The Anatomy of a Resurrection
"A bell's not a bell 'til you ring it, A song's not a song 'til you sing it."
— Oscar Hammerstein II
What it actually takes to release a 30-year-old song
In 1995, the dream was simple: You record a song, you get signed, and a label does the rest. You worry about the guitar solo; they worry about the distribution.
In 2025, the reality is very different.
When I decided to finally release "The Goddess of Love," a track recorded three decades ago, I thought the hard part was already done. The song existed, right? I quickly learned that "having a song" and "releasing a song" are two entirely different universes.
Over the last three months, I have poured easily 100 hours into this project. I’ve become the label, the PR department, the video director, the web developer, and the archivist.
Here is the true story of how a song travelled from a magnetic tape in a dusty box to your Spotify playlist.
Step 1: The Excavation (Or, "eBay to the Rescue")
For years, the master recording of The Goddess of Love sat in a box in my office. It wasn't a digital file I could just click on; it was on a DAT (Digital Audio Tape)—a format that basically went extinct twenty years ago.
I didn't even have a way to play it.
To even hear the song again, I had to scour eBay and buy a second-hand rack-mounted DAT player. I remember the anxiety of putting that tape in for the first time. I was sure I had other tapes—4-track demos, other sessions—but so far, they are lost. This one single DAT tape is the only digital survivor. It contains the original studio masters for TGOL and Hallelujah Man!, plus a demo of SuperStar!.
If that tape had snapped, the music would have been gone forever. But it played.
Step 2: Audio Surgery
Ripping the audio was just the start. The 1995 mix was good for its time, but modern ears are used to a different sonic landscape.
I pulled the track into Logic Pro and used its AI stem splitter to separate the instruments. This was a revelation. Suddenly, I found a keyboard part that had been completely buried in the original master—a ghost in the machine I’d forgotten about. I pulled it up in the mix, compressed the bass to give it a modern punch, added some fresh reverb to the vocals, and re-balanced the EQ.
I didn't re-record a note. The performance is 100% 1995. But the polish is 2025.
Step 3: The "Happy Accident" of Visual Identity
I originally planned to use a photo from a 1995 shoot for the cover art. It made sense—keep it authentic, right?
But while I was brainstorming social media ideas with Gemini (an AI tool), it generated a dreamy image of an angel to represent the song’s title. It wasn't meant to be the cover, but the moment I saw it, I knew. It captured the feeling of the song better than any old photo could.
It was a total accident—a generation meant for an Instagram post became the face of the single. Sometimes you have to listen to the art, even when it comes from an algorithm.
Step 4: Directing from the Desktop
I have a background in editing software demo videos, but making a music video is a different beast. I had to learn an entire new suite of tools from scratch.
I used InVideo to generate cartoon elements from a script. I used Veo to animate static clips from my old photos. I used HeyGen to make my 90s avatar lip-sync. And then I had to stitch it all together in Premiere Pro, learning complex effects like dynamic typing text on the fly.
It was a steep learning curve, but it allowed me to build a video that bridges the gap between the 90s and today—a digital dreamscape powered by genuine memories.
Step 5: The "Engineer" Mindset
You’d think building a website would be the easy part. I chose Squarespace for speed, but nothing is ever simple. I found myself fighting with CSS code to force menus to go horizontal and debugging "General 2" page titles that refused to die.
That’s the reality of the independent artist today. You can’t just be a musician. You have to be the engineer who fixes the code at 2 AM because Facebook isn’t scraping your link preview correctly.
The Result
Preparing for today's release has been a marathon. I’ve built comedy sketches, story ads, and "lost tape" teasers. I started this journey with zero expectations, but a lot of hope.
Bringing The Goddess of Love back to life wasn't just about uploading a file. It was a resurrection. And with a release plan for the rest of the year, I have to do it all again over the next six weeks.
But after 30 years of silence, I think the noise is worth the effort.
