Studio 168

Dolly Parton for Out magazine, 1997. There are so many things I want to write about Dolly. I’m not a big country fan, so my idea of her has primarily been shaped by the warmth of her social presence and, of course, her remarkable writing catalog, but I’ve been surprisingly moved by her death.

Hello 🫶 Deep in the trenches of finishing some songs, I dug out this beat (are you sensing a theme here) and thought it was worth developing. I ended up writing this slightly tongue-in-cheek song about missing someone — I was waiting for Jack to get home from his trip this weekend and I guess the lack of sleep was getting to me. Do you find that once you’re used to sleeping next to someone, you struggle to sleep without them?

Hello loves, Big news this month: the first three songs of my project have been mixed!! ♥️ I was so happy when I sent them off; stems in little packages (I pictured flowers when I wrote that), neatly organised in Dropbox with a deck of mixing notes attached. It feels amazing to complete something, to follow through on what you said you’d do.

Made this beat last week, wrote the song on Saturday. It’s just the rough vocal atm, please forgive the chorus being out of time in places! I’m not sure whether to properly record it with harmonies etc — some days I like it but a part of me feels like it’s a bit straight-down-the-middle. Let me know what you think? Leave a comment Leaving a small sample for everyone here, full version is available to members below. Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

life update is a reader-supported publication. Sign up to read my essays, hear my voice notes and receive my unreleased demos straight to your inbox ♥️ Hello loves, I am really loving vlogging at the moment — two videos went out in May and I’m going to try and share even more over summer. I think I need to get better at titling them as they’re currently a bit dreary-sounding, which isn’t actually the mood of the content at all.

Shared this idea in my vlog this week and realised I forgot to post it here — so as promised, this is camera shy. I love exploring the idea of muse/voyeur in my songs and this was another angle (pun unintended-ish) on that.

life update is a reader-supported publication. Sign up to read my essays, hear my voice notes and receive my unreleased demos straight to your inbox ♥️ Hello loves, This month brought two more weddings my way — firstly the marriage of sweet Holly and Ben, who happened to choose a venue next to where I grew up. I got a lift to the party from my sister’s boyfriend, quite novel for someone who has had to board flights too see her friends get hitched.

image via pinterest I’m meant to be working on my other songs this week but in a tale as old as time, in a feat of procrastination I ended up writing something new. I was looking through my old beats in case there’s anything I want to develop and I found this — it was fully arranged, and I had written the first two lines so I thought why not try and finish it. It’s hopeful and light, the Cartier line is a bit fast and loose for my style lol but we’ll run with it.

I went back to CROOK’s studio to film an in-depth breakdown of the production on our song Chrome! We built the foundation of the track in one session and worked on the rest over Whatsapp, so it was so fascinating to hear the isolated stems and to see how he arranged the final version. CROOK is an incredible producer who I’ve been a fan of fo…

life update is a reader-supported publication. Sign up to read my essays, hear my voice notes and receive my unreleased demos straight to your inbox ♥️ Immensely grateful we’ve made it out of the winter trenches and into the thick of Spring.