Another New Year

Most of us will be staying in this New Years Eve. If you're interested in a pretty laid back Spotify playlist, I recommend Another New Year. It's on the bottom of this blog post.

There's a good blend of old school and new style music that will leave you feel a little groovy. Enjoy your evening and the first days of 2021. I will leave a free copy of This Year (Song 365) on the front page of my website for you to download and keep forever! It'll be there until the 31st of January. We should turn our attention to love in February.

Rhonda

2021 - This Year

Click here to get a free copy of my song This Year. That's all. There's nothing to buy or sign up for. I just want the message to reach as many people as possible. I wrote it at the end of a song-a-day-for-a-year project back in 2011. It was the very last song in the collection of musical musings and observations about the world we live in as well as every imaginable emotion and thought to cross my tangled mind. It sat undeveloped and unreleased for nearly 10 years. Some friends and I will celebrate the 10th anniversary of that project by releasing a song a week for a year... once again exploring things happening in the world, the mind and hearts of people. I hope you'll pop in from time to time for a listen and a chat about your thoughts and feelings on a whole wide range of things over the course of the year as we meander through the music together. You can always listen for free and catch all the songs in the project by following me on Spotify and joining the discussion on Facebook. See you around!

This is the link to watch the concept video. I hope it inspires, uplifts and helps some of us to think about what we're doing to and with each other. I hope someday things really will get better.

Happy New Year.

Rhonda

Holding Onto Grudges - Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.

The UK government launched the Rethink. Reskill. Reboot. campaign to encourage creative people to think about finding new ways to transfer their skills in a shrinking jobs market. Unfortunately, they chose to encourage a ballet dancer to become an IT Consultant in the advert and that went over like stone cold porridge on a winters day.

I think the government missed an opportunity to uplift and encourage people to augment and grow as creatives in new directions in order to increase the possibility of finding new revenue streams and possibly jobs. I've been a musician for many years, but I've only recently started learning to draw. I need this skill in order to illustrate the ideas I envision in the lyrics of my songs. I aim to learn to animate and create cartoons, films and even television series from scripts and songs I've written over the years. Naturally, The Music and Film Company will manage all of it. I wrote a song called Holding Onto Grudges and it's probably not about the things most people first imagine based on the title. I've added 3 drawings of the concept in my head about this song... you can see how much I've progressed in 2 weeks.

Holding Onto Grudges is a song we released to towards the end of 2020. It's about making the choice of holding onto your grudges or letting them go. I wanted to create an image of someone who could be holding on or releasing her grudges, but I didn't have the skills to do that. The drawing below shows my progress on creating my first piece of concept art over a 2 week period. I'll never be a great artist, but I'm happy to get the idea across... the concept. Besides, we have Sophie Wyllie, a professional artist for the important art such as album covers for Project Undeniable. My works will be used for behind-the-scenes stuff. Maybe in the Amazon Prime videos documenting the process of creating 52 broadcastable songs in a single year. You can listen to the song on Spotify for free. Be sure to follow me if you want to listen to the whole project in 2021.

When the nation went into COVID-19 lockdown, I somehow created a music tech company which attracted venture capital investment and that led to 5 new jobs in the creative sector with the investors handling all the business elements of the business and my small team managing the creative work. I'm glad I'm a disciple of Business For Bohemians! It's the best book I've ever read on how to live your best life.

So, with a steady paycheck and interesting work to get on with 2021 looks set to be a busy year for me, however, I had already started Project Undeniable, a song-a-week-for-a-year project and I aim to see it through with the small group of collaborators working on it with me. I found a learn-to-draw course on Udemy which allows me to learn at my own pace with training videos, so I've been slowly moving through it all. Once I'm done, I'll learn to make digital art then animation. I've already bought the courses just to make absolutely certain I stick with it!

I've already got over 1,000 songs and song ideas written so you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to deliver 52 songs, but the challenge is I'm still writing! It's also difficult to choose 52 songs from such a vast vault of material. Each song has to fight against several hundred contentders to make the list. I hope you enjoy Holding Onto Grudges and if you happen to be holding on tight to a few grudges of your own, I hope you'll soon decide to let them go just like the balloons in my very bad drawings.

Working hard to draw better pictures! Sending love and kind thoughts from England.

Rhonda