http://itunes.apple.com/dk/album/nothing-is-real-single/id499783557

http://www.recordheaven.net/index.cfm?x=browseArtist&ID=6738&iID=133356&sc&ob=tl&so=ASC&pp=50&pn=1

By now, with cold dark scandinavian january closing in all around me, I wish I could go on a holiday somewhere warm and sunny, but unfortunately my bank account is completely empty, the result of 4 months making the album, which means we just didn’t play as many gigs as we really needed to, financially speaking. I feel tired, but relieved that I will be able to shift my focus to other things the next couple of months.

I’m listening to the final result right now and thought I’d share some general thoughts about it. Soundwise, the closest comparison in my back catalogue is probably Chasing Rainbows or the last Dragontears, but with much more bass (the instrument)  than ever before and also vocals that aren’t as loud in the mix as usual. We’ve also tried to use less elements in the mixes to be able to get a less confusing soundscape.

This was very much a conscious decision – but I guess I’m still learning a little bit every time I make an album, so next time I think I might have an even better idea of how the mixes should interact with the mastering for optimal results, a process that can really be compared to developing a photograph.

When you’re looking through the lens and your finger pushes the button, you might have an idea how it will look eventually, but your level of experience is the key to taking everything into account, light, distance, contrast, etc… These days, possibilities are so many, you can practically go on forever, (hopefully) improving your work in the mastering or digital development. It has to stop somewhere, but in this case I’m not really emotionally finished with it till I hold the actual LP in my hand.

I have never been a fan of bass heavy modern sound, I think 20 years of listening to nothing but 40 year old vinyl has corrupted my ears significantly, something that often causes conflicts with technicians, producers and mastering engineers. Sometimes it seems no one in the music business really cares about analogue sound anymore. A shame really.

Everytime I enter the studio, tape machines haven’t been used or even serviced for years (often since my last visit) while the protools is all updated and ready to go. I’m not even sure how many people are aware of this or how many take it into account when pressing vinyl, but it is actually possible to make a 24bit master for the pressing plant, but as soon as you burn a normal cd with it, you’re gonna have to live with 16 bit, which makes a huge and clearly hearable difference.

Musicwise though, the album is an entirely different matter. I really think I’ve entered some (for me) previously unknown territory – not only with the postpunk sounding WFTW, but also on the stoner heavy Loop type riff of BULLSHIT and the Hawkwind inspired spacerock assault of the title track. Naturally there are a few typical BW tracks that sound like they could have been on any other album by me, but lyrically, my feeling is that this is as good as I can do. Generally I think my lyrics are much more worthwhile and perhaps with more of a message on the recent albums, compared to the earlier stuff.

Today, my local mailman brought me an LP sized package that got me out of bed a bit too early for my general liking – a sealed STONEMINT copy of EVERYTHING’S ARCHIE by The Archies. It only cost me 30 USD including the shipping, but plays like a dream. This LP fulfills a hole in my ever growing sixties bubblegum collection. Next on my “animated rockband” wantlist is THE CATTANOOGA CATS on the Forward label, probably a lot harder to find. I’m pretty sure most people would get surprised if they knew the cheesy stuff I own on vinyl.

My next blogpost will probably be about the artwork for the album. I’m looking forward to hear people’s reactions, as it’s honestly also something a little bit different this time. Very thought provoking and quite appealing to my personal sense of humour. Till then…

One thing that struck me while listening to the entire album recently, is that it’s clearly the first BW album ever not to have any typical love songs whatsoever. I mean, LOVE LIKE A FLOWER is obviously (also) about love, but it’s definitely not the usual boy meets girl kinda thing, as it’s more of a general view on life. DANDELION also comes close, but really I think of this one as a childhood fantasy game hinting at both innocence, sexual seduction and sixties bubblegum pop lyrics as well as drug use.

The one song that really sticks out soundwise is WAITING FOR THE WAR, which has an almost eighties postpunk feel with thundering tomtoms, metal percussion and a heavily effected deep bassline. The initial inspiration for this came from a classic danish punk tune from 1982 by an obscure band called ADS, bearing the exact same title, but not really any other musical resemblance, except for the fact that we tried to pull it into an eighties type of universe during the recording.

Another thing that struck me as a bit weird is that, by sheer coincidence mostly, all the songs on side 1 ending with BULLSHIT DETECTOR are in the key of E minor, while all the songs on side 2 starting with NOTHING IS REAL are in the key of A minor. I would also like the intros and outros on the last three songs to be crossfaded, to create one long sequence at the end. Here’s the tracklist I ended up with:

DOWN TO THE BOTTOM

WAITING FOR THE WAR

DANDELION

IT’S JUST A RIDE

BULLSHIT DETECTOR

NOTHING IS REAL

LOVE LIKE A FLOWER

THIRD EYE SURGERY

HONALEE

We have also tried out a quick third mix that has more of a floating feeling, noisier and more spacey,  without the acoustic guitar. I’m listening to it on headphones right now. It might become difficult to choose between the last two mixes. Very happy how this song turned out.

