We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mungo Parker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mungo below.
Mungo, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.
Firstly, I would have got on the social media things quicker and learnt how to use them properly earlier on. Also, I would have stayed longer in earlier jobs which I didn’t like / which were unsuitable just to make more money so that I could then spend more money on my music. Always try to survive another day.
Also, I’d have been more consistent earlier on. The game on the digital platforms is releasing music every 6-8 weeks, but unless you produce your own music, its very expensive. The route I have taken is to have quite a good job and just to spend a lot of money recording music with a lot of the savings from that job. I’m sure there are better ways to do it though. Maybe I would have learned to produce my own music, that can be a great thing.
But I’m really liking where I am and what I’m doing and now I’m growing quite a lot, so I feel like its beginning to work.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I started learning guitar when I was 16.
I’ve been writing songs since I was 21, and I’m now 30. I started writing songs and putting them out on things like SoundCloud in 2016 towards the end of my university days, but they were really bad!! But I learned a lot from that period and I got a lot better within a year. I started learning songs on YouTube from songwriters like Ben Howard and Nick Drake, and then started having guitar lessons again as well.
I wrote some of the oldest songs like ‘Always Brings the Sunshine,’ ‘Golden Hours,’ ‘Grace’ and ‘Dark Days are Gone’ on Life Rolls on By, my first album, only a year later in 2017. I kept getting better really and released the album in 2019. An EP followed with the same producer who produced my first album exactly a year later in December 2020.
I then worked for a bit for a music coach, which I didn’t really enjoy and didn’t make me much money. But what I took from that whole experience is that you have to be really consistent with releasing music to get anywhere. I kept writing songs and got a job as a junior sales person setting meetings for a company that sold gift card software to hotels. I was working fairly hard and still not earning enough money to really think about recording more music for a couple of years, but then we got acquired by a massive company and things got a lot better. I was then given a lot more money, which enabled me to start recording again. The producer who produced my album and EP was also too busy with his new job, so I had to switch producer.
But at least in April 2023, ‘Always Brings the Sunshine’ from my first album was played on Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour on BBC6, which gave me some new interest.
I found a new producer and I think the quality of what I started putting out got a lot stronger. By the time it got to around May 2024, I started releasing music around every 8 weeks. I put out my second album, Beautiful Days, in 2024. Now things are really starting to grow quite quickly, and I’ve been featured in an Indie Folk Central compilation album and have had my latest single, ‘Everything Is Greater Than You Know’ added to Discovery Weekly on Spotify. It has already got 23,000 streams in 5 weeks.
There will probably be a new album in 2025, and I am seriously excited about some of the singles from it before that comes out.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I mostly gained fans by sending messages to fans of similar artists asking if they would like to hear a song by me, an artist who had been influenced by the artist they were commenting on posts of.
Now I’m still doing a bit of that every day, but also i’m trying my hand at some of the newer things, like posting consistently on Tik Tok.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
When you write a single! At this stage I know exactly what are the singles and what are just the album tracks. The game really in my position is consistently putting out singles, so it is a beautifully satisfying when you write one.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @mungoparker
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/176506773602751/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mungoparker
Image Credits
Finn Paul