Rag'n'Bone Man has recorded two new songs to celebrate Record Store Day 2018.
Rag'n'Bone Man
The BRIT Award-winning singer has been named as the UK ambassador for the event, which is now in its 11th year and is held to celebrate independent, local record shops.
Rag'n'Bone Man's new tracks are called 'Don't Set The World On Fire' and 'George Has Got A Friend' and they will be released exclusively on vinyl on April 21 when Record Store Day takes place and he has vowed that they will never be available on an album.
Speaking to Newsbeat about why he wanted to create fresh music to support independent music retailers, he told BBC Radio One Newsbeat: "This is one of the most amazing things I've done so far. These songs don't exist anywhere else. They've never been recorded before. They're not on the last album and they won't be on the next one either."
Rag'n'Bone Man admits the two tracks, which he recorded at the Metropolis Studio in London, are very "personal" to him with the song 'George Has Got A Friend' inspired by his seven-month-old son Reuben, his child with partner Beth.
The musician - real name Roy Graham - shared: "They're both personal songs. I wrote one of them on tour, and the other one while my partner was pregnant. She was actually in labour at the time. That one's called George Has Got A Friend. It's about my son coming into the world. Our friends have a little boy called George, that's the premise of the song."
In the last decade, music fans have turned to streaming and vinyl to listen to their favourite artists, with downloads and CD sales becoming less and less popular. The popularity of vinyl was proven in 2017 with total physical record sales of 4.1 million.
And Rag'n'Bone Man, 33, admits he was surprised and delighted when he discovered how many vinyl copies of his debut LP 'Human' had been sold in 2017, because it shows that people love and care for his music.
He said: "I don't tend to look at my sales but I was given a breakdown of where it's being sold. It's amazing how much is vinyl. I'd never release music that wasn't on vinyl. You get to the end of making the music, then comes the part when you think, 'How do I want this to look?' It's a true representation of who you are as an artist. You put a lot into it. There's a certain amount of that [that] is lost with digital music."
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