Every album needs a ballad, but those types of songs become old very quickly.It seems there’s always a very fine line between a heartfelt, deeply personal and emotional expression and plain corny self-indulgence. I think this one, while very melancholic and moody, keeps the balance because of the spacey and (very Dragontears) psychedelic elements.

Now I’m just looking forward to some straight three chord BUBBLEGUM garagerock.

Next we’re gonna get as far as we can into HONALEE. This track will probably be the mix that takes the longest time as it sounds so completely different to everything else on the album. We started out going for a quiet acoustic vibe, but soon layered it with huge ambient guitars – going for a Neil Young Le Noise kind of sound. After that it got a bit out of hand with mellotron, wind chimes, ebow, rainstick and echo effects,  so we probably need to weed out a little in the tracks.

We have only one final mixing day left, but we’re well ahead of time, as we will definitely finish HONALEE and do the two outtakes, BUBBLEGUM and LIGHT UP YOUR MIND tomorrow. These are both quite simple and should get a wild garage type sound. I’m looking forward to that already.

There’a a middle section where we had the idea to record a siren sound and we tried to get the job done in different ways – first with a simple WW2 sound effect sample, then an audio generator, a theremin and even a vintage police megaphone, but none of them seemed to work, so finally I simply played it on the guitar the way I imagined it, with a bit of delay and fuzz. Another interesting sound on this song is four tracks of me beating on different scraps of metal with a metal stick!

Late last night after we called it quits, I also had the chance to listen back to all of the different mixes and think about the song sequence. I’m still in doubt I must admit – should we start with the few short songs and then leave the long ones to later on the tracklist? Should we try to mix the poppier moments with some of the spacier stuff or separate it a bit? 6 of the shorter songs on side one and 3 long ones on side two?

I wonder if my own excitement over this music gets me carried away too much and maybe distorts people’s perception of it as I’m blogging? I’d like to think of this album as my spacerock album and I’d really like it to be perceived as such, but the truth is somewhere in between, because there are actually many different moods and also a few poppy moments. The question is whether Waiting For The War should sound like one of those or be in a category with the more spacy tracks?

It seems we have solved the WFTW problem just now, by opening up the drums a bit in the top and turning up the guitars in the chorus. It sure made it sound more full. Perhaps the murky groove made us afraid of treble? Or just four tired ears trying too hard? I’m glad it’s over. Next up is Love Like A Flower, a song that we tried mixing at an earlier stage, but I feel could also be better. I guess that’s what I’ll be listening to the rest of the day.

The lyric has a childish and playful fantasy game theme, with a deeper sexual meaning underneath it, sort of inspired by american sixties bubblegum music. We have been discussing the possibility that we might record a few other things for it if needed. Mellotron instead of Farfisa to make it cleaner sounding or a glockenspiel instead of acoustic 12 string. We’ll see. Right now, Anders is levelling the drums and finding the right sound for the basic guitars.

We also hope to make mixes of Waiting For The War today and maybe even start up Love Like A Flower for completion tomorrow. It’s always a good idea to save the last mix, so you can make small changes with fresh ears the day after. Mixing all day, every day makes you a bit unfocused, so fuck ups can sometimes happen late in a mixing session. Sometimes though, you find the mix is perfect, like today with yesterdays mix. I’m thinking, both of these songs might also need a few minor things recorded during mixing, smaller guitar solo parts and little tweaks.

Oh, btw – I’ve copied all the lyrics for the new album in the Lyrics section of this blog more or less as they appear on the tracks, so you can get an idea of the general direction, check it out.

