In January of 2020, I released my debut album Unfall, without knowing whether it would be the sole album I ever released or the first of many to come. Between the combination of pandemic shutdowns and the widespread affirmation the album received, I chose the latter route and began working right away on recording my sophomore album, Development & Compromise, initially released in January of 2021 (exactly a year after the debut).
In response to such a quick turnaround, multiple people made remarks about releasing “too much music” or wondering whether it was “too soon” to be putting out another album. I specifically remember one friend quipping, “Hey now, I’m still trying to let the first album sink in!” Even some friends and fans who were happy to be hearing new tunes presented some concerns about whether I’d be burning out my casual listeners with my newfound plans to continue releasing an album every year, (which came to fruition with 2022’s live album Questions at Thirty followed by my third studio album, Accidental Days, in early 2023).
Is it too much? Why am I releasing so much music?
I’m writing this article as a way to explain why I’m releasing so much music, to explore whether it’s plausible for a songwriter to write this much new material on such a prolific basis while maintaining quality, and whether the concept of “too much music” is fairly, evenly applied across all artists.
To begin explaining why I personally have been releasing so much music, it’s important that we note a distinction between prolific output versus prolific songwriting, as it is precisely this dichotomy which has been the driving force behind my desire to continue releasing at least one album per year.
“Prolific output” refers to the frequency and volume of newly recorded music released by an artist, regardless of who wrote the music or when it was written. There’s no agreed-upon definition for how much output is needed for an artist to be considered “prolific,” but I would argue that any frequency higher than one album every other year is prolific (or at the very least, more prolific than the average artist). So any output that matches or exceeds one-album-per-year absolutely makes the cut. For example, Barry Manilow was extremely prolific in the early aughts, releasing five albums in the three-year span of 2006-08; but this was made possible because all five albums contained cover songs, with no writing credits belonging to Manilow. (Similarly, Manilow’s contemporary and lookalike Rod Stewart had a prolific run of releasing an album every year from 2001 through 2006, but all six albums comprised cover songs.)
Another example that comes to mind is the Korean pop group TWICE, who have amassed hundreds of tracks on streaming services in less than a decade. They’ve accomplished this by releasing a new mini-album every single year (sometimes two!), while also releasing the occasional album, compilation, standalone single, etc. And while it’s true that these hundreds of tracks include remixes, instrumental versions, Japanese and English re-recordings of songs, etc., there are still over 100 distinct original songs to be found in their discography, averaging out to more than a dozen new songs every year. For TWICE, this is accomplished thanks to shared vocal duties across nine members plus the fact that they don’t write all of their music — and when they do, it’s usually just one member contributing lyrics. Thus, since the members of TWICE are each only writing an approximate one or two songs per year, we wouldn’t refer to any of them individually as being prolific songwriters.
“Prolific songwriting” largely refers to the people who treat songwriting as their primary occupation — which may or may not be people who personally sing or record or play in a band. Behind the scenes of the music industry, there are thousands of people who make a living through writing songs for other artists to record. These are the people who aim to finish a song every day of the week or to make multiple promising song-starts on a daily basis. Yet there are some singer-songwriters and bandleaders who have become famous for their prolific natures.
Perhaps the most famous example is Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, who has purportedly written over 1,000 songs in his life (maybe even closer to 2,000 by this point). He has made a bold number of these song demos available to the public through his Alone series of digital compilations, which currently number up to thirteen volumes. Yet while Cuomo exists on the extreme end of the “prolific” spectrum, his parred-down list of official songwriting credits for his band Weezer helps us to see a reasonable example of an artist with both prolific output and songwriting. This was especially true in the years 2021 and 2022, where, across merely 24 months, the band released two albums and four EPs, totalling nearly 50 new original songs.
Now I must redirect this question toward myself: am I an artist with prolific output, a songwriter who finishes songs prolifically, or both? If you were to ascertain this information merely by looking at my three studio albums, you would come to the conclusion that I am merely an artist with prolific output. Why? Because, across the three main albums I released in 2020, 2021, and 2023, nearly every song dates back to 2019 or earlier. Unfall‘s ten tracks originate from the years 2015 through 2019; with the exception of two 2021 compositions, thirteen of D&C‘s fifteen tracks originate from the years 2010 through 2019; and Accidental Days’ ten tracks range from 2012 to 2019. Therefore, nothing about my “one-album-per-year” rule necessitates that I have functioned as a particularly prolific songwriter; you could surmise that I was merely late to the game, with a lengthy back-catalog to pull from. Moreover, if these three albums represented everything I’d written in the 2010’s, then it’s possible that I wrote an average of merely three-to-four songs per year. (Earlier, I did not provide an exact number or metric for what qualifies as “prolific songwriting,” but I think at least one song per month or twelve songs per year needs to be the bare minimum requirement in order to be in the conversation.)
