A year passes so quickly. Thanks a lot for supporting me and my creative works. 2023 has been a rough year with many challenges. Still, I’d like to look back to what we accomplished and give a short overview about the plans for next year.

Review

5th studio album “Quarterlife Blues”

One of the biggest topics this year has been my 5th studio album “Quarterlife Blues”. Initially, I haven’t planned to publish a new album so quickly after “Going My Way”, but my creativity exploded. Whenever I touched my acoustic guitar, I wrote a new song, and most of them went unexpectedly bluesy.

The album has been a great success. It attracted a lot of new followers on social media, especially in the USA and Canada. “Quarterlife Blues” has been listed in the Roots Music Report as most songs were played in American radio stations like Global Blues Radio and Radio Guitar One. In December, I has been featured on the brand-new indie radio stationThe Ross House of Music. Thank you so much!

All songs uploaded in 2023

This year, I surpassed my personal goal of uploading one song a month. It’s been fun to create this little collage of cover images, cause it clearly shows the tough amount of songs I produced this year. We nearly doubled the amount of last year. These are not even all – I produced 3 more songs for a secret project, helped a friend on 3 productions and wrote 2 lyrics for my collab partners. I hope we can add those to my contributions next year, when they will be published.

Your remixes

Remixers from all around the world were interested to remix my songs. I received a ton of remix requests this year, and some are already online. Please check them out and drop these artists and producers a comment or like, if you haven’t already.

• Beautiful (ELEKTROPOPS Remix)
• Liminal Spaces (Lemonbrew Remix)
• Love Lasts Forever (New Orleans Mix by Lionwolf)
• Neotokyo (ELEKTROPOPS Remix)
• Neotokyo (CYBTRAXX Remix)
• Weight (Lemon Muzik Remix)
• Deep Heart (Lemonbrew Remix)

My remixes

I wanted to remix or rearrange some songs of other artists, but I only found to join a remix contest of the Australian metalcore band Invent Animate. My remix is exclusively online on SoundCloud:

Hitting the wall

After publishing and promoting “Quarterlife Blues”, creative exhaustion hit me pretty bad. I received tons of collaboration and remix requests, but I had no song or idea to share. I decided to step away for two months, only focussing on reading and drawing. I discovered Inktober.

Inktober is an art challenge where you draw a picture to 31 given prompts in October. Traditionally, the drawings should be done with ink, but I decided to dust off my watercolours. I didn’t add pictures to all 31 prompts, but created 10 paintings. This has been a great distraction from music.

Statistics

Your favourite songs

No year ends without some statistics. I summed up the statistics from SoundCloud, YouTube and Bandcamp to figure out which songs you listened to this year. The result is surprising as we have a mix of many different genres and albums. “Liminal Spaces” went viral on SoundCloud and hit nearly 2000 listens. While “Monsieur Lovin” didn’t work on my account, it’s been one of the most clicked songs on my collab partner StevieJ. On YouTube, my remix of “Desperate Religion” (2007) trended, but I couldn’t figure out the reason. The most comments were written on “Liminal Spaces”, “High Noon” and “Fit Right In”. Thank you so much!

Here’s a ranking of the most clicked songs this year:

1. Liminal Spaces – 2520 clicks
2. Quarterlife Blues – 1306
3. High Noon – 1024
4. I’m not angry – 968
5. Monsieur Lovin – 971
6. Dorian Gray – 926
7. Dust – 866
8. How Are You – 842
9. Under – 735
10. No Time For Blues – 617

Social media growth

Your constant support is giving me so much, that I don’t care much about figures. However, I’m happy to announce, that the amount of followers doubled in the last couple of months. YouTube has something around 200, SoundCloud 700, Facebook 400, Instagram 250, Bandcamp 80. It’s not much, but it means the world to me, since it’s organic. I don’t pay money for likes!

Forecast

My plate is full of tasty dishes. As mentioned before, I will try to reduce my projects running in parallel by getting them done. I will not work on a new album. I will not start a dozen new collabs, but I still like to keep things running in a slower pace.

Collaboration hiatus

I am very happy that so many people are interested in collaborating with me. However, I reached my capacity limits last summer, and I’m still not done with my pile of halfway recorded songs. If you want to help out on a running project, you may find a list of open roles in my collaboration section that will be updated monthly. I am not able to start ANY new project until most of my running projects are fully produced.

New release and posting schedule

In the last two years, I developed a habit of uploading new songs all 4 weeks on a Friday at noon my time (GMT+2). Unfortunately, most automatic social media posts didn’t work, and I ended up sacrificing my lunch break to fix broken links. Thanks to a huge increase of listeners in the USA and Canada, I will move my social media posts around 6 – 8 pm CET, which should be lunchtime across the Atlantic. My Bandcamp releases and Bandcamp Friday announcements will still be posted in the Central European morning, as their schedules start at midnight Pacific time. Otherwise, Bandcamp Fridays would be over before you noticed them.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!