I see that once again over a month has passed between blog posts… 40 days to be precise. I’ll get you up to speed soon, but now I just want to make a quick announcement. Hong Faux‘s full length debut entitled The Crown that Wears the Head was mastered yesterday by Magnus Lindberg from Cult of Luna (who also mastered both of Nutmeg‘s albums) and we start taking pre-orders for the vinyl release this Friday – October 21. More info on hongfaux.com.
The first single is called “Feign Death to Stay Alive” and will see a worldwide digital release on iTunes, Amazon etc. on October 25. Already today you can enjoy the video we made for it. More exciting news soon! ‘Til then, much enjoyment.
This weekend was spent in Turku, Finland with The Genuine Fakes. We got invited by a powerpop club called Flavor of the Month (named after the Posies song) and took the ferry across the Baltic Sea. It was our first gig outside of Sweden and to our surprise it was one of the best gigs we’ve had. We hadn’t done a proper gig since our release party in January so we thought we’d be pretty rusty, but all those years of grinding in the rehearsal studio have paid off, ’cause it certainly didn’t feel like eight months had passed between gigs. We were very well received by the audience and a lot of people came up to us afterwards and told us it was the best gig they’d ever seen on that club. One person even went so far as saying it was one of the top ten gigs he’d ever seen anywhere! Makes me proud as hell over the band. Hopefully we’ll be going over there soon again and play one of the bigger clubs in town.
We also got acquainted with two Finnish acts; The Sugarrush and The Wonderminers. They both put on good shows, and I was particularly impressed by Petri in The Wonderminers whose vocals and guitar playing had a certain Jeff Buckley-esque quality. He also was kind enough to film us when we did Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”. Check it out below.
This week I’m moving into a new studio. It feels great to get out of the apartment and get a more controlled environment to work in. It will also enable more frequent work on the next Genuine Fakes album. We haven’t gotten as far as I’d wished at this point in time, but I think that we will be able to make some headway now. All the drum tracks are done, so now we just have to work through the songs one by one. We aim for a May 2012 release, so we best get crackin’!
This weekend we started recording the next Genuine Fakes album. We hired our buddy Per Björling to help us out with the micing up the drumkit, and then we got down to business. All in all, fourteen drum tracks were laid down in two days. Our drummer was on top of the game, and it feels like we got off to a perfect start. Now we’re going to work through the songs one by one, and not move on to the next before the first one’s finished. In the past we’ve been doing instrument sessions – drums first, then bass on all tracks, then guitar etc. It worked fine on the last record since the songs came from the same mold more or less, but this time around the material is a bit more diverse and therefore each song needs more attention and different treatment in order to get the best end result. I really look forward to continuing work on this material. I wrote and demoed most of the songs between April and September of last year, and during the time we’ve been rehearsing the new material, many of the arrangements have been refined and approved upon. I can’t wait to hear how they turn out!
We’re blogging about the recording session on our website, and we’ve also set up a video blog at thegenuinefakes.tv for your enjoyment!
Since WordPress just released a new theme that I really like, I decided to give the website a little updated look. I also added some new content to the music and video sections. Found some clips on YouTube I’d forgotten about – a couple from my time in HappyPill (now Roxie 77) when we played the Sweden Rock Festival and had Brian “Robbo” Robertson from Thin Lizzy join in on two songs. There’s also videos from Nutmeg and Charlie Emm. Hope you like ’em!
Here’s one of the Sweden Rock clips. Rock n’ roll! 🙂
I’ve made some updates on the website. In the right hand column are now neat little buttons for Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. I’ve also added the RSS feed to feedburner, so if you’re a subscriber please switch to the new feed (just click on the RSS button). I’ve also added music players for my different projects’ latest releases for your listening pleasure :). Also, if you go to the music section you will find all of my previous solo releases available for streaming in their entirety.
Tomorrow night I’m doing an acoustic Beatles gig at The Regent Pub with my buddy Karl from The Compleatles. So if you’re in the neighborhood feel free to drop by.
Johan Bergqvist 