Don't Look Back In Anger

If you recall from my last post (and I take my hat off to you if you have been hanging on for the next instalment, or should that be apologies due to the inordinate amount of time between this post and the last one), I had great expectations that with the publicity, the most popular Elvis Tribute Artist in Australia performing on the song with thousands of Facebook friends, the appearance at the Parkes Elvis Festival plus the global release, we should have gone gang busters and sold loads of copies.

I thought I had all the angles covered, articles online, articles in traditional media, I even had T-Shirts printed for the festival to give away. They played the song on the main stage at Cooke Park at the Parkes Elvis festival, I got asked up on the stage and interviewed by the compere Elvis Presley. I explained how the song would only be available on digital download because that was the new medium. He said all the Elvis Tribute Artists would be beating down a path to my door so they could perform it.

I had aspirations of offering the song to all the Elvis Tribute Artsit Competitions throughout the planet so they would play the opening bars each time the next competitor came on and did their set. You can visualize it now. The opening riff and then 'Here comes the new Elvis Presley......'

Hello Guy, wake up, wake up, your dreaming............

....and so it came to pass, that I was dreaming. I had got it all wrong, I had misjudged the demographic. I should have realised on that blistering hot weekend in Parkes, a town that is 365KM west of Sydney, that the Elvis Community had been brought up on a diet of 45RPM singles, 33RPM albums and more recently CDs. If I had come armed with a load of CDs then I am sure that I could have made some sales.

The fact that Mark Andrew was unavailable also conspired against me. As Piers from the ElvisInfoNetwork had said to me, lots of artists have written songs about Elvis, but I thought mine had a different angle and would be popular enough to at least get noticed. I was wrong.

To date the song (Mark Andrew version) has sold 31 copies with 54 streams, not 310 or 3100, or 31,000 but 31.

I love writing songs, and the people that hear the songs, rate them very highly through the lyrics and the musical content, so I don't look back in anger, I use it as another life lesson that will assist me in achieving my goal of being a respected songwriter and having artists wanting to perform my songs.

If you have enjoyed this blog, then please tune in to my next one which is called 'Shine That Light' and I will take you on another journey through the creation and progress of another song.

Thanks for reading. I am a songwriter.