Erlend Øye
Since eavesdropping at a studio door in Bergen, Norway, Erlend Øye has become an international spokesman for sentimental lyricism. It’s hard to believe that at one point friends were suggesting he find another vocalist to supplement his efforts – luckily, he kept on trucking until he found the right niche. Erlend came to prominence with acoustic duo Kings of Convenience, then made a sidechain via Tellé Records and Röyksopp to the universe of electronic dance music. He’s since proved, as we found out at the 2003 Red Bull Music Academy, that even if you feel your music falls between the categories, you should stick to your vision.
Hosted by (music: Röyksopp - “Poor Leno” / applause) We recorded the album with Kings of Convenience - maybe I should play some Kings of Convenience too? Ah, it doesn’t matter. Osunlade How long had Kings Of Convenience been a group? Erlend Øye Kind of since 1997, we started doing things, but we didn’t really work all the time. It was a... Osunlade It was just a collection of songs or did you guys play out? I mean, how did you acquire a deal? Did you have a demo? Erlend Øye Yeah, how we acquired a deal was because I was living in London and I was living in Manchester because I thought I should be where music is happening. I want to be where you get to know people. I really didn’t know how to do it because the problem with Kings of Convenience was, that there was no particular scene to latch on to. If you make house music, there is a lot of house labels or people you can get to know. I mean, when I was telling people I was in a band with two acoustic guitars and two vocals, people were like, “OK, you play blues?” [smiles] “No, we don’t play blues!” Osunlade So it’s ‘97 when you were working with this guy and you get the deal with Source, yeah? Erlend Øye Yes. Osunlade What year was that? Erlend Øye That was in the end of 1999 we got in contact with them and we signed a deal in April 2000. Here is the song. (music: Kings of Convenience - “I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From”) At this time I had made one more song with Röyksopp and I was really enjoying the thing about singing on electronic music. I mean generally, I really like to dance but my main problem, when I get out to dance is that so many of the songs, so many of the dance music is not very deep. [smiles] Especially when it comes to lyrics and, you know, very often I don’t get hit by vocals in dance music. Osunlade Was your introduction to electronic music with this project or had you been listening to it before coming from music like this with really acoustic background and songwriting in saying that you really didn’t find electronic music so deep, as far as a writing aspect and songwriting and arranging? What attracted you to electronic music? And I heard your solo album and it is very electronic. So what was the bridge from this to that? Erlend Øye Basically, I went to a festival in Finland in the summer of 2001 and I saw a band called Mr. Velcro Fastener with a really kind of hard electro sound. And seeing them made me very excited because the music was very hard and at the same time it was very intelligent. (music: Mr. Velcro Fastener – “Bend”) I really liked the control of this music. It is really fast and really kind of hard but they had a lot of control of what they were doing. What I didn’t really like was the vocals. It was worth a shot to combine this music with my type of songwriting. And as I was doing this, I mean I got into this idea, like Mr. Velcro Fastener there must be tons of good electronic music producers around the world that you have never heard about. And if I could find them, then it could make something special. But what eventually happened was that, as these people went to work with me, I think we all had the idea that now they we’re going to make something different from what they were doing. Then we would make something more like chillout music, which is not really what I wanted to do because I find with Kings of Convenience is my idea of listening music. If you’re just sitting down and you are not going to dance, you don’t need more than two instruments. I mean, this is a little bit of a generalization but... So it ended up somewhat in between. So here is the song that I made with Morgan Geist. (music: Morgan Geist - “Lullaby”) As you can hear it’s similar to Mr. Velcro Fastener but it’s a little bit slower, a little more chillout music. Osunlade Is your process the same when you are writing for electronic music as it would be for Kings of Convenience? Because it seems that you concentrate on the lyrical content. Whereas maybe Kings of Convenience is guitar-based, do you write with a guitar? How did you go into - especially working with someone like Morgan Geist - how did you go into it? Erlend Øye The story of the song you just heard, it’s kind of the typical situation where I’d never met Morgan [Geist] before. I sent him some music. And we met, you know, it was like, “OK, hello! OK, let’s make a track together.” Of course, it can be a little bit of an awkward start, but I quite like the awkward start. And then you basically start from nothing. I mean, you start with a drumbeat; you just start with the BPM. [laughs] And usually you would start making something and by day three, we basically had some idea of a chord and melody structure. And by then we totally redid what we had done. Like, it was kind of more of a house-y sound, and I was saying, “Yeah, I don’t know. I want kind of more like a synth bassline, which got some individual textures to it.” And he said, “Oh, you mean like this?” And it was like; he just played the whole bassline of the song. I said, “Yeah, like that. Great!” “Oh, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” “I don’t