Trusties

Oikku:
Rock music is all about the sounds and the arrangement. There are countless of great songs that really have nothing special to them if you reduce the harmony to basic voicings and just play the melody and harmony straight on a piano. What makes them special is the way the musicians execute the song – the specific rhythms, chord voicings and articulations each instrument plays.

For this album I had a couple of songs, “Rituals” and “Djemoniee” where I had very strong feelings about what the arrangement needed to be. This kind of dictatorshipness might become problematic in a mostly democratic band setting like ours. A big part of the fun in playing in a band is getting to make up your own parts. However, the guys were supportive about it and they were willing to try the parts as written. I don’t mean to say that the arrangement did not develop during rehearsals and tracking – it’s more about staying true to the initial vision of the song where arranging and composing were equally important to me.

The verse drums & bass riff dates back to when we first started writing songs together with Matti. The B-part (“don’t try to change”) came from a guitar instrumental tune I wrote on a 4-track cassette machine back in the day. The 11th chords were added to A2 during rehearsals. Janne came up with the polyrhythmic intro drum part during tracking. When we recorded vocals Ville came up with the brilliant background vocal part for the “sex” section.

Ville:
I didn’t realize I ever took part in a sex section 🙂

~ by Marko Oikarinen on July 4, 2009.

Posted in Human Wheel