Calaisa Supporting

Ok... we have to add two gigs to our nice little list this summer, and not any two gigs... The 7th of June Calaisa will be entering the stage in Globen, Stockholm, to support Celine Dion!!!
We found this out yesterday, and couldn't be happier. Only playing in Globen is pretty cool, and doing it on the same stage as Celine Dion is even better.
After the gig we go with her to Helsinki to do a performance there as well.
Looks like this summer can become a really good one. Great gigs, a trip to L.A and a record in the making.

Pre-summer

The summer is coming up! Since we are busy working in the studio we will not go on a huge tour all over the place. But we can't help playing some places, one of them is "Läckö slott" together with Magnus Uggla and Jill Jonsson, another one is at the Summer rock in Svedala. For our few but important gigs we are now workning with our sound engineer Peter, at his studio, getting the show together.
It's nice to gather the whole band and develop the live performance, and we're slowly but surely getting used to the in-ear-systems. However our last rehearsal was interrupted suddenly when, in the middle of a song, smoke started to come out from Caisa's bas. It had caught fire, and even though we tried everything, it simply refused to work. Caisa could choose between burning or stop playing. The choice was quite easy. We had some coffee instead.

Back

We have not vanished into thin air, we have just been very busy. That's why you haven't heard from us in a while now, at least not here in the blog.
With yesterday's concert, here in Malmö, a lot of time-consuming work is over. We had decided to give our Malmö audience something extra, and wanted to play some of our new songs. That always means hard work. It's one thing to play the new songs in the rehearsal room, but a totally other thing to play them as good as the songs we have been playing for a long time, and under pressure, in front of 500 people!
It's up to those present to judge, but to us it felt really good, and it felt like people liked our new material.

Now that this gig is successfully done we can focus on recording the new stuff properly, and slowly but surely make our way towards a second album.

Tomorrow two of us are going to SVT (Swedish television) to record a show that will be broadcasted this fall. We are supposed to play and talk about 5 of our favorite music videos, and I think the show is called "My playlist" or something like that. Looking forward to it.

Maia is back in LA and we are back to old routines. For five days we worked twenty-four seven with Maia, and when she left it felt like breaking up a relationship :) It's such a shame she lives on the other side of the world, but we will definitely meet again, and write more great songs, in Malmö or LA.


Today we are in Stockholm writing songs with Peter Kvint and Alena Gibson. We started early by taking the train from Malmö at 6.14!, not our favorite time of the day, and when we arrived in Stockholm we went straight to Peter's studio.

A few more songs and seeds for songs are now waiting to be recorded and finished. We have tomorrow to do that before we go back to Skåne.






Tonight we were invited to an event where Marit Bergman played. We went there, had some food and drinks, and saw Marit play for a bunch of totally uninterested people from the music business. They seemed to think it was more important to talk to each other, than to listen to an artist playing live. Why are they even working with music?
We and some other music lovers crowded up around Marit and got a nice little intimate concert.


Now we are going to bed so that we can make some good songs tomorrow.

Report from the writing session

Ha, ha, ha... inviting Maia Sharp to come and write songs with us turned out to be a brilliant idea. It's not often that you find your perfect match personality wise or musical-reference-wise. Maia is both. During the four days she has been hear we have written three really good songs, and recorded them decently on Maisa's little portable equipment. We have also had time to see the best parts of our town, go to a party, eat Sunday brunch, and drink atleast 40 cups of espresso between the 5 of us, a few of them out in the spring-sun.
Tomorrow is our last day together. It’s a bit sad, but working as hard as we have done, kind of consumes your strength, so we could use a few days of.


Yesterday at dinner we started talking about other artists and idols, and found out that we are all crazy about Sheryl Crow, Feist, the Beatles and Imogen Heap and several other musicians. That’s probably the reason why it has been so easy to write songs, we like the same things.


Can’t write more now… need to work, work, work!

Gold Record!

As we suspected the meeting at Universal was about a reward. Our hard work paid off in a beautifully framed Gold Record, which will be positioned in very visible places in each apartment. A great proof of the support and backup we get from all you wonderful fans out there. Thank you for buying our record. Let’s hope that our next one will appeal to you too.

Recording

We have taken another step towards our second album! Thursday and Friday we spent at Tambourine Studio, to do a test recording of one of our new songs. It's nice, when you have been sitting all by yourselves, writing and arranging songs, to try the new material for real, with an outside producer.

Per Sunding, who produced one of our favourite albums, "Long gone before daylight" with the Cardigans, got to be that producer.
It was so refreshing to work with the songs from another angle, and to get his input on what we do. Per is known for being a good singing coach, and he lived up to that reputation. Everything was very relaxed, and even though you always feel a certain pressure when you stand in front of the recording mike, it was just enough to make you perform a little better.

It feels like Tambourine and Per could be a good alternative for the whole album. We will finish the song next week, and after that we will be able to hear the result.






Today we are on our way to Stockholm to play and have some meetings. Among other things we are meeting with Universal, they have asked us to come up and meet with them. We have a hunch of why, but we wont tell you until tomorrow! It’s probably good news though!