Meet Derek Clegg
Derek Clegg is a singer-songwriter and musician from Chicago.
He has been writing songs for more than 20 years.
Recording everything in his home studio and getting the assistance of musicians from around the world to fill in the sounds.
FMA Team
I’ve been writing and recording music since around 2000. Mostly demos for the first 5 years. After that time, I realized the likelihood that I was going to get signed and someone was going to help me produce an album was slim.
So, since around 2005, I have been working on albums on an endless loop. Constantly trying to improve on the sound and songwriting on the album before. - 
Performing was never something I enjoyed, and I’ve always viewed writing and performing as two very separate things.
Dropping the performing piece freed me up to work on the part of the music I enjoy the most. - 
The process over the years of writing has changed, as I always try to find different ways to produce songs. For the past dozen years, I have treated the writing of the song’s music and melody and lyrics as two separate jobs.
In the beginning, I would write the songs, with melody and lyrics, while sitting at the guitar so that when it was time to record the idea was already fully fleshed. - 
But now, and as an example in my latest release Old Town Worry, I write the music first trying not to think too much about the vocal and lyric content.
After the music is laid out, I come in and write a rough vocal and lyric in a sort of stream of consciousness sort of way. This allows many non-autobiographical contents that I can work out from a non-firsthand . - 
After about 100 or so songs, I realized I had very little to share about myself personally and needed to find a way to create songs that were about other topics not related to personal experience. This is one of the reasons that I do not tend to do interviews or try to record videos of me talking about the process. It sort of ruins the luster and mystery of the songwriter.
At least when I was growing up, there wasn’t a constant presence of musicians talking or on social media, which always created a story about the songs that the listener could interpret. I always found myself disappointed when I would hear the songwriter talk about their work when it was different from my own interpretation. - Derek Clegg