know. I didn’t know.” [laughs] Osunlade So this was kind of work in progress, as you went along, that was it? Erlend Øye Yeah. I mean, then we had many different parts and what usually happens is when you come to the end, you kind of have to cut away at least half of the stuff you have made to make it into a song and not like a collection of ideas. I had many vocal ideas and I had to sort of come down to something. And I had to write the lyrics finished, which is really hard. So I was just sitting in cafes like [imitates forcing it], and eventually you think of stuff. Osunlade What’s your musical background? Like, what were you inspired by growing up? What music did you listen to? Erlend Øye Well, I mean because electronic music, I guess it all started with A-Ha [waits for reaction and laughs]. It is electronic, you know? It is just like that there is so much pop there, that you don’t really see that they have used [electronic instruments]. [laughs] Osunlade So what about the aspirations of becoming a pop star? Do still have this? Are you still waiting to be a pop star? Erlend Øye I don’t know. I think I am. As long as I am being paid to go down to talk about songwriting in Cape Town, that is as much pop star as I ever wanted to be. Osunlade That’s cool. Audience Member On the new CD did you basically just write vocal parts or did you have any involvement in the other instruments or electronic instruments? And also, the second part of the question is, in contrast to the Kings Of Convenience stuff, has working with more traditional dance producers maybe made you think of songwriting in a different way? Erlend Øye Well, OK, first question first. I mean, most of the time we wrote it together in the same way. I would work with Eirik in Kings of Convenience, like I would play just some chords, he would play stuff of a bassline. I would change the chords, and I would say, “Will you play that in the bassline?” And he says, “Yeah, will you play that in the chords?” And it kind of goes from there. A common misconception about how the record was made is that people think I was writing on acoustic guitar and coming to them to make a remix. I mean, this is done a lot and I find that I would probably get to a different place if I’d do it actually as a collaboration. It’s not really like remixes. But it was different from producer to producer. Some people had very strong ideas. You know, they had really made up their mind when I got there and I really thought of something that they thought would work. And so, if they really had an idea, like Schneider TM from Berlin, he was like, “No, no, no, no, no. You stay out, you do the vocals!” And I was like, “OK.” But I mean, most people weren’t really sure about how we are doing to do it. So the most fun part I find is to work through it together. It often feels better if you know that you were just doing it. Like, it would never have happened if it wasn’t in fact you two together in a room. I particularly like when someone has already made a beat and maybe a simple bassline and some chords and then I can come up with something. Because sometimes you just hear a beat and some chords and it is like trrrrrring. And it’s there already and it’s really quick. And that’s quite cool, because then the process has already come to a certain point and then I can really feel I can contribute to see how the song should be finished. Because if you start a song from scratch when you have gotten halfway, you have always started to be a little deaf about the possibilities of that track. And if you come a little bit later in the process, that means that you can really quickly see how long should this go, before it goes into this and then [into this], you know? Audience Member I don’t know whether Röyksopp were signed when you first heard that song, but you would know that they had started with that label Tellé, which is from Norway, and that had a lot of subsidiaries of like, strict dance music and pop music and sort of weirder things. Did you know about them at all before? Erlend Øye Yes, actually I should have mentioned that earlier on. The way I knew about Röyksopp was my friend Mikal Telle, who runs Tellé Records, he put out some 7”s of Kings of Convenience very early on and he also put out the first 7” by Röyksopp. So I had heard of them through him. And I guess from that 7” I wasn’t like super-impressed but at some point he was visiting me, he had a CD with some demos of theirs. It is actually quite amazing because a song like “Eple,” the one that goes “dit doot, dipidit doot, badibadib doot, badibadib doot,” ahm, I was like, “Hey, check this out, isn’t this great?” “Well yeah, this is great!” And this is like in 1999 or something like this. And it is really exciting, to think about it now, after they have sold a million copies that I thought it was great when I heard it too. Well, but anyway so this was how I got my attention to them. Particularly, they also have this track with Anneli Drecker, track three on the record, there was a track with a woman singing. I mean, that really appealed to me as a real song together with good production. And I found that to be very special. So this is kind of how I got the idea of working with them and that’s probably why I decided to stop outside the door and listen to the beats. Osunlade For your solo album were you pretty freeform or did you have any idea of the sound that you were going for in electronic music? Because I hear as I mentioned before a bit of Pet Shop Boys in the vocals and it is very ‘80s, but it is very now as well. Did you have this in your mind? Erlend Øye Well, you know the thing, actually I think a downfall of the CD is that I had a little bit too much of an idea. And I think in retrospect I wish I had let a little