I am still on a break from the studio, until monday…. Can´t wait to go there again!
I would like to have a cat or two but I live in an apartment just by a big street and on the 3rd floor with no grass outside, so I think we must wait. But when I lived in the countryside we had a lot of cats, I think they are great animals. You can´t tell them what to do and they really know how to enjoy life, sleeping in the sunlight and doing what they want! I have never had a dog so I am a little afraid of them, once I was hunted by a big black one and one other time I was bitten in the thigh. But I think that dog was just playing but still she made me scared. Maybe it is because I am not used to dogs. I have heard that if I smile and my teeth show, a dog might think I am angry. So now I can´t really smile in a normal way to a dog and it makes me a bit tense of course and I know they sense that very quickly! But Martinique has had both dogs and cats (once they had 8 cats at a time :o). I think he would be great with a dog. He thinks Rhodesian Ridgeback is a very beautiful kind. Maybe one day! 
I was honored by my mother Margareta, my father Per Olof and my friend Hanna, and Christoffer Andersson my pianist and friend. You can see them all on the photos. We played one song from the coming album and it felt great, I was just so happy I almost cried…
And here is the motivation from the jury:
“Helena Josefsson is a left handed, firm woman who has decided to take at least one risk a day. This has led to the brave step from working as a shop assistant to concentrating fully on a carreer as a singer. She has already met a large audience during her tours with Per Gessles group Son of a Plumber. Also, she has sung on recordings with Andreas Johnsson and The Ark. But above all, she has her own carreer, where she gets to show her precise sense for lyrics, melody and singing. She puts strong feelings of love and longing to life, but also a fantasy world inhabited by fairies and trolls. She is delighted by the theatrical, but her personality and stage precense is always enchanting and disarming.”
The studio has buttons and machines that you can only dream of, but still the machines would be nothing without Christoffer Lundquist! This is my view from the listening-sofa!!
This violet button is my favourite lamp, diode, in the studio! Nice isn´t it ;o )The thing is that the album wasn't available at all anymore! I happened to notice this by chance at the EMI office in Stockholm and nobody could explain why it had been deleted. So I decided to put it back on the shelves, but of course with added material I know some people are interested in. First of all I wanted to make the re-release special. So basically I just asked myself what I as a fan, would want from an album like 'The World.' And the most obvious thing to me is 'behind the scenes' -material, like the original demos for instance. If you're really into an album it's always interesting to get to know how the working process got started and so on. On this release we're getting no less than 20 demos, of which only one has been released before, that being "June Afternoon," and that's not even counting the six B-sides from the singles that are on the first CD. The three Jonas Åkerlund videos of "Do You Wanna Be My Baby?," "Kix" and "I Want You to Know" weren't included but will be available somehow as downloads. It's not yet certain how though. Also missing is the Electronic Press Kit.
I haven't really listened to this album for many, many years and yes, to my surprise, both Clarence Öfwerman - who was with me during the new mastering - and myself loved it! I can hardly remember recording it though… Just fragments, bits and pieces. Don't ask me why… I remember that the basic idea was to use the Gyllene Tider-band since we just had done the very successful 'Återtåget' tour and the band sounded extremely tight at the time!! GT is still a brilliant power pop group if you ask me!! But it only lasted for five six songs if I remember it correctly. Then Christoffer, Jens and David from Brainpool came in and changed my life forever. These days I prefer to do my English work as the soothing sunny Son of a Plumber. But hell yes, someday I'll make the definitive ultra-catchy-power-pop-guitars-skweeked-to-13-sort-of-record! It would be nice. I have it in my system somewhere. It pops up every other Saturday night when I make silly dance moves.
I wrote many of the songs during the GT tour. To my (and to my family's) surprise I always seem to unwind from the crazy tour schedules writing new songs… I don't know why, it's always been like that. Maybe I get bored playing basically the same songs every night. I need new blood in my system… new stories, new truths, new lies.
TWATG wasnot "almost a Gyllene Tider album". Like I said before I only wanted to use the lads as backing musicians, I felt songs like 'Stupid,' 'Do You Wanna Be My Baby?,' 'Reporter,' 'Elvis in Germany' and 'T-T-T-Take It!' would fit this beautiful combo perfectly. Just the way it worked recording Roxette's 'June Afternoon' with these guys. But I was only partly right. Like I said, after a while we ran out of freash ideas.
There's nothing I can talk about at this point but you know me… there's always something waiting around the corner"
Two days of recording this week. Day 2 included water pistol war with Christoffer Lundquist´s family and I and his youngest daughter Agnes played while Christoffer worked with his tweezers. We made a house to the wooden mouse Muffi and a king´s crown and a cloak for him. And in his little cardboard house we made a cave with a bat in it and a tunnel, and some stairs and so on. Until she fell asleep in the sofa listening to the drum machine going round and round and round!
Martinique surprised me by borrowing a car after his job, and by 22.00 he came to us in the studio to pick me up, oh what a great surprise! He brought some liquorice, fruit and water that tasted great because he knows that the water in the studio has a strange taste that reminds me of something that comes out of your bottoms. He had his new perfume on too! Then he listened to the three finished songs. To my delight he was very happy with them but unfortunately we didn´t get anything to listen to at home. Then we went home to Malmö as I fell asleep in the car…!
Now I don´t have any time booked in the studio until June 2nd but then we will work for three weeks straight. The dead line is June 20th, when everything will be mixed and finished! In the mean time Martinique is making the artwork for the album!
With a symbol of good luck on the door!
Here you can also see the drum-room.
Visit my first blog! You find it in the menu of my Official Website. I would like to tell you a little about how the new album is proceeding! So stay tuned!
I collected loads of inspiration before the recording- first flamenco dancing in Jerez, Spain!
Two days of recording this week. This is what I do when Christoffer Lundquist needs to go for a ride on his moped to clear his head- I can sit in the garden and look at all the flowers!
Here you can see my view from the hammock! The birch, the golden flowers and the studio entrance, with Christoffer´s moped outside.
It is only Christoffer and me now in the studio, he plays all the instruments except for the drums that Erik Hjärpe has prepared. We had so many instruments on “Dynamo” that now we want to do the contrary, as few sounds as possible! We finished three songs and they felt energetic and simple. We were surprised to find how little sounds you need to make it feel complete!
Hej Helena! Vad kul att du bloggar. Jättebra skrivet och härliga bilder! Hoppas att vi ses snart, kram Fia
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008)The film, which features a song recorded by Per Gessle, will not be released in Sweden until October 2008. During a question-and-answer session, The Daily Roxette asked Alfredson about the Gessle song "Kvar i min bil," which – as Per had told before – is given a prominent place in the film. In one scene, the lead actor is shown putting the the 45rpm single on a record player so as to listen to it. The director explained that the male half of that group (Per) had had a popular group (Gyllene Tider) back in the '80s, the time period in which this movie is set. Looking for a song that fit that era, but not wanting to use an instantly recognizable song, he asked Per (who he said he was an acquaintance of), if he could write a new song in the same style as those earlier GT hits.
Novelist John Ajvide Lindquist adapted his best-seller for the screen to tell the beautifully touching tale of the first romance of 12-year-old Oskar and the girl next door, Eli (who also happens to be a vampire). The Tribeca jury commented that the film was exceptional "for its mesmerizing exploration of loneliness and alienation through a masterful reexamination of the vampire myth." The film already has North American distribution in place and Variety also writes that a US version is in the works.