Truth be told, I was not a prolific songwriter for much of my life. Throughout my college years (2010-14), I would slowly piece songs together during the semesters, often with bigger blasts of new material during the summer holidays. This might only result in a few songs per academic year plus a few songs per summer. It wasn’t until after graduating college that I began flexing my writing muscles, seeking opportunities to write more frequently and challenging myself to finish new songs faster. And the results of this can be seen if you look at the spread of years across those three studio albums and 35 songs. Only three of the 35 songs come from 2010 (meanwhile none of them come from 2011 or 2013). The bulk of the songs come from the latter years of the decade: a whopping nine from 2018 and ten from 2019. So while a few years are exceptions to the rule, these numbers would map onto a chart to show a clear growth trajectory over the years; and this trajectory absolutely overflowed into the 2020’s, where nearly every year has continued to be more fruitful than the preceding one.
So, to provide one simple answer to the original question (“Why do I release so much music?”), it’s because I’m playing catch-up on a musical career that, in my mind, started ten years too late. Hiding beneath my concise ten-track debut in 2020 was an entire decade’s worth of songs that never could have fit onto a single album. Once I decided to keep recording more music, I became determined to release as many of those songs as I could deem worthy — or to rewrite the old, promising songs until they became worthy of a proper release. Thus I spent the following few years laser-focused on making the best albums that I could out of all that older material; all the while, I never stopped writing newer songs, too.
At this point in time, I have effectively sworn off the idea of recording any more material that pre-dates the year 2020. But I’m still playing a game of catch-up — one that’s basically just as intense as it was five years ago, (if not more so). In 2020, I was looking back upon a decade’s worth of songs I wanted to release; now, in late 2024, I’m looking back upon five years’ worth of songs that I would love for people to hear. And since I’ve generally become an increasingly more prolific songwriter as I’ve grown older, I would speculate that I’ve probably written more songs in the past five years than I did in the decade-long span of 2010-19. If that’s true, then I now have more catch-up to do than ever before!
That brings us back to the tension between output versus songwriting. Songwriters who aren’t recording artists don’t need to worry about their output, and recording artists who rely heavily on outside songwriters don’t need to worry about having too many original compositions. But for those of us who record the songs we write, it is so hard to try to slow down, to desire to slow down, especially when the sole reason for slowing down is purely a hypothetical one (i.e., to avoid burning out your fans). And as far as hypotheticals go, this argument doesn’t seem to hold much water in practice. For an artist’s non-fans, every new release marks a new opportunity to win someone over. For their casual fans, there’s nothing forcing them to check out every release by every artist they like; they can choose to skip some releases or get around to them in their own time. And for an artist’s biggest fans, new music is almost always a good thing; most of us can’t get enough from our favorite artists.
Case in point: Taylor Swift. For any music listener in the English-speaking world of the 2020’s, Taylor Swift is probably the first artist who will come to mind when thinking of prolific songwriters with prolific output (that is, of course, unless they’re fans of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard). The volume of her output throughout this current decade has been, for lack of a better word, insane — yet many of her fans take no umbrage with the large number of songs Swift has been pouring into the world recently. So for this final stretch of this article, I will be comparing my own output over the past five years to that of Swift’s, to see how a little indie artist like me (who may or may not be releasing too much music) shakes up against America’s most popular, biggest-selling artist.
Taylor Swift makes for a fitting comparison to me because my solo career aligns neatly with this extra-prolific season of Swift’s career, kicking off with the two albums she released in 2020, Folklore and Evermore. As of writing this, she has released a total of four new studio albums in the 2020’s, alongside four re-recorded projects. Similarly, I am in the process of rolling out my fourth full-length album (available solely in the Friends Club) alongside a few other non-album projects I’ve released. How does my version of “prolific output” compare with Taylor’s?
Across Taylor’s four new studio albums (which tend to be lengthier than mine), she has released 60 new songs, according to the official track listings for these albums. However, thanks to re-releases and deluxe editions, this number quickly balloons up to 87 new songs. Additionally, her re-recorded albums include “From the Vault” songs that, despite being written many years ago, can be included in this count thanks to them having never been released before. With five or more “From the Vault” songs appearing on each re-recorded album, our total of new, original songs released this decade grows from 87 to a stunning 114. (And to bring us to an even more mind-boggling number, when you include remixes, live/alternate versions, and re-recordings of previously released songs, Swift has added over 250 tracks to her streaming service libraries since the start of 2020.)
