Dernières news :
Pretty Maids studio report, March 2010
As usual, there’s always one song that sort of catapults the whole songwriting process into action. In this case it was the song now called “ Cielo drive “ that started the whole thing. It was written last summer (2009) during a rehearsal for some festival we were about to do, and as with the best songs it was more or less written within half an hour or so.
Up until then we barely hadn’t written any new music since the Wake Up to the Real World sessions, nor had we any specific plans on doing a new album for that matter. But it sort of started something and during the autumn we negotiated a new deal with Frontiers Records.
Since the members of the band these days logistically are spread out all over Denmark, it makes it difficult to rehearse as we did in the old days on a regular basis. So we decided to hire some locations that we used on the WUTTRW sessions to speed up the process and get the album ready for a spring 2010 release.
So we teamed up altogether in the beginning of November for a three day rehearsal at what we call, “Camp rock” and sort of cooked up several ideas that through the process actually ended up as finished songs.
On through November and December we did another three of these “Camp Rock” gatherings and played whenever we felt like it and partied at the rest of the time (not exactly surprising to those who know us).
I guess that none of us actually believed that we would be ready to start recording in January since there was a lot to be written and it was really uphill. But never the less before New Years Eve, we had eight songs more or less ready to go. During the period of writing we also for the first time in 20 years had ourselves a permanent keyboard player since Morten Sandager, who’d been playing live with us since 2006 split with his former band Mercenary and became a full time member (of course not until he passed the examination of the mandatory drinking test, ha ha)
That of course means that all the songs this time was written with keyboard in mind and the fact that writing and playing with a keyboarder being physically there gave the songs a new and different dimension, compared to the way that we have worked in recent years. Personally I think that a lot of the songs on Pandemonium have elements of the Future World/Red Hot and Heavy era. But then again some of the stuff is also pretty modern and up to date and above all really melodic. And the combination of all that has just turned out to be a real good album, which we all in the band are pretty proud of, the best we’ve done in many years.
So on January 11th, with eight songs under our belt, we entered The Hansen studios with producer Jacob Hansen with whom we were about to work with for the first time. We’d briefly met and didn’t as such know much about each others way of working, but things went smooth from day one.
During the recordings we spent quite a lot of time trying to detune the individual songs to see how it worked and sounded, one song was in fact totally ripped apart and changed, for the better though. We also wrote a brand new song while being there since eight songs weren’t enough. On top of that we’ve taken a left over track from the WUTTRW sessions (Beautiful Madness) and redone the vocals as well as added keyboards to it + one cover song (yet a secret, maybe a bonus track, but definitely not anything you expect from us, ha ha)
As I’m writing this little update we’re still in the process of mixing the album, but so far we’re really pleased with the sound of the first mixes. I think Jacob Hansen is doing a seriously fucking good job here, these songs really comes out of the speakers, right in your face.
All I’ve got left to say is that we all sincerely hope that you share our feelings about the new album and that you’ll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed doing it.
The album Pandemonium will be released on frontiers Records on May 21 2010, and will include the following songs:
Pandemonium
I.N.V.U
Little drops of heaven
One World One Truth
Final Day of Innocence
It Comes at Night
Cielo Drive
Old Enough to Know
Breathless
Beautiful Madness
Ronnie Atkins
March 7. 2010
