We Had Faces Then

Those who love a good solid rock studio drama will probably find this very boring reading: As with the previous album this one came in to being relatively easy and peaceful.

The break between the 3rd and 4th album marked a small change from the breaks between the others, this time we managed to do quite a lot of other projects at the same time that we toured more extensively than ever before.

At the same time we were constantly exchanging ideas for new songs and after I came home from Berlin in the Spring 2008 we did some intense rehearsal months piecing together all these ideas as well as writing new songs from scratch. Probably the most “co-operational” album we’ve ever made, for the first time everyone contributed with bits and pieces of composed material, most notably Casper wrote the choir part that ended up opening the album, his first compositional contribution after joining the band during the recording of the previous album.

During the months of rehearsing we probably worked on sketches for around 20 songs, but ended up taking 14 songs to the studio.

The most dramatic part of this whole process was the problems arising from our recurring lack of rehearsal room: Shortly after we started rehearsing for this album our old rehearsal complex was closed down. We managed to find another shortly after, but after being there for a while a heavy rain literally flooded the room and made it inhabitable, so we ended up rehearsing the last part in the studio.

We had booked the Sweet Silence Studios for five weeks during the Summer and thus ended up spending even more time there after witnessing the rehearsal room turned into lake one early Friday morning. Being the most legendary music studio in Copenhagen, most notably for the recordings of the early Metallica albums, but also for big Danish acts like Anne Linnet, Sort Sol, Gasolin and Mew, it was in some way a rather dubious honour to be the last complete session there; it had to close shortly after our recordings.

We had grown very happy with our cooperation with Jeff Knowler on the previous album, so he joined us for this one as well. This time staying all 5 weeks with us it was an even bigger pleasure working with him than the first time.

This collaboration also ended up adding quite a significant feature to the album in the shape of Jeff’s girlfriend, Sophie, the keyboard player in British rock band These New Puritans. She visited him in Copenhagen during our third week of recording and one early morning before any band members had yet made it to the studio he convinced her to dub the choir part on “Rising & Falling Points of Dust”. We were really happy with the result and ended up convincing him into convincing her to do some more and it ended up being quite a feature on several songs. This was the first time we had female vocals since a few parts on our debut.

Sophie was far from the only guest musician on this album. After the nearly “guest-free” The Art of Kissing Properly (with the exception of a minor guitar part done by my brother) this album also marks the return of numerous guest musicians. Bo Rande did trumpets and flugelhorn on the two first ones and returned for this album, this time teaming up with saxophone player Ned Ferm, who also did some clarinet and flute on the album. They stayed in the studio an entire day and ended up doing some dub vocals as well.

Morten Svenstrup and Nils Gröndal recorded strings on our second album and returned for this one. And our good friend Jacob Bellens, the great voice of Danish bands Murder and I Got You On Tape, did some backing vocals as well.

After five weeks of recording, three songs were left out of the race and we ended up sending eleven tracks across the Atlantic, where John Goodmanson did the mixing in Seattle. All of these eventually ended up on the album, providing this with exactly as many songs as the previous album and nearly the same total playing time.

Our fourth album, We Had Faces Then, in this way marks a return to the slightly more orchestral feel of the two first albums, but still more in sway with the general sound of our third one. And probably the most laid back, slowest album we’ve made so far.

The title is partly a quotation from the astounding 1950 Hollywood movie Sunset Boulevard. In this the main character, the has-been silent movie star Norma Desmond, complains about modern films with the line: “We didn’t need sound. We had faces.” I saw a documentary about this film and someone quoted it wrong saying: “We had faces then”. When I finally got around to see the actual movie I liked the misquote a lot better and it ended up serving as a title for the album.

This title says a lot about the general lyrical theme of the album; time passing and the choices one makes that ends up determining how this time is spent. Also a small note on the nostalgia, or rather negation of this that runs as a theme throughout the lyrics. As with the other albums this is to some degree about making choices. But nearly completely stripped of the desire theme that ran through all the others, this one is really about trying to settle with the way things are. As mentioned it’s in some way a negation of nostalgia, that things weren’t necessarily better in the good old days, they were just different. And that one might make life easier by accepting this.