Dear Folks and Folkettes

Sorry again for the longer-than-intended hiatus, it's been pretty busy here in Janiland. On Friday we flew to northern Finland to do (probably) the last Railio show for this year, on Saturday I flew back home and we had a pretty big party and got pretty damn hammered with a bunch of friends. Took me 2 days to fully recover from that, I guess my party stamina is not what it used to be. Must be the age kicking in.

But now to the stuff that you -hopefully- find more interesting: The drum recordings are drawing closer every day, I guess it's now 11 days and the recordings for the second Cain's Offering album officially start. This means that I have to spend pretty much every waking hour that I'm at home working on the material, but I am pretty happy with it already. I think it's stronger and much more coherent than the stuff on the first album (though even I have to admit that there were some truly great moments on the first one).

I've been asked a lot about my writing process, how I write songs. While that is way too large and difficult question for me to answer, mainly because I have no set way or formula of how I approach writing, I can now shed some light into what I've been doing now for few days and will continue to do until next Tuesday. I guess I could call it polishing the songs.

What I do is this: I have all the demos on all of my computers and also on my phone. I listen to them pretty much daily, especially when I'm travelling and can't really do anything else productive. Not to listen to how great they sound, but to find flaws and weak spots. If I start to feel like something is out of place or doesn't work in a certain part of a song I will write it down somewhere so I will remember it when I get back to my work computer where I have my stuff set up. Because lets face it, if I don't write it down I'm not going to remember half of it when I'll actually have a chance to work on them.

This way I will have all my previous thoughts and ideas always memorised. It might be that I find a certain melody dull, want to change a chord or a harmony or a drumbeat, or maybe I feel that some part of a song is not quite up to par with the rest of the song and the song loses momentum because on this. I've now gone through 2 songs in the last 2 days, and I have to say the songs sound a lot better now than they did before I made those changes.

In a fact, I'm going to wrap this up now, take a glass of whiskey and listen through all the songs, while making notes about everything I think is not quite right yet. Tomorrow I will wake up, make some coffee and then start fixing the things that bother me, it's that simple.

Take care dicks and dickettes, see you around :)