“Songs don’t quite belong to you in the way you think they might”
On 30th January 2026 I did it! I released 13 albums 130 tracks…all in one day…a body of work . Some people ask me WHY..I wrote this for an article by Far Our Magazine who published it.. I am going to ask people to hand write one song so I can make a book /collection of all the lyrics each in a different person’s handwriting . DO a limited run…Now I am in that curious limbo land and am just relaxing a bit as it was a lot of work releasing them all in one day, took about 3 months of proper planning. SO there is a space now that I can fill with something new .
Why I’m releasing 13 albums in a day. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/releasing-13-albums-in-a-day/
I made my first album when I was six. It was with my mum, dad and two younger siblings, although really it was my parents’ record and we were allowed a guest spot. We sang Go Tell Aunt Rhody. It came out on vinyl. Limited run.
A nice man arrived at our house with a Revox tape machine and a very fancy microphone that hung from the ceiling above the dining-room table. The whole album was recorded there, mum and dad carefully placed with their acoustic guitars and close harmonies. I love harmonies.
I didn’t analyse any of this at the time. I just absorbed the fact that music could be made anywhere, on any budget, whether it was going to be listened to or not. Being skint and unheard has never stopped me making music. Someone presses record, we play, we sing. That idea lodged early and never really left.
Since then, I’ve recorded in kitchens, bedrooms, garages, and very occasionally swanky studios with catering.
Songwriting has been a quiet, reassuringly steady thread through my life. Much of it has been written for choirs, songs designed to be sung by proper, real people, in school halls, church spaces and community centres, with the occasional massive cathedral, outside space or Royal Hall. Singing together, rooted in place.
Most of my writing life has been collaborative. Songs have never felt like precious objects to me. They arrive, get repeated, adjusted, sometimes slightly mangled, and usually made stronger by use. Songs don’t quite belong to you in the way you think they might. They pass through, shaped by being sung, listened to and shared.
In my first proper recording band, in my early twenties, I was only meant to be the backing singer. Me and two men. That was the plan. But I happened to own the only recording equipment between us, a four-track reel-to-reel I bought with money my mum gave me when I was 22, to make up for a very impoverished upbringing.
Because the tape machine lived with me, I kept trying out alternative words and melodies while we were recording, just to see. Almost without anyone noticing, mine became the song.
I’ve always loved tape recorders in whatever form they take. As someone with dyslexia and a short-term memory that’s best described as unreliable, I sing ideas into machines and play them back. Not much stays in my head, but something always sticks. The act of recording is how I think and feel.
We tend to talk about creativity as something that happens to people, rather than something we do. Words like “talent” and “gift” make it sound effortless, as if the work arrives fully formed and stays alive on its own. My experience has been quieter and more ordinary than that.
Writing songs, for me, is mostly about showing up and staying until it is done.
In July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I joined an online Australian songwriting group. A song a week, written quickly, shared with a small, supportive online group. It felt like a proper, steady thing to hold onto when everything else felt so uncertain.
That weekly rhythm changed my relationship with writing. It kept me sane. I stopped worrying about urgency or relevance or whether a song was “good enough”. Writing fast left no time for judgement. I learned to trust long arcs. To let songs be.
After several years, the songs began to pile up. At some point you realise you’re holding more than you know what to do with. They want to be released, like a flock of birds lifting all at once. They’re shouting at me: let me out.
Each album holds a small stretch of time, months of writing and living, placed in order. Side by side, they feel less like individual statements and more like one long conversation. Releasing them one by one would have suggested a sense of momentum that wasn’t really there. Letting them go together feels closer to how they were made. And yes. Fuck algorithms.
I think there’s a point where keeping work back stops being care and starts becoming clutter. Letting the songs go feels a bit like clearing space, ordinary, slightly overdue, and quietly relieving. I’ve started to think of the songs as friends who’ve stayed for a good long visit. You love them, but you don’t need them sleeping on your sofa forever.
Some will disappear. Some might land somewhere meaningful. I might never know which.
Releasing thirteen albums in a day won’t change how I work. Tomorrow I’ll sit down with a keyboard, a microphone and a word of the week, and begin again without knowing what will come.
Art isn’t meant to be stored away. If it’s released and one person hears it, something has moved. The work continues, quietly, as it always has.
Fly softly, my beautiful songs.
Gitika Partington
(Gitika, fittingly, means “a little song”)
SO I am making lyric videos slowly..and here is a song from album number ummm….
https://youtu.be/7EZTOtBL-To?si=0cXsaf5VBlyMjDvg
Gitika Partington