Past sins III: The small hours

The last months have been very hectic – my little family has moved from Umeå to Stockholm, we bought our first house, and I’ve started working at a steady government job. Packing up things for such a big move to another town is weird – while your mind is primarily focused on the future, it is also a great catalyst for nostalgia. While cleaning out a closet I found an old 4-track minidisc. In it was a few songs from a musical project I’d almost forgotten: The small hours.

In my third year of high school I saw the movie “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle “, of course portraying the life and poems of Dorothy Parker. I got intrigued and for some reason got the idea to start making music to her words as part of my senior project. I enlisted my friend and classmate, the singer Joanna Grubbström, to sing the songs. A recording was made, but that should be a blog post all on it’s own.

The year after high school we both moved to Umeå. We had occasional gigs, I wrote some new songs and we recorded a few of them in my little dorm-room in the student housing area “Ålidhem”. After a while we moved on to other projects, and the recordings where forgotten. But now, 10 years later, I found them again.

The problem was actually accessing the music – there are very few 4-track MD players left. Luckily I still had that big clunk of scrap metal called SONY MDM-X4 which is a “portable” (in the loosest usage of the word) minidisc recording studio. The REC-function had stopped working many years ago, but I had saved it for some reason. It could still play back the 4-track MD, and I managed to hook it up to my PC. So after that it was just a matter of recording the tracks individually to Cubase, add some light mixing, and upload it. So without further adeu, this is the sound of my late-teen-angst:

The death of nightingales

“The death of nightingales” was ment as a metaphor for the loss of innocence, the loss of a romantic mindset in favor of a dull, adult, realistic outlook on life.

Narrow

It seems like many of these songs was about balancing the thin line between adolecence and being a responsible grown up. So was this one.

To face a fear (why am I)

Now being a dull adult (working for the government and all) I’m glad to see that even when I was a romantically enclined youth I envisioned a future where I actually could balance that thin line of responsibility and family with seeing the world as a wondrous, colourful place filled with dreams and fantasy.

Warsong

Summer 1999 I was backpacking through western Europe, having the time of my life. At the same time, not far away, the Kosovo war raged.

To read the lyrics or download the song (for free of course), click the image below: