“Looking for a life” – The Mankind remix by @davidmyhr
Posted: August 17th, 2011 | Author: David Myhr | Filed under: post | Comments Off on “Looking for a life” – The Mankind remix by @davidmyhrOne of the greatest aspects of the creative process is seeing what happens when working together with other people. As I’ve described in a previous blog post ”Looking for a life” came as a result of a Nashville trip where I wrote the melody together with the American “hit-man” Ian Eskelin, and to which Andreas Mattsson of Popsicle later put words to.
Then in the studio when I was playing together with my brilliant session musicians Andreas Dahlbäck, Rikard Lidhamn, and Anders Pettersson the song found the form that you hear on the single. Classic melodic guitar based power pop or indie pop if you so wish. (Feel free to help me out classifying what genre this song represent in the commentaries.)
But who knows if the way we recorded the song was the ultimate one? That’s one of the scariest parts of making a record. All the creative decisions taken on the spur of the moment that throws the song into a completely different direction. As my co-producer Andreas Dahlbäck said to me in the studio with a smile; “-Well for me this was an easy decision to make, it’s just another day at work for me, but you David, you will have to live with this for the REST OF YOUR LIFE!”.
But then again, if you don’t make decisions you won’t get anywhere, will you? You can spend years and years thinking about “what if we did this and recorded it like that instead or maybe we should have tried another approach etc…”. That’s what we did with the Merrymakers the last ten years without even releasing a record(!) I like the idea of “this was what we came up with today – on the next album we’ll try something different…”. Although it would be a lie if I said all the overdubs on the album were as instant and spontaneous as the basic tracks were. For instance I spent days on each track afterwards at home trying to sing them right and put on acoustic guitars and additional electric guitars and stuff…
But another really, really exciting thing to try is what happens if you strip down the song into only the vocal track and you give it to creative musicians and producers who then are completely free to put on anything they like. This is exactly what happened with “Looking for a life” this summer. I was talking to my close friend and musician colleague (as well as keyboard player in my live band), Joel Sjödin, who is part of an upcoming and very exciting band called The Mankind. Joel said “-You know, we make remixes… you should consider sending us a track and we’ll see what happens!”. So I sent him the vocal track of “Looking for a life” since it was going to be the summer single.
When I got to hear the result I was delighted with what I heard. They had made a production almost as far from the original as is possible. No guitars, no real drums, no nothing that I’m usually very fond of. Instead they have put the song in a really heavy electronic, synthesizer based soundscape. They even changed the chord sequence for chorus which gives the song an extra twist. I am now very happy to be able to share the result with all of you. You will find it on iTunes Store,
Please spread the word, and share, and see if you can get your DJ friends to discover this fresh take on “Looking for a life”.