Joe’s 2022
2022 has been a year where we have been slowly pulled back into what was 'normal' before Covid. I have seen quite a few new music champions call it a day after a couple of years of blogging, hosting radio shows or sharing playlists, as their lives got more complicated and time consuming. All I can say, for those who have hung up their boots, is thank you for helping us all be heard and enjoy things from here on as 'just' a listener!
Someone of particular note was Andy Sharman who did a regular 3 hour show under the title "Keep Yourself Nice" - He had such a melifluous voice and his shows had a consistent theme of sincere support for the artists he played. I never grew tired of Andy's GIF he regularly responded with on Twitter, of a hurtling anime character embracing with full force someone very much in need of a hug.
So, what sort of 2022 did I have? If I was to sum it up in one sentence, it would be this.
I think I got rid of my Imposter Syndrome.
2021 was such an enjoyably creative year that was rounded off right at the end with being able to produce the MindAid-2021 cover of the famous Band Aid track. But deep within me was a nagging sense of biting off more than I could chew. Watching a notable big screen actor like Robert Carlisle introduce our project that raised a superb amount of money for the charity “Tiny Changes” (set up as a legacy in memory of Scott John Hutchison, the troubled singer/songwriter of Scottish band, ‘Frightened Rabbit’) was quite a shock for someone who had learnt to be quite comfortable in my anonymity throughout 2021
Jordan (of Arcade State) rallied the troops and I was left to piece together over 25 vocal contributions into one track.
I reference the charity single from the end of 2021 because it ties in very much with a lot of what has occurred in 2022. I can remember sitting down with one of the vocal contributions by a young singer songwriter going by the name of SILVI. I was floored by it, tbh. Over the course of 2022, I have had many a lovely conversation with Jodi and as one of many passionate fans of her music, it has been a real highlight to get to know Jodi as a friend. Jods will smash it in 2023 as her audience grows every day.
The same too for Tom Brogan, lead singer of SILVER HAAR who I have high hopes for as they unleash themselves on West Midlothian and beyond with their solid tunes and a beautiful soup of jangle guitar anthems. We collaborated on a track that was well received called ‘Mountains’ in January 22 which was one of my most streamed releases of the year.
2022 was a lot about my role as a remixer and producer. I managed to collaborate with quite a few bands / artists throughout the year. Here’s a selection of them below.
DISTANT IMAGES - Echoes (Remix)
THE RAHS - Our Design (Invisible Squirrel Remix)
LEWCA / INVISIBLE SQUIRREL - Balls Out (Co-written)
JOE PEACOCK - Trace (Invisible Squirrel remix)
MIKEY J - Chasing Seagulls (Co-written)
MANTRA RAY - Forever your pleasure (Invisible Squirrel Remix)
LEIGH THOMAS - Find my way (Hammond session)
BUSHROD + SMITH - Time is up (Remix)
There are a few more in the pipeline for Voldo and Shawn ‘ChuckStar85’ Charlton and another, yet to be confirmed, with one of the brightest stars in our unsigned world. I left out the one I did for Fin Hatton which tbh was not my finest hour. One of the occasions where I failed the artist in realising a song. Took 3 hours when I should have taken 3 days. I am always learning which is one of the main reasons that keeps me toiling. Improvement through experience. Even the negative ones.
Speaking of the negative, the toughest thing (in music) to occur to me during 2022 started off around June, when an artist, who shall remain nameless, asked if I could attend as a producer for a session in London at very short notice. With only 2 days to spare I unfortunately could not make it, but tentatively agreed to do a remix of their most popular song. I did a bit of research and saw they had an astounding number of monthly listeners on Spotify (30,000). With this in mind, it seemed a fair exchange for me to do the remix free of charge on account that a ‘remix tag’ on the stream platforms would give me an enormous amount of exposure to their 30k+ listeners.
I remixed their song and it came out a few weeks later. I’d like to think it was one of my better efforts. To date this track has had less than 1000 streams in 6 months. Later on, at the beginning of Autumn, I posted a tweet that caused a minor stir in the New Music Twitter community. The remix and this tweet, to my complete surprise, collided. Tweet below. It is worth reading to understand the next part of this story.
With hindsight, I appreciate the he-shall-remain-nameless artist took the gist of my tweet quite personally, even though that was not the intention. I had, up to that point, never ‘outed’ them for being so excessive with their dodgy boosting of their listener statistics. I was just speaking about a significant number of artists out there, doing it. He just happened to be one of the most prolific at this sort of thing. I could quote you Carly Simon lyrics right now, but I guess you get the drift.
