Even though many of the demos were quite carefully recorded we anyway ended up replacing almost everything or even starting songs from scratch, using the demo as a template. All the bass lines were redone, most of the guitars and all the drums of course, as they were programmed. The original demo parts that made the final mix include the wailing guitars on Waiting for a train and Niclas Carron’s superb verse fills on Pray where he uses the middle mic on his Fender Strat that I know he prefers (and which I never use on mine). A lot of the original keyboard parts were also used.
Often, we used Herbie’s original demo arrangements, which mostly worked fine, though not always. That’s Me is a case in question which we recorded completely uncritically and which sounded like it had been mixed by Stefan Glaumann (First Cab producer) in 1984, totally drowned in reverb. We accepted that for months until we were nearing the end of the project and listened through all the songs, being completely honest about what we were hearing. Björn’s comment on That’s Me was classic: “I fast-forward that one”. Consequently, in the week following that meeting I worked on the song and revamped it completely, with new a drum and bass rhythm completely different from the original, plus some new guitars. The singing was kept. The week after that we re-recorded Björn’s drums and lifted the song to become one which is definitely not fast-forwarded. Herbie’s original arrangement for Northern Skies is intact on the other hand and is a high-point at the end of the album. If I have one regret, it’s that we didn’t put that track earlier in the sequencing.
Waiting for a train also caused some headaches. I didn’t really like the drum rhythm on my original demo and spent a lot of time trying to give it more bounce. After Björn re-did the drums, the bass part didn’t fit and we weren’t satisfied until the sixth version of that. Under Heaven was written on the jetty in September 2017 on an iPad while Niclas Carron was out in a rowboat with his young son Eddie, trying to catch a fish. That song was close to not making the final cut until some heavy editing and revamping had been done. After which, well, I’m glad it’s there. Plans for the cover artwork. Herbie had a couple of suggestions, one with a bunch of guys in 40’s zoot-suits with angel’s wings. Eh? It was surreal and quite fun until he even added a nuclear explosion, which I thought looked like a cauliflower in one corner of the picture. And a pile of skulls in the other corner. Another Herbie suggestion was a collage of eyes, noses and mouths, which when reduced in size looked just like a pink pavement pizza. �6�7 B