Next up according to the plan, is NOTHING IS REAL. This one ended up sounding very Beatles, partly because of some soft harmonic backing vocals ala Paperback Writer, stringy mellotron and poppy sitar courtesy of Vicky Singh.  We’re gonna try and do a shorter radio edit of it as well as an album mix, featuring the full 2 minute freakout outro. I’m very happy about the lyrics on this one:

I was born in a junk yard

And told culture is my friend

That money is my god

And the vultures my government

I was raised in a wasteland

Circled in by electric fence

My food grows out of a trash can

And turns plastic in the end

I grew up in a treadmill

At the bombshell factory

They tell me war is peace

And TV reality

Right now, Anders and good old Ralph are discussing whether to run an acoustic guitar through the Fairchild or a Tubetech, as we have started mixing DOWN TO THE BOTTOM, which I’m thinking could be the opening song for the album. It’s kind of a standard minorchord Woodrose song in the same vein as Let Yourself Go, with a title taken from an old blues lyric and a psychy Farfisa organ riff. I thought I’d better spend the time updating you on the ongoing process, between listening and giving directions, but actually it’s quite nice to just sit here in silence for a change, undergoing a shift from looking at the music from one angle to another, completely different. I mean, when recording I’m so into throwing ideas around, playing the instrument or singing the vocal, putting my best effort into it and trying to imagine where the song could go or inventing it as I go along. Mixing is more about details, listening closely, making decisions, diving into each little element and weeding out what doesn’t work.

As I hinted at last week, we have 11 finished tracks, but I’m thinking more of a final 9 song tracklist, which means that both BUBBLEGUM and LIGHT UP YOUR MIND will be left off the album for B-sides or other purposes. I really like both songs, it’s just that they don’t quite suit the general mood of the album plus there are some really long tracks recorded, so it’s gonna be really hard to fit it all in. There’s a few tracks I havent really told you about yet – one is the 7 minute sitar drenched LOVE LIKE A FLOWER, which I’m thinking we might have to edit a bit as there’s a long meditative outro featuring four different sound effects of rainfall. I mean, I would love to keep it in, but then something else would have to go – but, we’ll see. Another track is IT’S JUST A RIDE, a lyric which is heavily inspired by a Bill Hicks rant. That song is also quite stretched out, with some bubbly lead guitars playing pseudo arabian scales all the way through the song with Elevators style echoplex.

I’m thinking the album should conclude with HONALEE, a 6 minute acid folk ballad with lots of wind chimes and more rainfall effects. The song has an interesting back story. Originally titled The Eschaton, there’s an apocalyptic theme running through three verses of lyric, but some of it was inspired by reading internet chatboard trip reports, which coined the term SWIM (“someone who is not me”) and bits of Terence McKenna isms like “dissolving boundaries” and talk of lucid dreams. However, much later on, the original verse melody was coupled with a different chorus idea that had no verses. They seemed to fit together and counterpoint eachother magically, so the song changed into HONALEE – a title some might recognize as the land where Puff The Magic Dragon lives! But apart from being a reference to sixties pop culture, drug conspiracies, childhood memories and subliminal messages, it’s also relevant on a personal level, because of a crazy story, where a friend of mine underwent hypnosis for the sake of a radio documentary and mind travelled back to his childhood, where he somehow associated me with the song, so it became Guf (long time nickname for me) instead of Puff!

The album will most certainly include the totally spaced out title track as well as another one called Bullshit Detector, which is in a very similar mindmelting  style. There’s a cute and melancholic psych pop duet with Emma Acs called Dandelion, a harsh and metallic comment on the state of the world called Waiting For The War, some fuzz & farfisa sounds on Down To The Bottom, some jangly 12 string bliss on Nothing Is Real. A few other songs, like the typical garage blast of Bubblegum will probably not make the final tracklist, as it simply differs too much in style. It would have fit perfectly on the previous album though. I have also let go of a song called Salvia Pull, which didn’t really work out at all. A shame as I really liked the lyric. I’m still considering Light Up Your Mind though, which is an attempt at writing a lyrically uplifting major chord song, something I always have to force myself to do, but I’m not completely convinced that it will fit in with the very spacey sounds of the central songs.

We still have some work to do, recording all the fun stuff – effects, backing vocals, lead guitars and coloring the tracks with acoustic elements like sitar, tanpura, glockenspiel – but the deadline is mid january, so basically while the rest of the western world is still curing their new years hangover, we’ll be mixing the seventh Baby Woodrose studio album. I have asked Kiryk Drewinski, who also did the Mindblowing Seeds artwork, to come up with something cool again this time and the drafts I’ve seen look amazing, so by now I’m pretty confident that no one will be dissapointed by the finished package.

Ok, I think it’s time for me to round this off, get dressed and head to the studio to get some work done! No, wait a minute! I have to say, I have not really listened to much other music than my own for the last couple of months, due to recording and touring quite a bit, but that hasn’t really stopped my record buying routines, as I’ve purchased quite a few albums for the collection, including stuff like The Listening on Vanguard, Demian on ABC, Woody’s Truck Stop on Smash and The Banana Splits on Decca (huge and lovely bubblegum album apparantly including The Deep and Freak Scene member Mark Barkan as a songwriter!)  so there’s your traditional record tips! Google and you shall find.