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Calvin and Hobbes is so very 90's but they get the point across. Bear with me.

Yesterday was a long but very productive day. I finished the vocals for three tracks – The World Is Listening, Our Hearts Are Dying and Stop Making That Noise – and the mix on those three are almost done too. Just need a little more tweaking and turning and they should be done. I have a deadline for my mixes in about a week from now. It looks as if this is one deadline I am going to keep.

I occurred to me last night, as I drove home from the studio, that there is a growing coherence in the lyrics on this album. Almost as if there is a…theme.

“The theme” is something that many journalists ask into when talking about the entirety of lyrics on an album, and maybe it’s not a bad thing to think it over, so as to be prepared for interviews for once. I almost never know what to answer to the questions regarding the lyrics, but it seems that, as much as WHT was about love, BLCK is about hate. It might sound obvious, given the titles, but it sort of just dawned on me, and was never something I had given any thought. The lyrics are always whatever pops into my mind, and I seldom spend more than half an hour writing them. This time though I feel I have worked a little more concentrated with them than usual.

When I say “hate” I mean hate as in the demagogic, war waging, genocidal and tyrannic way. The kind of hate that eats our very souls and make us something less than human. Kind of a bummer theme, but it is something that is occupying my mind a lot recently. Why we – the single most intelligent life-form on this planet – can’t see that we are destroying ourselves with hatred toward each other.

Our Hearts Are Dying

Our hearts are dying
From the words that we use
Our souls are shriveling
From the paths that we choose

There is a place where
We can all fit with ease
It’s in our hearts and
And it will fill us with peace

Our hearts are dying
’cause we act just like animals
We’re putting pride in
Things that are destroying us
Our hearts are dying
’cause we act just like animals
We should be trying
To use the minds that were handed us

Lastly I will just say, that if I could be anyone else than who I am, I would be a nihilist hippie. What would you be?

It’s really dark, but I thought I’d let you see where I have been working the last four days (and nights).

So, second day in the studio in Århus and everything is coming together nicely. I think I am close to solving the puzzle that is BLCK.

I left from Copenhagen early yesterday morning, but due to the snow I was held up and we didn’t get much done, other than some sound-checks and practical stuff. Today though was different as we laid down the drums for four songs and the bass for three of those four songs. Tomorrow has been dubbed “work-hard-and-long” day, so I expect a lot of progress to be made. The songs on BLCK are looking to be more melodic than I first expected. A lot of the songs are very gloomy and dark, so the title is just perfect. See, I told you the pieces were coming together.

After this record I think it might be a while before I release anything as a solo-artist again. The last couple of years have been all about BLCK and WHT and I need to get back into the band-thing again. We haven’t been doing anything VETO related for the last three or four months, and while that might not sound like a lot of time to be separated, it really is. The band and I have been working non-stop, practically since the release of There’s A Beat In All Machines, so the time-out was needed. However you tend to develop an addiction towards people you spend so much time with, and lately that addiction has been itching.

That’s all for now. I’ll try and upload some of the photos I snapped so far tomorrow.
Take care until then.