We released the second single off the upcoming album today. It’s definitely the title track of the album for a reason since it’s crammed full of all the major musical directions present on the album in one song. It also features an amazing guitar solo by Matias Kupiainen (Stratovarius). I remember when he sent it to me and when I dropped it into the Pro Tools session for the first time, my socks were blown off!
Actually there’s an amusing anecdote about the song:
We’ve always been a four piece live band but the band has only ever had three official members, and I thought that I’d turn that into an opportunity on this album. I know some amazing musicians and I thought “why not ask a couple of the best guitarists I know to contribute a solo or two”. To my surprise my two first picks said yes! I took a few guitar lessons a long time ago from Matias and he first taught me that 4-finger tap technique (the kind of classical melody part in the middle of the song) when I was like 14, so about 16 years ago I guess. Jesus… Ever since those days I just fiddled around with it and half-assedly tried to fit it into songs for all this time to no avail, so when it came time to write this album I decided to finally put it into a song once and for all. It was high time. I had definitely not written Here And Now with a guest solo in mind, so the fact that Matias ended up playing on the song centred around a thing he taught me 16 years earlier was a funny “circle of life” kind of realisation for me. That or maybe musician circles in Finland are just really really small. It’s probably that.
So yeah there’s another guest guitarist in the song “Black Mirror”, but you’ll have to wait and see who it is! I’ll buy a beer for anyone who guesses correctly 😉
I’m really proud of Here And Now, the crown jewel of the album. We actually shot and recorded a studio live video for it about a month ago and it turned out great! It’s honest and a little rough for me to listen to at times (when it comes to the tune of my singing) but I wanted a real live video, no autotune, no overdubs, parts recorded later or combining takes. Just us. That being said, it does have some backing tracks for backing vocals, synths and percussions, but that’s what we use live on stage as well out of necessity so that’s fine with me. It’ll probably come out some time in the spring, but no date decided yet.
So what’s next? We have rehearsals coming up but March will be a little quiet on the surface, just things happening behind the curtain. We’re getting ready for the record release show which is 11.4.2020 at YO-Talo here in Tampere. We printed some AWESOME new shirts for it as well!
The next single comes out on the day of the album on 3.4.2020 so look out for that, it has a cool music video too 🙂
-Sincerely
Viljami