With the 114 new, original compositions that have been released in the span of four years, Swift is currently averaging nearly 30 new song releases per year. That’s approximately three albums’ worth of material, annually. For any recording artist, this number is unbelievable. I don’t believe The Beatles ever released that many songs in a single calendar year. (Fun fact: King Gizzard, if I’m counting correctly, released 64 new songs in the year 2017… but they’re a unique case.) On a songwriting level, I think we can safely assume that her four studio albums contain all relatively new compositions from 2020 onward; so if we remove the “From the Vault” recordings, we come back down to the figure of 87 songs, meaning that Swift, at a bare minimum, writes an average of two brand new, finished songs every month. The number of started or drafted songs is probably much higher, though I wouldn’t be quick to suggest that she’s likely finishing many songs that we aren’t hearing. From my vantage point, the general public seems to believe that she has recently begun a practice of recording and releasing everything she writes — that every finished composition has been finding its way onto her deluxe editions as bonus tracks. It is certainly possible that she has songs which hit the cutting room floor without ever being recorded, but I can’t imagine that her song completion rate is much higher than that two-per-month figure, considering the amount of time she spends recording and touring. Even still, a rate of two or more songs per month handily places her in the “prolific” category.
For my own volume of songwriting in recent years, it would seem that Swift and I are on a similar track. My numbers aren’t consistent by any means (as in, I might write ten songs in one month, followed by a few months where I don’t finish any), but I’m fairly confident that I’ve finished at least twenty songs per year this decade, sometimes considerably more. (I struggle to keep precise records of songs per year, but I do know that I hit 30 finished songs in 2020, and I will likely hit that number again in 2024.) Both of us fall short of the number of credits that would be expected of a full-time songwriter, but given our recording aspirations and other ventures, that’s completely reasonable. However, the “output” category is where the disparity between us becomes readily apparent.
Compared to the 250+ tracks that Swift has released to all streaming services, I’ve released 150 tracks across the major platforms that I use. These platforms include Bandcamp and my Friends Club, which each host a handful of exclusives (though many of the “exclusives” on Bandcamp are cover songs). Of these 150 tracks, 80 of them are original compositions. 10 of those 80 can only be accessed in the Friends Club while another 9 of them are currently only on Bandcamp, leaving 61 original compositions that are widely available on all streaming services. These 61 include the 35 official album tracks we discussed earlier, plus an additional 26 songs that come from a live acoustic album, an acoustic EP, a few standalone singles, and some bonus tracks. All in all, my footprint on streaming services is considerably smaller when the Bandcamp- and Friends Club-exclusives are removed from the equation, reducing 150 total tracks to approximately 86 distinct, universally-accessible tracks.
All those numbers are probably forming a nonsensical mush in your brain right now, but I’m hoping a direct comparison to Swift’s discography might add some clarity. Regarding songs that are widely available on all streaming platforms, over the past five years, I’ve uploaded only one third as many tracks as she has. Of these tracks, I’ve released only one-half the number of newly-available originals that Swift has (61 versus 114). And if we combine all tracks, all songs, all versions of songs, etc., from across every platform on the internet, my output still falls shy of Swift’s by a gargantuan one-hundred tracks (150 versus 250). So for all of the “prolific” tendencies and goals that I have, Taylor Swift is still more prolific than me by a ratio of 3:2, perhaps even a ratio of 2:1.
Yet is it fair to compare the two of us? I have hundreds of listeners; Taylor has hundreds of millions, which is a number I struggle to fathom in any concrete sense. There exists a demand for her music that far exceeds what I will ever reach, and I’m fairly certain that I don’t have a single fan who’s as rabidly obsessed with my music as the top 1% of her fan base is with hers. But this recalls a point I made earlier: “for an artist’s biggest fans, new music is almost always a good thing.” When I release new music, I primarily want it to serve my lost loyal fans, to be enjoyed by my most passionate listeners. There’s probably a 10/90 divide between my listeners (10% big fans, 90% casual fans), and I would rather serve the 10% by giving them more to hear, to enjoy, to chew on, than to withhold new music from them due to fear of releasing more music than the 90% cares to interact with. The 10% should be my priority, as long as my new releases come from a place of love, care, intentionality, and creative overflow, rather than being prolific for prolific’s sake.