bit more of the producer’s own ideas come out a little bit more. Because at the moment it’s a lot of tracks in 120 BPM, and it is a lot of stuff that I am trying to do. Sort of an electro groove with a synth bassline. It’s a lot of stuff I am doing . And it’s kind of working at the same time. Like the track with Schneider TM, he really had an idea, and he really had a vision too. And I was kind of more just being the vocalist. It is something in retrospect I am a little more proud of because it is going a little bit further. When we made it I was like, “Yeah, it’s nice, but...” I mean, the track grew on me, which is kind of funny. [laughs] But for sure the one thing about my vocals in general is that I have a very limited voice. Like, six years ago people in Bergen were suggesting, “So why don’t you get another singer to that band of yours?” You know, politely suggesting that. But the thing is, what is very important with voices is that you have to record yourself over and over again and try to sing in many different ways. And suddenly you’ll find, “Wait, when doing this, it actually works. When doing this, it doesn’t work.” And that’s different from every person. Osunlade I would just like to hear what you thought was the maybe furthest stretch from what you expected from your own ideas of the album. Erlend Øye I mean, even the text here, you know is something that I was a little bit unsure about, but Schneider [TM] says it’s great. (music: Erlend Øye - “Like Gold”) Osunlade When are you incorporating the electronic experience into the future Kings of Convenience projects? Are you bridging those things? Erlend Øye Not really, I think that... Osunlade You want to keep them separate? Erlend Øye No, it is not that I want to keep them separate. I just find that Kings of Convenience are special because it’s so simple as it is. In the moment you have a little bleeps and blops, it might trying to be a little bit more with the times, but itself is being timeless. And it starts getting dated very soon. Osunlade Yeah, but there is a way, I believe, that you can do both. Erlend Øye Yeah. Amen! Osunlade You are also doing the next DJ-Kicks projects as well. Erlend Øye Yes, I am. And whenever I DJ, I can’t stop singing, you know? [laughs] Osunlade So yeah, you were saying you sing over the instrumental things that you play while you DJ. Erlend Øye Yes. Osunlade Very interesting concept. Can you show this to us? Erlend Øye I’ll see if I can do something like that. [puts a CD into the player] I mean, the main fun about it is that if you are playing, you play stuff that you maybe don’t know so well. You play it and then you think about things as you are playing to people. Because your brain works a little bit different. And you maybe understand a little better what is it that will work here in this venue when you are actually in the venue instead of when you are in a studio, which is very far away from the reality the track’s going to be played in. Osunlade And do you just make it up just as you go, freestyle, or do you have ideas in your mind of what you will sing? Erlend Øye Yeah, I mean, I sing often cover songs because if you have the lyrics already, of course, is a little bit easier. Osunlade With the label Source, I don’t know much about the label outside of the success with some of the hip hop that they’ve released, it seems a very different sort of label. I know they are associated with Virgin UK. Erlend Øye Yeah, we were signed to Source when it was still an independent, initially the boss of our company got asked if he could be the MD, which is the managing director, of Virgin UK. So he said yes and he said that it would not change the way he did Source Records, but eventually it did. And this was when my solo album was released and unfortunately I felt that it was an album that would work really well when Source was an independent. But now as it was really Virgin, I mean, it wasn’t pop enough to be a pop album. At the same time it is not really underground enough to be, you know an underground release. It is not really 12” music either, so it kind of fell a little bit in between two chairs. Osunlade Do you find that frustrating being in a situation that you signed a deal with an independent that basically became a major? Erlend Øye Yes. Osunlade What are the differences creatively or maybe the things you have to go through now, since it is a corporate situation, solo project, group project? Erlend Øye A major record company, once you do a lot of stuff, they also very often ask you to change, they try to format your music to work with whatever their reality is. In England it is always Radio One. If they can get it on [BBC] Radio One, it will sell a lot of records. If they can’t, it won’t. And it becomes very boring to listen to them because everything they ask you about is basically centered around one thing, to get on this one radio station. And also in the long run, it just doesn’t help you if you try to conform to this. Because so many people try. You try to make stupid remixes and eventually they won’t play it either. I mean, of course, no one is going to play something that really isn’t the project. If you have a project with a soul, it is either they like it as it is or they don’t. And if you try to give them something, which is totally changed from what it really is, then you can’t defend it anymore. And, of course, you will be a one-hit wonder. I mean, at least at the level I am doing. I am kind of a “real artist,” making “real music.” I mean, Kylie Minogue for sure can do it whatever way she wants to because that’s not really the point of her. I mean, she has a great body, I don’t have a great body. [smiles] Wait. (music: Erlend Øye - “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”)