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| ALIAS
WEBZINE , 2002
AFTER
THE HOME FROM HOME RECORDING
by
Jott Utter |
How's
it going?
- Great, I just got home from LA!
What were you doing there?
- Me and Peter, the owner of Burning Heart, went over there
to deliver the artwork for our new album "Home From Home"
to Epitaph and to have some meetings with them. We also met
up with Vans and our American publishers at Chrysalis.
Why the title "Home From Home"?
- It's like the expression "Home Away From Home".
Our band is our second family. It's been a huge part of our
lives for almost ten years now. October 2002 will be our tenth
year anniversary.
Are you happy in how the new new record turned out?
- Totally! It's the best we've done. I know that it's cliché
to say, but it feels like we really progress a lot on every
recording we make. I guess we learn from our mistakes and become
better musicians from all the touring we've been doing.
Song-wise and production-wise is this by far the best we've
ever done. Lou was a king behind the table.
How was Lou Giordano to work with?
- He's a really mellow, nice guy with lots of experiences and
good ideas. We've been lucky with producers. Brett Gurewitz,
who recorded our last album was great and and so was Dan Swanö
who has recorded pretty much all of our stuff before "Pennybridge
Pioneers".
We first got in contact with Lou's work from the Samiam album
"Clumsy" which we're all big fans of.
Any funny stories from the recording?
- Being in the studio for two months can be really frustrating
sometimes, cause most of the time is spent lying around on the
couch listening to the same song for the 211:th time. So most
of the stories must have something with the couch to do... Larzon
found a lot of musicians money one day when he decided to take
a look to see what was under the cushions. I think he actually
found over 200 Swedish kronor in that couch.
Me and Mathias were buying all this salty Swedish licorice which
is a taste Americans don't have in their candy-racks. Lou couldn't
believe why people even thought about putting it into their
mouths. So one day we bought pretty much all the brands we could
find and had him try it all in order to turn him a little bit
more Swedish. He actually finished two or three pieces.
You re-recorded two old songs for the new album how come,
didn't you have enough songs?
- We actually had to say, this is enough, when we came up to
17 songs, cause we really wanted to focus on making the songs
we had, as good as possible. We really liked both "Kemp"
and "Black Eye" and we didn't think that they were
recorded as good as they could have been the first time. "Kemp"
for example was made back in January 2000 in one hour on a Friday
night. On Saturday, the day after, we went into the studio and
recorded all the instruments, then we went out drinking the
whole night. On Sunday, Nikola had to sing the song, which had
no lyrics at the time, so he sat down in the studio all hungover
and wrote some lyrics about something taken from a economic-history
schoolbook he was reading at the time by a writer named Kemp.
It felt like we really had to record the song again with some
real lyrics this time. "Black Eye" was too short so
we added a verse and a chorus to it. The whole production sound
so much better on these versions too.
Larzon put drums on all 17 songs, but we decided to just focus
on 15 this time in the studio. We'll finish the other two some
other time.
Who wrote most of the songs for the new album?
- Nikola and Mathias had all the basic ideas for the songs like
they did on "Pennybridge Pioneers" too. I don't play
too much guitar at home as I used to. That's why I haven't written
any songs on these last two albums. I'm always busy with some
artwork job or something. Nikola wrote all the lyrics on the
songs that made it to the record. Mathias wrote the lyrics to
one song that will be used as a b-side called "Absolute
Zero"
You are doing all the artwork for the band, right?
- Yeah, and I freelance as a graphic designer too when I got
the time and get fun jobs. I've always been into art so it was
natural for me to make our first demo-cover and I've been doing
the covers ever since. I'm also editing video and motion graphic
stuff, making our official homepage and designing all the t-shirts
and so on.
Can you order t-shirts from your homepage?
- Yes, but actually from the Burning Heart Mailorder who are
the ones handling the shop, but you go through our site to order
online from them. I'm just designing the stuff and place the
order. They take it from there.
You can order a lot of stuff from there, depending on what's
in stock, we make jackets, caps, sweats, hoods, girlshirts,
posters, stickers etc. etc. You can make an order online from
anywhere in the world and the Swedish money is pretty low right
now so it's cheap too.
What equipment do you use to design all the stuff?
- I use to do it with ink and brush on paper, back when I started.
I still draw a lot, but then I scan it into my computer and
work from there with Photoshop and Freehand mostly. The "Pennybridge"
cover is a genuine oil-painting though. The first one in a lot
of years. At that time I was kind of sick of doing everything
the modern way. It's good to try different stuff so you don't
lock yourself up in a certain genre of art. I do the web stuff
in Dreamweaver. I suck at html but I usually get most of the
basic stuff to work by just using Dreamweaver after a while.
Internet stuff is the part of design which I don't know too
much about and I don't really got the time to learn. From time
to time I video edit a lot too. Then I'm working in FinalCut
and After Effects. I'm a huge Macintosh fan so that's all I
use. I got a Powerbook G4 with firewire drives to work with
on the road too.
Talking about equipment, you got some sponsors how does that
work out?
- We get shoes from Vans and they help us out by doing other
stuff too. Vans are actually releasing a Millencolin Old Skool
shoe when the new album comes out! If everything goes as planned.
Clothes from the Swedish based clothing company WE. We've known
those guys for years and they're making really cool stuff. We're
getting tattoo's made by David at Ink Spot Tattoo here in Örebro.
Strings from Ernieball. Amps to a "endorsement" price
from Mesa Boogie. Larzon plays Pearl drums and Nikola Music
Man bassguitars. We don't get paid by any of these companies.
Some of them are our friends. We like their stuff and we're
happy to promote them by using their stuff.
