I am for once up to date. That is, as I write, it is the release day of my 4:th album Sun Pie. It’s been a long journey, and I want to get anecdotal with the three of you for a bit.

As a DIY project, Sun Pie goes as far as it gets in that it pretty much only involves yours truly in every part of the process. I played all the instruments with the exception of some trumpet and saxophone (I couldn’t help myself when opportunity knocked!), produced and mixed the record. I’ve been heartily fed up with waiting for people over the years. It is the situation for every plinger-plongbiter without connections. Sun Pie is in a way a silent protest, a self-absorbed “fuck you, I’ll do it all myself then”. I would have looooved to do it with a group of musicians, with a proper mixing engineer etc etc, but going at alone was an interesting if not very full experience.

In early 2019, I moved back to Stockholm after 1,5 years in Malmö. While planning for drum sessions for Cross-Word Tears, I had group of pop songs, most of them written but not quite figured out production-wise, stuff that stood out from the more lengthy compositions on Cross-Word Tears. Starting in the fall of 2019 I played drums a couple of hours (almost) every Saturday to some rudimentary pop song demos in parallell to working on the production of Cross-Word Tears. Having a full time job and working on another record left me only the weekend slot for rehearsals. Added to that, I had never really learnt how to play drums in my teens, and not having sat down next to a kit for twenty something years, it was obviously gonna be a slow process. I was pretentious enough to believe the end result could present itself reasonably on a record but knowing, somewhere below those clouds, that it was not gonna sound quite like I wanted it to sound. It would simply be an experiment, One way to go about making a record. I found the process of sporadic drum playing a great deal of fun. And speaking of that, here’s a photo of a bald man in shorts, trying to pour coffee whilst holding a hot dog with his other hand.

Cross-word Tears was eventually released at the end of a tumultuous 2022. I kept on drumming for another year before daring to record my efforts with some (crucial) help from my brilliant studio neighbors at the time. During a day and a half in August of 2023, we laid down 13 drum tracks marking the starting point of recordings for Sun Pie. Still occupied by a full time day job, I moved the studio gear to my apartment, trying to save time for producing Sun Pie. Come May 2024 I quit my day job to engage fully with music for a while. After a summer full of traveling I started to mix Sun Pie, finishing production, playing a gig, recording vocals, releasing a single…

….. Which pretty much brings us up to date. I’m back working full time since a couple of weeks. The next record producing journey will be different one. I can tone down (if not completely stop) the whining about not having active collaborators since I joined the lovely group of friends at Mara sounds. That is the label that released my record. Today.