What happened next was the negative. The guy started trolling me. Hard. First of all he kept popping up on some significantly important tweets by/to me. The saddest one by BandCamp featuring my new album in July. What I would metaphorically describe as taking a shit in my celebratory punch bowl. He would always use an annonymous Twitter account for these things, but the annonymity was poorly camouflaged and from a couple of exchanges they duly revealed themselves (by using almost identically critical comments about Artwork using Artificial Intelligence as the strongest clue)
When he realised that I had worked out their identity he went ‘all in’ on the trolling. They had screenshotted a discussion I had held with them earlier that year (about another artist) and the words I used were very poorly thought through. What I said was wrong but in private. The troll responded to a tweet by the guy and there it was: Mean words said by me, that were based on half-truths, common links (our troll had done the same sort of thing to them) and my idiocy.
It went on for a couple of weeks. Got messy. Then, one day I guess I woke up without the anger that this guy wanted back from me. I had spoken to the innocent party who had to deal with reading the screenshot. He’s a kind soul and at the very least has accepted my apology. The best thing to come out of it was I wrote a dark gothic song to express myself over the whole thing. It will be appearing on the next album and I think it’s a godamn banger.
Are you still reading? Wow. You are AMAZING. Really. I’d have given up by now.
What about my own tunes?
Now we’re talking! I released 4 albums in 2022. Yep 4. Ridiculous I know. But I had a bit of a backlog with both artist profiles. Under Joe Adhemar I brought out Existential Dreadlocks in February. It’s an album one or two out there have a real affection for. Me too.
About The Soul came out in July. As I alluded to in the sorry troll story above, this album had a particularly lovely thing happen to it. I pitched it to the BandCamp editorial team. They apparently receive 1000+ uploads every day, so the odds felt very slim. I learnt 3 days later (via email) from the Director of Editorial that I had been chosen. This is still for me, the most important achievement so far in my musical career. And for 2 days on the 18th July, anyone who logged into BandCamp would have seen my album in the New and Notable section. Sales and ‘reach’ of this album were obviously a lot better than previous works. I have enjoyed regular soothing ‘pings’ as the BandCamp app on my phone notifies me of another sale. I need to sell around 30 more vinyl albums to break even. So even with a BandCamp feature it’s really hard to make money from this mullarkey. One of the tracks, ‘Put it all back’ got played on Tom Robinson’s BBC Introducing Mixtape on BBC 6 (19th December) so if you’re quick you can still catch it on BBC Sounds. Check out the album below.
Under my Invisible Squirrel profile I released Sonder that is quite a mix of dance genres. Funk, Electro, Breakbeat and Trance. The title track was picked by the Fresh on The Net team this summer. So it’s had it’s moments as an LP. Invisible Squirrel was created to not really care too much about image. Just write what I like and make you all bop.
I mentioned earlier the BandCamp feature for ‘About The Soul’?
Well….In August, you wouldn’t bloody believe this, but my album / mixtape ‘Chief and McMurphy’ got picked too! It was a totally new song-writing concept for me. I write a tune. Then I delete 90% of the elements in the track, keep a couple of key sounds and use the same BPM and then start again in a new direction. At the end of this process (around 6 months for this album), I have a bunch of tracks that have similar beginnings and endings. Mix them together and what you get is a mix-tape with an extra dimension. And for that reason, I hope, the musicality of those cross fades caught the attention of the BandCamp review team. Of all the things on this blog/end of year review I’d like you to listen to, it’s probably this. I have 2 more ready for release and I think they are stronger than this one. Yeah I know, we always say that don’t we?
So to round off my self indulgent / congratulatory end of year thinkpiece, I must say a few thank you’s. Thanks to my wife, Sarah and kids Alfie and Lucy and all my friends who are too long to list here. Thanks to Midge Phillips for the artwork. Thanks to everyone who bought the albums. Thanks to John Michie for having a dabble at promo for the About The Soul single. Thanks to Moby Tanner and Danny Milner who have to spread themselves thin with a lot of artists, but always seem to find sufficient dollops of banter to keep me occupied. Thanks to everyone who used me as a producer / remixer. And thanks to anyone involved in New Music who helps keep this part of Twitter, on the whole, a kind place to be.
My next album will be out sometime in the first few months of 2023 that will blow your socks off as it includes the excellent guitar of Jim Sanger. Have a great Christmas and New Year and stay warm as you can.