The homepage got lot's of visitors do you get a lot of mails?
- Yeah, it's starting to get really crazy! It's cool! We got
an average of 4000 hits a day! And yes, we get lot's of mails.
We use to be able to answer all of them, but nowadays it's impossible.
Larzon has been working like a maniac to try to keep up but
we just can't answer them all. It's really fun to keep getting
mails though, to hear peoples thoughts and stuff. We probably
read all the mails we get. What's good too is if I'm sloppy
and make a mistake at the homepage, somebody always send in
a mail about it and then I get aware of it so I can change it.
The Webmaster Magnus at Burning Heart is working on a mailinglist
service solution for us, where people can sign up directly online
from our homepage. Then we'll be able to gather up the most
common questions and answer them in one mail.
Will there be a sequel to Millencolin & the Hi8 Adventures?
- We've been filming maybe five tapes a trip on the Pennybridge
tour. So we got around 30-40 tapes. On DV this time, no more
Hi8 stuff. One problem is that the only time we remember that
we got a camera with us is either when we're about to film a
show or are drinking. So most of the footage is either us on
stage or four drunk Swedes screaming in Swedish. That will not
make a whole film. We got some fun footage though, but I think
I'll wait till we're done with this upcoming tour. The last
film took me over five months to edit, so it takes a whole lot
of planning and a long period of time dedicated only to that.
Are you going to make a video for one of the songs?
- Yeah, we're working on a video right now! I don't think
I can tell you too much about it at this early stage. It's actually
the old singer from Voice Of A Generation (Kalle Haglund aka.
Charlie Voice) who nowadays work at this really cool mediaproduction
company out of Stockholm called Stylewar. They just did their
first music video which was "Main Offender" for the
Hives and everybody who's seen that video understands why we
wanted Kalle to do our next video. What's odd in this scenario
is that I made Kalles, Voice Of A Generation's video and now
he's making my bands!
We also got an other cool thing we're working on, but I don't
think I can tell you much about that either...
Lot's of secrets!
- I wish I could tell you more, but it will be more fun
to break the news when everything is finished.
Yeah totally, I understand.
What music are you listening to at the moment by the way?
- I just bought the new five-gig iPod mp3 player. The albums
I've filled it up with so far is, Rancid, of course, I never
leave for tour without a Rancid album in my bag, Manu Chao,
Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Eat World, Steve Earl, Sublime, Rocket From
The Crypt, A Camp, Weezer and Infinite Mass. That's what I've
been listening to lately.
Mathias owns Sound Lab studios, right?
- He and Mieszko(also known from Nasum, Krigshot & Genocide
Super Stars) bought the Unisound Studio(Where Millencolin recorded
their first three albums)stuff of Dan Swanö when he decided
to quit the studio business. That was around early -98, I think.
First they had this nasty space down at a basement in downtown
Örebro next to a Chinese restaurant's basement where it
always stank of rancid vegetables. Millencolin and Voice Of
A Generation also shared a rehearsing room in that space. That's
where we recorded Vixen, Kemp and Queens Gambit. Two years ago
they got their stuff together and moved to the same building
as Burning Heart Records, where they rebuilt the rooms in the
studio from scratch. Now it starting to look pretty fancy and
they're booked all the time. The studio got a really good reputation
in underground media and bands like, Bombshell Rocks, Nine,
The Peepshows, Voice O.A.G are just a few that recorded their
albums there.
You and some guys built a skatepark in Örebro some time
ago. How's that going?
- I think it's going ok. It's always been and I guess it
will always be hard to finance a big warehouse for skateboarding.
It's always on the edge to not being able to pay for the rent.
I haven't been there for some time now. Most of my friends I
always skated with got jobs in other cities so it's really not
the same anymore. Me and my all-time best skatefriend Ronken
are planning on skating a lot during Christmas when he's staying
at my place. There will soon be a huge two day contest held
at the two years anniversary January 19 actually! Tons of people
will be there. I got no idea how they are going to fit in the
hall, but skaters from all over Europe and Puzzle videomag,
Onboard, Sidewalk Surfer etc. will be there. Pretty cool! Big
party on Saturday night too! I think we're going to be rock'n
roll DJ's and Looptroop will be playing live.
Örebro is a pretty small city, do you all still live there?
- Nikola moved to Gothenburg a few years ago with his girlfriend,
but the rest of us are still living here. I like Örebro.
Burning heart and so many of our friends and family live here.
The size of the town doesn't bother me at all. It used to when
we always ran out of skatespots and maybe it could have a few
more restaurants, especially vegetarian ones. It doesn't really
matter where you live when you travel all the time anyway.
When are you going on tour?
- No dates are set yet, but it looks like we're starting
the Home From Home tour in Australia in February, then we're
probably moving our way around New Zealand, Japan, USA, Canada
and Europe during this spring!
You guys have been around for some time now, how has touring
changed for you over the years?
- It has of course changed a lot since we've been touring
for eight years and made over 650 shows. In the beginning we'd
drive around in a really crappy van, which later on burned down
on the way home from a show, and stayed at peoples houses and
slept on floors. Now we're able to rent a buss and travel easier
all over which is great, but I'm really happy that we've done
the floor-thing for some years and slowly moved our way up.
Being on stage in front of a crowd that goes off is one the
best things in the world!
What's most fun in being a member of Millencolin?
- There is not a single day passing by when I don't think
about a new thing I could do for the band. A new logo, t-shirt
print, cover artwork, play guitar, update the homepage or whatever.
It keeps me creative and that's the most important thing in
my life.
This interview is free to publish
ALIAS WEBZINE
jott_utter@hotmail.com
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