Minute

Published: 21.01.2012

Photo by Mikko Pylkkö

"Well, I DO have this one thing I played two nights ago, but I don't know...", Kimmo said, sort of apologising for his riff's assumed crappiness before I even got a chance to hear it myself.

It was just another Saturday afternoon at our rehearsal room, two slow guys lazily riffing back and forth, trying to come up with something that would be worth a smile, a nod, anything that counts as a reaction. Two or three hours had passed with not much progress, except that we had managed to run three or four beers ahead of our hangovers. Not good, not bad.

Didi-diddiddi-didididi-didi-duh-di, didi-diddiddi-didididi-didi-duh-di...

"I kinda like it", I said. I don't know what it was, but it had a nice, positive flow to it. "If that's a start, what could the rest of the song be like?" I wondered. Another raid on the fridge later, Kimmo had played me a verse and something resembling a chorus. The song seemed to flow real effortlessly, naturally. We started to come to life and threw some ideas back and forth and after a while it was like, what the hell, turn on the drum machine and let's get it on tape.

The real turning point came after an hour or so, when we grew a bit tired of the sounds we had and started joking about overdubbing the riff with a synth. Oh boy, it sounded so ridiculous, we were rolling on the floor laughing our asses off. And then realized that's what we wanted to find, a reaction. Like it usually goes, we felt great about having done something we hadn't done before. We were ready to party so we turned on the new super stupid sounds we had, raided the fridge, hit the city and let the bartenders raid our wallets in the night. All was well in the land.

Recording Minute with Rake (the producer at Inkfish) was a pretty easy job, too. We tooled around a bit with key changes to see what suited the vocals best, but that's about it. Hit the REC, go full blast, no problems. Olli had like the best guitar ever (some VOX) which he played in a cool open tuning, I played my parts in fifteen minutes or so, Kimmo took even less. Easy. Rake turned everything louder than everything else and came up with more cheapy tricky synth sounds. When we heard the final mix, we were laughing our asses off. Again. Not bad. All was well in the family.

Never spend another minute of my life down...??? Yeah right. But there are those days when you can almost fool yourself into believing it... So be prepared to let life rule when that time comes.

Thanks for checking this out, and know that there's more to come soon,

-Janne & the Bröthers-