A year and a half ago, I was making songs.
That was basically it.
I’d write something, use AI to help turn it into music, spend far too long changing things nobody else would probably notice, make some artwork and release it under AiLF.
Some of those songs did surprisingly well. The music has now passed 410,000 streams, prompted more than 1,700 Shazams and received over 125 radio plays.
But there was something missing.
I had songs. I had faces on covers. I had lots of ideas.
I didn’t really have artists.
Then I started Lost Vintage Grooves.
And apparently, once you give imaginary singers names, personalities, wardrobes and complicated personal lives, there’s no going back.
Selene Rosaline — the songs came first
Selene came first — although technically, some of her songs are older than she is.
Around 18 months ago, she was really just a face I’d made for a song cover. One of those early songs, I Never Miss A Thing, went on to reach hundreds of thousands of streams.
But there wasn't really a Selene.
Fast forward to this year and I realised I had quite a lot of songs I'd written sitting around doing absolutely nothing.
So I gave them to her.
That random woman on a song cover became Selene Rosaline.
Her music is cinematic soul — songs about love, loss, relationships, losing yourself and, eventually, finding your way back.
Her Silent Mirror series became a five-part journey about slowly disappearing inside a relationship. Each song captures a different stage, from feeling unseen and emotionally trapped to finally recognising what has happened.
I couldn't just throw five vaguely related songs together and call it done. They had to feel like they belonged to the same woman and the same story.
So Selene became more than a face.
She became an artist.
She also now has a boyfriend, fellow LVG singer Sammy Degas, and naturally I’ve written them a duet.
This was not in the original business plan.
The Bloomettes — then I went back to the music I grew up with
The Bloomettes probably make more sense when you know I've listened to The Supremes for as long as I can remember.
That sound is just lodged somewhere in my brain.
But I didn't want to simply make a fake 1960s girl group and leave it at that. What really interested me was that point where Motown started getting stranger — psychedelia creeping in, unusual production, strings, harmonies and those driving rhythms.
I became slightly obsessed with the tambourine in Reflections. Jack Ashford's playing drives that record, and I wanted that same relentless feeling in a Bloomettes song.
Which is how I ended up spending an unreasonable amount of time on a tambourine.
Nobody asked me to do this.
I pulled the song apart into stems, rebuilt parts of it in Suno Studio, and eventually learned how to put everything back together properly in Logic Pro on the iPad.
The result was Silent Mirror.
And that's really what The Bloomettes are about for me. Not copying old records, but understanding what made me love them in the first place, then taking that feeling somewhere new.
Their songs are completely new, but every now and then I want someone to hear one and think:
Hang on. Do I know this?
You don't.
Probably.
And then there’s Sammy Degas
Sammy gave me somewhere else to go with soul.
Where The Bloomettes belong to that colourful 1960s girl-group world and Selene lives somewhere more cinematic and emotional, Sammy brings a different kind of warmth.
Southern soul, Northern Soul, psychedelic touches — and the sort of voice that sounds as though it should already have a stack of old records behind it.
It doesn't.
Because, like everybody else around here, Sammy doesn't actually exist.
He's also somehow ended up dating Selene, which means the fictional people are now developing relationships faster than I can develop their release schedules.
But underneath all the world-building, Sammy exists for the same reason the others do.
The song comes first.
The character gives that music somewhere to belong.
So what exactly is Lost Vintage Grooves?
I'm still finding out.
Which, frankly, is half the fun.
There will be soul. Motown. Psychedelia. Italian songs. Lost-radio broadcasts from years that never happened. Artists with relationships, histories and probably increasingly unnecessary amounts of backstory.
But Lost Vintage Grooves isn't really held together by a genre.
It's held together by a feeling.
I want to make songs for people who still want music to do something to them.
Songs that make you remember someone.
Songs that make you feel understood when you thought you were the only one.
Songs that make you laugh.
Songs that take you somewhere else for three minutes.
And occasionally, a brand-new song that gives you the strange feeling you've somehow heard it before.
That's Lost Vintage Grooves.
The artists are imagined.
The feelings aren't.
Timeless Music for Modern Hearts.
