In the 17 years that have passed since the Love & Alcohol album was released Herbie, Björn and I have played together in both Tuckers Lilla Kapell and Men On The Border for most of that time. We had been very active with Men On The Border for a few years, recording a lot (46 songs on Spotify) and performing major concerts with Sandvikens Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in both Sandviken and Cambridge, UK, in 2016 and the following year at the Dalhalla arena together with part of the SSO (the psychedelic part) supporting P-Floyd. After Dalhalla came a lull in MOTB activity and Herbie put the question: “Shall we make a Padded Room album?” My response was: yes indeed. The timing was perfect and we both had a bunch of songs to put on the table.
All three of us were in the studio together to listen through all the demos Herbie and I had and to choose which songs to work with. We listened through 21 songs that first evening at the end of October 2017 and several songs felt obvious for inclusion. The following week we chose a song to work with, more or less at random and started building its structure in Cubase. That was the start of the process and routine of the three of us meeting once a week, usually recording drums or bass and building the structure of the next song. Between meetings I would work on guitars or keyboards, or do some singing, programme drums or edit. The programmed drums were not used at all in the final mixes, but were kept as a guide for recording other instruments. As soon as Björn had played his drum parts, the programmed drums were axed and as spring came on we were working mostly on vocals. Layers of backing vocals featuring all three of us.
Some nerd stuff: I’ve had a Tama drum kit in the studio for three years, which I bought from an ex-work colleague who had stopped playing (Lennart Eltin). It’s an 80’s kit but in very good condition, apart from some issues with the snare, which Björn sorted pretty quickly when he put his mind to it. I also put new top skins on everything. I use 10 microphones on the kit, including two room mics, two overheads and two mics on the snare: one under, one over. The underside mic on the snare is great for picking up light touches (a good example of that is at the end of “Let Go”). I should point out that my studio is small, only 9 square meters, but the room mics still make a big difference to the overall sound.
I use Gatt drum mics, a couple of Shure SM57s, and large-membrane condensers for the room mics. It might be a bit rough-and-ready but it does the job. Early on I found another band called Padded Room on Spotify, which complicated things a little, but after giving it some thought, we decided to call ourselves A Padded Room for this project. However, we have three previous albums in our backpacks and we don’t know what to do about the name if we should decide to put them out on streaming sites too. Call them all A Padded Room? Maybe. The covers could stay the same.