the thirteenth gathers “songs that nearly got away.” Why was it important to separate those two ideas, and what do the almost-lost songs represent to you?
It’s partly about how I chose the first twelve. Going back and listening to the ones that had been forgotten was surprisingly moving, and I’m sure my mood on the days I selected the songs influenced what made it in. Some of them were half-finished, some were “too weird,” some were just hiding in plain sight. I love that a few songs got a reprieve. “Songs that nearly got away” feels like a small mercy – things you thought were gone, returning, like finding an old photo and realising you still recognise yourself.
During the pandemic, your virtual choir work earned praise from Tom Robinson, who called you “a force of nature.” How did community collaboration – especially during isolation – shape both this project and your identity as an artist?
I’m not sure I think much about my “identity as an artist.” I just do stuff. I make things. But I do love working with groups of people – my community choir life has been a rich, expressive part of my life for years. I’ve been called a maverick leader and a catalyst – I do tend to arrive somewhere and then everything kicks off. During lockdown, that energy had to find a new doorway, microphones, home recordings, people singing alone in bedrooms and kitchens, and then suddenly – together. Someone the other day said they actually miss that.I collaborated closely with Bob Karper, who was in the choir and is a brilliant community filmmaker. Making films together was exciting. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but a bit of friction can be useful – if you can ride the waves, it helps the work deepen. And honestly, in isolation, that kind of collaboration felt like oxygen.
Releasing all thirteen albums at once intentionally sidesteps algorithms, singles culture, and traditional promotion. What do you hope listeners experience by being invited to wander freely through the music without a prescribed path?
I heard an author say something recently that I loved, she uses music streaming sites and her playlists like a kind of oracle – she has something on her mind, presses play randomly, and often something in the song gives her an answer. I love that. I like the idea of listeners playing “song roulette,” pressing play anywhere in the body of work, washing up, walking to the shop, staring out of a train window, and maybe finding what they need that moment.
In the old days people talked about “album tracks,” meaning songs that needed a better listen – not instantly obvious, but the ones fans come back to. Sometimes “album tracks” were fillers, though, and didn’t have much to offer. My hope is that none of these are fillers – that every track has something alive in it, even if it’s a quiet kind of alive.
The iHeartSongwritingClub community clearly plays a central role in this body of work. How has writing weekly to prompts within that community sustained you creatively over the past five years?
It’s totally sustained me. It kept my creativity alive, gave me structure, and gave me that inner certainty – “I am a songwriter.” There’s something incredibly steadying about showing up every week, even if you’re tired or annoyed or overthinking everything. I’ve had some truly terrible times in the last five years, and without doubt the practice held me through them .
You’ve emphasized that this release is an artistic gesture – an act of permission for people to create without critics, benchmarks, or validation. Was there a moment during this process when you personally had to silence an internal critic to keep going?
Oh yes – often. The inner critic is practically my best friend at this point. We rub along quite well now. When it arrives, I say hello – like, “Ah, you again.” I let it be in the room for a bit, and if I don’t feed it too much attention it soon gets bored and wanders off to annoy someone else. It’s a bit like a yappy dog, or the chattering monkey the less contact you give it, the quicker it settles.
Beyond the albums themselves, you’re inviting 130 people to handwrite lyrics and turn them into a physical book. What does bringing this deeply personal, digital-era project into a tactile, communal form mean to you as a final extension of the work?
It feels wonderfully tangible. This is the first project where I haven’t made CDs or vinyl, and I’ve got so many old CDs under my bed that I felt it was absolutely fine not to create another physical music object. But the book feels different, and rather lovely. A book has its own life. You can hold it, live with it, scribble in it, pass it to a friend, even (in extreme circumstances) put it on the fire – you can’t do that with a CD.
And there’s something special about seeing the lyrics without the music, almost like a poetry volume. Plus, every page being handwritten means the project literally carries other people in it – different handwriting, different slants, little human quirks. It feels like another way of releasing the work-communal, physical, and human.
Check out all the albums: https://3bucketjones.bandcamp.com/
