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Album cycles often feel like a musician’s curse. You work for months, sometimes years, on a project, only to wait another however-many months to get it out there. Don’t release another album too soon, otherwise fans get burned out; release one too late, and they’ll have moved on to a more regular artist. 

Gitika Partington doesn’t care. At 5pm today, she’ll release 13 albums simultaneously, breaking a world record for the most albums released in one day. Just for comparison, The Beatles only ever released 13 studio albums (and that’s only after Magical Mystery Tour was standardised from a double EP to a full-length LP).

Why did she take on this behemoth task? Read below.

The project originally started as nine albums. How did it end up spiralling to thirteen?

It just grew. There were 289 songs written over five years, sitting there quietly waiting. I listened to them all on trains – and then more trains – and these were the ones that made the first cut. At a certain point it became clear I wasn’t dealing with a handful of albums, but a body of work. I still joke that I could release another record called The Ones That Got Away with 159 tracks on it.

How important is community in the songwriting process?

Community is central. I usually write alone and for myself first, but that’s only the beginning of the journey. Many of my songs are brought to life by groups of community singers, and that sharing is where they really come into their own.

A song, like a painting, isn’t fully alive until it’s experienced by others. If it’s never heard, seen or sung, it’s like a bird kept in a cage, or a beautiful pair of shoes left at the back of the wardrobe. The value of a song doesn’t depend on huge audiences – it just needs to connect, however intimately.

The songwriting club itself was the first landing place for all of these songs. A small online group of songwriting peers, gentle feedback with a strong sense of safety. That kind of creative community is priceless.

Were there any word prompts that proved particularly difficult to write a song about?

Ha ha. So many. Often the prompt would arrive on a Wednesday evening, and I’d think, ‘This is ridiculous – how am I meant to write a song from that?‘ But interestingly, those were often the most surprising songs, because I had to stretch both my imagination and the word itself.

Some of the more challenging prompts for me included Dinner Party, Action Movie, Ken Burns, Pizza Topping, Traffic Lights, and even Song Titles.

When writing such a large number of songs, were there any ideas, sounds or emotions that kept recurring more than expected?

I often leaned into the quirky – which was great fun – but I also kept returning to ideas of home and everyday feelings – like little therapy sessions. Things I care about deeply, like why women don’t get proper pockets in their clothes while men do. You know, the important stuff.

Sonically, layered vocals is something I do quickly and instinctively. Harmony is my first love, and that sense of atmosphere became a thread running through many of the albums. I also used a vocoder-style plugin to add harmonies fast, which ended up becoming a bit of a sonic fingerprint.

Were there any big learning curves you had to overcome during the making of these albums?

Writing quickly was a big lesson. When you move fast, the critical mind simply can’t keep up, which makes finishing things much easier. I also learned that less really is more – I probably spend as much time cutting things away as I do adding them. An old saying that a work of art is never finished but always abandoned is always there for me. You have to know when to stop and I have got much better at that. Having a song prompt a week helps a lot. 

When did the prospect of a world record come up?

That was really a throwaway thought rather than the point of the project. It’s simply a fact that the current record is twelve albums released in one day. But that was never the motivation – it’s more of a footnote. This was never about quantity for its own sake. It was about regular practice, and how one song can turn into hundreds simply by showing up. I’ve been writing every week for five years, and I expect I’ll keep doing that for a long time yet.

What do you want people to take away from these albums?

Permission. Permission to make things, to share them, and not worry whether they’re perfectly polished or commercially shaped. If someone listens to one album, or stumbles across a single track by accident, that’s enough.

Though I do like the idea that if you booked a train from St Pancras to the Mediterranean, you could just about listen to the whole body of work in one go.

What’s the next project you’re going to work on?

I’ve co-written a body of songs with Andy McCrorie-Shand, my favourite human and songwriting partner of twelve years. The latest set is mostly settings of poems by W.B. Yeats, with piano and layered vocals. They’re sitting quietly on the back burner, waiting for a little polish and for the wardrobe door to be flung open.

We played a few of them live last summer with just piano, voice and a harmony pedal, and I keep imagining them being performed in small, unusual spaces – perhaps churches or slightly unloved buildings with sparkling acoustics.

Listen to all thirteen albums here, and watch the video for her latest single ‘Home’ here.

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