I'm four songs into all the songs I want to release. It's been great and there's been a couple surprises/learnings.
1. My name. Yeah, I've had a few name changes over the years.
People from my youth call me Chad. People from my military days call me Nick (short for Nichols), and people from my adult and professional life call me Chris. With all the Chris and Chad Nichols' producing music, I chose CC Nichols as the name to release music under. I really don't know who the hell I am I guess? I just know I don't want to be confused with other people. Unfortunately, the name changes not only confuse me but also confuses all my current and future friends. I adjusted all my online accounts to CC to help keep things straight. But please continue to call me whatever you want. I'll continue to answer to my many names.
2. I tried to use TikTok, Instagram, and other social media outlets to promote each song's release. Turns out I HATE this. Making the content for each social media post can be fun sometimes. However, all the music promotion experts say you need to post something daily or at least three times a week. This is exhausting and not fun. I find myself producing videos that often aren't very good, continually checking my phone to see how many “views” each post gets and ignoring the actual joy of playing music. I'll still use social media here and there, but I'm COMPLETELY done following the “experts” advice. I'm gonna follow my own path. Let's see where that leads. I do enjoy making music videos. It's incredibly fun to include others in the production of the videos. So, you can expect that to continue.
3. The positive reception to each release has been wonderful. Coming up with an idea for a song is one thing. Working the idea into an actual song is something else. Collaborating with a team to build that song into something worthy of publication is…well…a lot of work. Finally, sharing that artistic product with the world is both exciting and intimidating. Some music “professionals” have come back with less than great reviews of my vocal talents. I expected that. I'm not trying to be Freddy Mercury or George Jones.
And I deliberately choose to not go too deep with the autotune craze of modern music production. I simply have some stories to tell. They may be slightly off key but it's the real me and I think the stories are resonating with the right people.
UPCOMING STUFF
My next release, “Wasting Time”, comes out on August 7th. It's another fun/introspective tune about…well…wasting time. Sign up to my email list HERE to receive updates about this release and other stuff.
If you are enjoying my music, please share it with your friends. Send them this blog post, direct them to my website, or send them to whatever outlet you use to listen to music. Here's a couple links to the big streaming services:
Thanks for reading this and listening to my stuff!
CC Nichols