A Look Back On 2016: Music

2016 is nearly done, so we thought we’d take a look back on some of the stuff we’ve done this year. Here’s a run-through all the music interviews (there’s a LOT) we did in 2016.

HEART/ DANCER

It’s definitely just the way the music turns out, we don’t aim for any certain genre. Though, one thing we do aim for more consciously is the feeling of a song. We almost always decide beforehand exactly what feeling the song is going to be about.

FRANCIS

Marathon is about that struggle to keep your faith in a better tomorrow and more or less a tribute to people who stay passionate about solidarity, humanity and all the worlds’ children. We are all the same, and it’s so very important that we remember that and strive to make a difference rather than just giving up.

AMANDA BERGMAN

It’s a relief for sure. I’ve been working so long, so I’m just happy that I finally made it. It’s a bit surreal to me even that it’s actually done, but I’m just very happy about it. I definitely view this album as a debut album, it’s a way to get out there and have a platform to build from.

1900

I was playing with Bob Hund and working on a different solo album that I released a few years ago. But a year and a half ago I took out the old tape recorders and started playing with them, and I just realised that I missed the sound of tape, and I just wanted to try and do it again. And I had a few songs that felt like they could be 1900 songs, so I started recording again.

VÄSTERBRON

We wanted the album to be quality over quantity. There’s no point in having a song that maybe only three or four people will like if we think it sucks and don’t want to have it. We wanted it to be short and leave the listeners wanting more.

MAGIC POTION

The philosophy we had for this record was that when we write pop music, it’s not a science or an attempt to do mind-bending stuff. We tried to put at least one funny thing in every song. So every song has at least one element or point where something strange happens. So with one, we just took the tape recorder and dropped the speed, on another we threw in some weird synth sounds, just to keep it refreshing to ourselves.

LEON

It’s crazy, because I just thought the other day about how it hasn’t even been a year since I put my song on Soundcloud. I just talked to my producer the other day in the studio, and we were like ‘This is insane!’.

It’s not even been a year and we’ve been travelling everywhere. I was in the States for the first time last year, I was in London, and in England, for the first time just a month ago. So I’ve been to all these places. It’s slowly starting to feel normal, but in the beginning I didn’t really know what was happening

EL PERRO DEL MAR

It started with me going to a musical instrument museum with my son, because I knew there was a room there where you could try out different instruments. I recorded those, and I felt like it was something I wanted to work with. I knew I wanted to do something that was very rhythmic, that was dancey but not in a Western way

MOON CITY BOYS

It was really intense, which is a good thing and sometimes a bad thing also. We bunkered up and we wrote the songs and recorded them in just a couple of weeks. Our philosophy in the band is pretty much the Please Kill Me philosophy, if you want to do it you should do it. You shouldn’t over-think and over-analyse every aspect of everything. If you want to record a song that you think is good at that point in time you should just do it. It’s not really our thing to just sit for a year or two years and just mix and edit forever, so it would be strange if we did that.

TIGER LOU

I always write songs, and I always have to decide beforehand what I’m writing for, which project and what kind of song I want to make. For a number of years I really made an effort not to write Tiger Lou songs, and I didn’t want them to sound like Tiger Lou songs, and I hid my guitar, y’know, all of that. But at the end of the day this is my outlet, and this is my style of songwriting. And it felt very relaxing admitting to yourself that this is it! There’s no point trying to change it, this is the natural state of the song.

MABEL

I think I didn’t really think it was strange or different to any other families growing up. When you’re a kid you just think everybody’s life is like this. But yeah, when I was a kid I was constantly surrounded by creative people. I think creative people are quite emotional people, which I definitely was from a young age, and my parents and other people around me just taught me that you can use that. If it’s sadness, pain or frustration, you can use it to make things that are nice and beautiful. I learned that from a young age.

HATER

We recorded the album this summer with Joakim Lindberg out on the countryside and are very much looking forward to the release. A really good album that we’re super proud of, we wrote eleven songs in a month and nine of them ended up on the album. They all feel connected even though they’re often very different from each other.

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