On that note, one major criticism hangs over the head of this topic, which I have not yet addressed: What happens when prolific songwriters decide to record/release everything they write, rather than only recording the best of the best? Isn’t it possible, if not likely, for an artist’s career to suffer when an overabundance of releases coincides with an overall drop in quality?
This argument arose frequently in the discourse surrounding Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department. For a celebrity of Swift’s stature, everything she does is poised to attract controversy, but I was shocked to see that even some of Swift’s die-hard fans came to the conclusion that TTPD might be the singer’s weakest album; even those who loved the album loved it a bit less than they loved everything else. The general consensus seemed to be that the album needed an editor — someone who could tidy up the strongest songs and remove the weaker ones entirely. It’s a natural reaction to fear that an album is too long in the wake of a sixteen-song track listing, regardless of the artist, but that response was exacerbated all the more by the extended double-LP version of TTDP, running 31 songs long. Between this, the multiple deluxe re-releases of her 2022 album Midnights, and the inclusion of “From the Vault” songs on every re-recorded album, the evidence adds up that Taylor Swift might believe her fans should get to hear every single song that she writes. Her biggest fans most assuredly do want to hear every single thing she writes, but for the larger majority of her fans, she’s going to want to tighten up her future albums and put her best foot forward with the songs she releases. A few more album cycles with responses similar to TTDP could do irreparable harm to her career and (ahem) reputation.
So how will I avoid this very same issue if I continue down this path of prolific output? The answer comes by way of the scenario I explained earlier: I’m playing catch-up. Unlike Taylor, who has spent her entire career recording and releasing her most recent batch of songs, I get to enjoy the benefit of hindsight every time I start working on putting an album together. For all three of my studio albums, I was looking at songs I’d been sitting on for years, and I was able to judge them, rearrange them, and often even rewrite them with a level of objectivity that I lacked when the songs were new and fresh. This degree of separation made it clear to me when songs had flaws in need of fixing (or when a song was too flawed to be worth fixing). For example, when I originally wrote “The Checklist” in 2012, I thought it was my masterpiece — perfect exactly the way it was. A decade later, when the time came to record “The Checklist” in 2022, I realized it needed a drastic rewrite, where I ended up replacing 75% of the lyrics.
I doubt it’ll ever happen again where I’m finally recording a decade-old song, and like I said, I plan to never again record a song that’s older than 2020 — so you won’t be seeing any “From the Vault” releases from me! But with even a year or two of hindsight and separation, combined with my ongoing growth as a songwriter, producer, and self-editor, it has become increasingly easy for me to thresh the strong songs from the weaker ones. I have zero delusions that everything I write is gold or that every song should see the light of day eventually, but let me tell you this: I have spent the past five years feeling incredibly excited about the newer material I’ve been writing since the release of Unfall, and it kills me that so few of those newer compositions have been released into the world quite yet. I truly believe the best is yet to come — and I make that statement not based on shiny new ideas I wrote yesterday but rather based on songs and demos and ideas that have stood the test of time and have remained exciting to me over the past few years.
In conclusion, I would like to… announce something? Kind of? This isn’t a firm announcement of a for-sure decision, but if you’ve read this entire article, you deserve to be the first to know: When I update the Friends Club for 2025, one of the changes that I plan on making is to increase the expectation for Club members to start receiving two new songs from me every month instead of just one. Here’s the logic behind that decision: I’ve been longing, for many years, to start making concept albums — not loosely conceptual or thematically cohesive albums, but real, hard concept albums where every track adheres to a tight musical requirement, lyrical narrative, etc. At the same time, I want to have an outlet to write new songs about whatever I want, whatever’s happening in life, without feeling the need to force those new songs into conceptual restraints. If I only make one Friends Club album per year, it would be difficult to meet these dual desires. So here’s my unofficial, probable plan for the Friends Club in 2025 and onward: Club members can expect to receive two new, exclusive songs each month (January through October), building up to two ten-song albums by the end of the year. One new song each month will be part of a concept album, leaning into the more experimental and esoteric side of my style (think “Wings Not Made to Fly,” “Interrogate the Fantasy,” or “Cave”). The second song each month will be one of the following three things: 1) a brand new song inspired by normal life, which doesn’t fit within this year’s concept album; 2) a re-recording of a song demo from 2020-23; or 3) a newly finished iteration of an existing song idea; and these songs will largely lean into the more straightforward and down-to-earth side of my style (think “Matter,” “Every,” or “Settled in the Unsettled”). If this interests you, you can join now for only $1/month before the membership price increases at the start of 2025. If you have any questions about the Friends Club, please email me at music@chasetremaine.com.
