We recently connected with Single Sparrow and have shared our conversation below.
Patrick, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
Last year I released a pair of full length albums, “The Cutting Room Floor” and “Automata” all of which I wrote, played, recorded, mixed, and mastered myself (27 songs in total). Accompanying artwork for each song on “The Cutting Room Floor” was hand drawn and for each song on “Automata” was generated by DALL E 2, an OpenAI generative image creator. And while I played a couple live shows over the year, I was just missing the collaborative experience creating music with other people, which is why my next album that’ll be out later this year is called “Someone Should Do Something.” And I’m excited to collaborate with several bands and local musicians in the Charleston and Columbia area on each of the songs on the record, with them contributing to shaping the song arrangements and instrumentation. I cannot wait to see how these songs adapt and change in ways I couldn’t imagine or create myself, and will be publishing them everywhere you stream music late 2023. My hope in this collaborative record is also to share audiences between local musicians and artists in Columbia and Charleston, SC to build and support a more vibrant music scene for everyone involved, because I want to live in a community where people are creating and sharing their art.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Single Sparrow is the moniker of Patrick Leitner writing and recording from Charleston, SC. Exploring the depths of childhood memories, commonplace family interactions, and living in the shadow of faith through the wonder of multi-tracking and digital signal processing.
“Automata” released on October 1st, which was the date the Turing Test (a process for determining if Artificial Intelligence computers can think like a human) was published. The album artwork was actually created by DALL E 2 (an OpenAI platform that generates images from text), and the title track explores how we move through life robotically until love and desire make us human again. There are stories behind each of the songs on this record, but one of my favorites is Centralia, which is an almost abandoned coal mining town in Pennsylvania that has been burning from underground for 60 years and likely won’t extinguish for several hundred more. And there’s Happy Accidents, which I wrote immediately after watching the documentary “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal, and Greed” using one of his quotes to open the chorus: “I’m waiting on the good times to come.” Lastly, the album closer, Tiny Metronome, chronicles watching my daughter, Emma, grow up chasing her pushcar down the sidewalk and losing my grandparents, realizing how little control I have and learning to let go.
But my next record titled “Someone Should Do Something” is a more collaborative work with other local musicians in Columbia and Charleston, SC that will be out later this year with a similar mix of indie folk, pop, and rock.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I absolutely love the feeling of writing a song and forming the lyrical structure, story and melody, there’s just nothing that compares to it. I work in IT for a living and all the problems you face in that environment are bounded with certain fixed variables, but creating songs and artwork don’t have those same guardrails or limiting constraints. It’s a process that feels completely free and adventurous. And the same thing is true when taking a song that is just a vocal melody and acoustic guitar and wrapping it layer by layer into a full band arrangement that would take 9 of me to actually play live, every one of those layers unbounded and free to be really anything. Mapping that out feels like being an cartographer before we had maps, exploring and trying to write down what you find.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
This is a tricky one, because what this question is asking is effectively “how do we get people to value music more?” While there was definitely a dip in overall revenue in the music industry after the transition from CDs to streaming, that shortfall is gone at this point. So there is money to be made for a musician, but the avenues for making money from your craft are different. Relying solely on streaming revenue is just not practical for a musician seeking to make a living, you have to pursue collaborations with other artists to grow your audience, play paying live gigs, explore NFTs, film and video game placement, etc. But generally, I think there’s a parallel with the music industry and the larger US economy post 1973 where wealth has risen but just not equally, and in music you have really big name artists and viral hits that make significant income and many, many, many artists who struggle to be noticed in a sea of new music that comes out daily. 
Contact Info:
- Website: https://singlesparrow.bandcamp.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/single.sparrow.music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SingleSparrowMusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH1_23TzbnubPmVniCD1jYw
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2cK4IafoQfjZ2aZYjAEveY?si=NK-36f01RUyhD0–zjqu0w
Image Credits
Erin Leitner