Together As One. Literally!!!
We had a quick dinner. The vibe wasn’t as joyful as the fake birthday surprise party and cake we had earlier. It wasn’t confrontational or anything, but it was clear that the tiredness involved in stretching ourselves a little bit more with each passing day was starting to weigh more heavily on everyone’s shoulders. Even Mikko looked slightly less like his usual “hyped” self, and Mr. Gordon is in an impressively healthy shape. I wouldn’t dare contemplate a future potential cardio contest with him. I’m still struggling to climb over a few floors and I’m barely able to do my 10 thousand steps a day… That being said, he’s an impressive model of discipline to follow, and since I’m just a tiny tiny tiny bit competitive, I might challenge him for a cardio test in a year’s time. So, Mr. Gordon, if you are reading this, the challenge is “on”. You have one year to get your game ready!!! He probably has a 10-year headstart on me. Oh well, no pain, no gain! Ok, enough affective deflection, let’s go back to the collective tiredness. There’s a very cool ending to the hazardous story it’s been so far…
What I admire about Mikko’s unique way of producing a record, besides his ability to get way beyond the best you thought your doubting self had to offer, is the fact that he is completely engaged and devoted to the songs, the record, and every one of us. So while I was happy to see him grab a guitar and join us as we were diving in and finding a different way to approach a song nobody was particularly a fan of a few hours prior, I wasn’t surprised at all; Mikko is the type of person who will crawl into the trenches with you. He doesn’t care and is willing to get dirty alongside everyone else. Therefore, I reminded everyone of the singular nature of that song and we started to let ourselves go, reaching the proper tones of light slowly and slowly. It led me to dwell on the moment myself, exploring the dazzling and overwhelming experience of a first conscious morning following the bleakness of a long night of uncertainties, which ultimately became the song “As Morning Sets In”. It was a moment of surrender and contemplation, of gratitude. We all knew at that point that we had touched an emotion so honest and denuded from any personal creative ambition that we concluded the recording of the song’s shape and form in a sort of collective reverence where there wasn’t any type of allusion to good or bad… It was right, it was “it”. We all remembered in that exact second that the record was way deeper and more significant than ourselves, all feeling the very same emotions.
We ended the night with a soulful rendition of “All the Violence in the World”. It wasn’t planned or anything, we just started playing the song without thinking about the context of our surroundings, until Mikko showed up with Jojo, moving microphones around in a hurry. When we finished the song, Mikko asked Ben and me if we were open to playing an even quieter version of the song, vocals and piano only, which led to an extraordinary kind of celestial uplift. Have we just touched the conclusion of the journey?
What I admire about Mikko’s unique way of producing a record, besides his ability to get way beyond the best you thought your doubting self had to offer, is the fact that he is completely engaged and devoted to the songs, the record, and every one of us. So while I was happy to see him grab a guitar and join us as we were diving in and finding a different way to approach a song nobody was particularly a fan of a few hours prior, I wasn’t surprised at all; Mikko is the type of person who will crawl into the trenches with you. He doesn’t care and is willing to get dirty alongside everyone else. Therefore, I reminded everyone of the singular nature of that song and we started to let ourselves go, reaching the proper tones of light slowly and slowly. It led me to dwell on the moment myself, exploring the dazzling and overwhelming experience of a first conscious morning following the bleakness of a long night of uncertainties, which ultimately became the song “As Morning Sets In”. It was a moment of surrender and contemplation, of gratitude. We all knew at that point that we had touched an emotion so honest and denuded from any personal creative ambition that we concluded the recording of the song’s shape and form in a sort of collective reverence where there wasn’t any type of allusion to good or bad… It was right, it was “it”. We all remembered in that exact second that the record was way deeper and more significant than ourselves, all feeling the very same emotions.
We ended the night with a soulful rendition of “All the Violence in the World”. It wasn’t planned or anything, we just started playing the song without thinking about the context of our surroundings, until Mikko showed up with Jojo, moving microphones around in a hurry. When we finished the song, Mikko asked Ben and me if we were open to playing an even quieter version of the song, vocals and piano only, which led to an extraordinary kind of celestial uplift. Have we just touched the conclusion of the journey?
