Studio times

Michael Jackson

From what I heard MJ passed away an hour or so ago. This affects me a lot because we have been inspired by him when making the record. I can just say that the snare drum on "Talk" will sound even more like the one in the opening track on Dangerous, "Jam". It is still unclear if any "hihh hiiiih"'s will show up on the album.

The secret of duets

Anna and I created and recorded a duet for the album, Believe In You. There are at least two ways of duetifying a song. One is you take turns singing one verse each and share the chorus. Let's call this A. The other way is to rewrite parts of the lyrics for a girl (in this case) and then I sing my lyrics and she sings hers. This is B.

The problem with A is that the song is probably about a girl, and why is a girl then singing parts of it? Logically it doesn't make sense. However it's quite common you just make it a duet because it just sounds neater. I don't know if I'm OK with that. It just doesn't make sense to have the girl sing to herself like that. The fact that we used method B on Believe In You was great in the respect that we sing it to each other, and Anna actually wrote the lyrics for the verse that she sings.

The reason I'm thinking about this right now is that we have a song, There Were Times, that will go on the album. I would love to make it a duet, but it's not possible to use the B method, since the lyrics must be exactly as they are right now. Oh now I actually came up with something, there is a possible "answer" that she could actually sing, and we could still keep the end of the song. Let's see what happens, A or B, that is the question for this song.

On a side note to Believe In You, something that is really interesting there I think (which our feminist drummer came up with), Anna actually makes up the stable, masculine voice in the song. In the chorus she sings lower than me, and the verses are so very high for me to sing so I sound like a scared little boy, but for her it makes her sound like someone you can lean on.

Writing music when happy?

Taxi on my way out to Heathrow. I wrote a hell of a lot of songs in London. The Astronaut, Talk, All I Do, One Day with Sunshine One With Rain and many more. And I have never been in worse life situations than my time in London. It's hard to break trends, I've been really grumpy since I got here, just trying to make time pass so I could go home. That has something to do with why I wrote all those songs here. I should have brought a guitar!

I am learning to write music in a happier mood. I have to. This is of course a good thing, but sometimes I really long back to the days when the lyrics just burst out of my heart whenever I wrote songs. Now I sometimes find it hard to actually get the songs done. I start off and find a great melody, a riff, I write a verse. Then I get the feeling it's not unique enough, that it doesn't really matter. And I stop. The only songs I have finished writing the last year is basically Believe In You, Waiting For Your Call, and the Intro for the album. Luckily those are some of my best songs.

I really feel I'm on the verge of nailing a couple of new songs. Now after some studio sessions I know more what kind of songs I want to write right now.

Hey..

Thought I'd follow the only guys I think is doing swell things online, Jason Mraz and John Mayer (ok Coldplay I'll let you in on this list as well) and blog about the band's progress on the upcoming album Crashing Towards Daylight.

This album is a tribute to music, love, and my friends in Örebro (the city i grew up in (it's in Sweden)). 

Let's start with the music; the album will probably start off with an intro without vocals. It raises the anticipation, Olle gets to show off some of his amazing drumming skills (the used version is the 2nd take with no rehearsing the song before) and Mikael's guitar play is awesome. These musicians I have the pleasure to work with is on a whole other level, instead of writing down the chords for them, we have had philosophical discussions about how to arrange the songs. So the intro starts off tentatively and ends with a-flower-that-burst-into-bloom kind of part. We were not meant to record this song when we went into the studio but it turned out to be the song with the best mood, that I want to continue building the album upon. The sound and arrangements are incredibly important. It has a lot to do with the fact that this is the first time my music gets to sound how it should. I have been playing guitar and sang the tunes for 15 years and imagined how they would sound, and now it's actually happening. 

Hopefully I will also talk about influences later on (remind me), the big life-changing artists who have given me so many intense and wonderful experiences it's insane.

Love. All songs I've ever written is about love in one way or another. Some of these songs are to my girlfriend, some older ones are written to someone I wanted to meet or fantasized about meeting, and some are to old crushes. But the title track is a song dedicated to my good friend who was lost in a car accident.

My friends. My oldest friends and our relationship is so much about music. When we meet after not having met in six months we would definitely make it a DMB-night, where we would listen to, and play along on our knees, the fills Carter does at the end of the Live at Piedmont Park version of Grey Street. Coming back home to Örebro to record has also been a wonderful wonderful experience, meeting Olles friends (many of them are also musicians on the album).

I want to give you a sample of the album, here is an unmixed version of a duet with Anna Fogel called Believe:

http://www.inlovewith.com/BelieveInYou.mp3

Hope you like it! Welcome to follow the making of Crashing Towards Daylight.

Email me on music@inlovewith.com

Love, Karl