It may please you to note that this site now sports an integrated Music Store (link above), courtesy of cdbaby.com, where you can shop for Strummindude albums or individual songs. The available albums are “Writing On The Wall” – a remastered edition of the second Strummindude RPM Challenge album from 2009 – and “Insatiable“, which is a compilation of the third and fourth RPM Challenge albums, “Three” and “Kaleidoscopy“. The latter one is only available as a download right now, until they receive the hard copies over at cdbaby.com.
Back around the weeks leading up to RPM 2011, I made a blog post on the site, saying that I’d gladly try to put music to any lyrics someone might have lying around. The idea was that if I got lucky, maybe something would pair up with some of the idle melody snippets littering about my studio. A fellow named Will Gough sent me the poem “Again”.
I saw immediately that it had potential. It was artfully composed, a well spun story and it had rhythm. I didn’t plan on writing a bossa for it, though. That just happened. It happened to be lying on the desk when I was fooling around with a gut string guitar, landing on a jazz progression that I thought sounded a little cool. So I recorded the idea and decided to try and fit a melody to it that would cater for these words. It turned out that wasn’t so very hard to do, and all of a sudden I found myself with an almost complete song in my lap! It needed a B-part, so I came up with a variation on the chord progression, and, not wanting to touch the lyrics too much, just spun on the title for a refrain. Turned out quite nice!
I programmed a bossa percussion groove and recorded the basic instruments around that, guitar, vocals, bass. I actually never went back and redid any of it. Janne Hedlund added some really nice drums, and Robert Wirensjö adorned it with a musky electric piano. It still lacked a solo though – there was a great big hole in the middle of it that I was not looking forward to at all trying to fill…
But I was in luck as Hasse Johnzon happily agreed to do a solo part as an encore to the amazing pedal steel work he’d already contributed on a couple of other songs. And, what a great solo it was! I think this was done late in the evening on the 28th. Actually the very last thing recorded for the album!
Developed around a funky drum groove, this song represents a little different approach to songwriting than normal for me. I tend to start out with a melody, and the basis for each song is usually something I can strum and hum. Here, playing around with a drum sampler I found a loop which made my foot tap. So I grabbed an instrument, hit the red button, and just started to play along.
The song built from there, and it’s based around loops and parts, whereas normally I would have a song outline from start to finish. The melody built gradually as well, and was adorned with words along the way.
The first version had me singing it. While that was ok, I sure don’t possess the necessary skills to make a melody really fly in a funky r&b setting like this one. So I asked my daughter Amanda Persson if she’d like to have a go at it. Even though only 15, she already has the goods, the energy and the technique. Luckily, she thought the song was pretty cool and agreed to spend a couple of hours in the studio with her old man… The result was really great, her vocals are awesome!
I asked Robert to try for some clavinet licks when we were having the keyboard session. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it, but it turned out an essential part of the groove, especially after I found the sampled sound of an old Hohner to use.
This song was meant as a warm up to the RPM Challenge 2011. The community on the site set up a voluntary pre-challenge that a few of us participated in. I needed to find my production legs after a couple of months of hiatus, so it was a perfect kick start and a good test for some new gear that I’d acquired.
The challenge was to illustrate different scenes for a fictitious movie. There was a Car Chase Scene, the Falling in Love Sequence, the End Credits, etc. I got – the Sex Scene. Whew! I decided to pass on any obvious naughty ideas, and instead I aimed for something, well… sensual, I guess. And this is what I came up with.
The inspiration for this tune was dreamy, sweeping ballads with alluring rhythms and evocative, picturesque lyrics. The first line of text came to me like a flash out of nowhere and immediately set the tone and the landscape. The rest was just fleshing it out and arranging the music. I quite like the way it turned out, even though I did it all myself on this one. The new guitar amp performed great, and together with my trusted old Ibanez Artist that was revived for the occasion, it managed to create a tone on the guitar solo that I absolutely love.
Assembling the random sketches on my hard drive going in to the RPM Challenge 2011, I found a melody snippet that turned out to be the skeleton for the chorus of this song. I recorded it pretty barebones and went looking for a verse. As it turned out, I could use another idea that I recorded on my cell phone going to work one morning. It’s funny how things sometimes come together…
I actually had to redo the song from scratch one week into the challenge. I was going to add a bass guitar to it, and it sounded very out of tune. Using the internal Cubase tuner, I checked the bass, and it was ok. But still out of tune to the acoustic guitars and vocals that I already had recorded. Meh!!
It turned out my piezoelectric tuner for acoustic instruments had recalibrated itself to 430, which meant everything I had recorded so far was outside of standard pitch. Out of several choices, I opted to just scrap everything I had so far and re-record it. I also found the song to drag a bit, so I bumped the bpm about 10 beats for a snappier groove in the new take.
I ripped off a lot of the lyrics from a piece that Will Gough had sent me earlier. I asked him to look it over and add his magic to it. He rewrote the middle eight and advised on various other parts.
It was a pretty standard pop song, I thought – before Hasse Johnzon added his solid steel guitar to it. That boxed it neatly into the country genre all at once. It probably was already in that neck of the woods even before this addition, only I was too preoccupied with my private perspective to notice.
Robert Wirensjö plays the keyboards and Janne Hedlund handles the drums.
This is the title song of the album. But the album isn’t named from the song, but the other way around.
I came home from the music store with some percussion gear and a ukulele. Within a couple of minutes of playing around with the uke, I had a hook and a line, and reeling in the fish was a breeze. Making the song was so much fun, and so much of the spirit of it is due to the splendid playing by Robert Wirensjö on the piano and Hasse Johnzon on pedal. They took it from burlesque crooner into vaudeville, complete with the can-can girls a-kicking!
I wrote the first couple of verses pretty much right off the bat, and recorded what became the Kaleidoscopy Overture, with the window opening up to the world, and the reclusive singer confessing his feelings, oblivious to the world outside, not caring whether anyone listens or not. I later decided to expand the song, and Will Gough helped me with the words in the second half.
Title of this blog entry is the title of the new Strummindude album. Another RPM Challenge album done! You can listen to it here, and I will update this site with some liner notes and the lyrics to all of the songs in the days ahead.
There, I inserted a poll about the integrated music player at the bottom of the page. I think I will reconfigure it so it doesn’t autostart when you hit the page, but you’d have to click the play button at bottom left in your browser window in order for it to start blasting. I know from personal experience that unexpected audio can be pretty invasive.
Edit: OK, reconfigured it. Check for yourself that it works ok!
This year’s RPM challenge is in full swing, and the halfway point has just been passed. This will be my fourth album-in-a-month, and so far it’s going really good. I’m keeping a blog at the site updating the progress, and I’m also posting some demos on my profile page over there.
The album will be called “Kaleidoscopy” and will be very diverse. As diverse as the patterns of a Kaleidoscope maybe.
Oh, and I incorporated a widget playing random Strummindude tunes that I loaded up to Soundcloud. I hope you like it. It’s stuck at the bottom of the page as long as you stay on the site. If you go away it will disappear. It’s kind of cool, and the only thing I don’t like about it is that when you click on a link within the Strummindude site it stops playing the current song and a new one starts. Kind of wished the widget somehow had its own session. Oh well. I guess if you like the song you stay on the page? Anyway, please tell me whether you like it or hate it.
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