Category: A Padded Room

When A Padded Room was to be uploaded to the streaming sites distributor, one of the obligatory questions we had to answer was how we categorize our music. Which is not as easy as it sounds. We’re not rockabilly and we’re not death metal. We can’t be called pop and rock is way too broad. So, after a very brief chat about that we decided on alternative rock. Which is probably OK, though if I was uploading something today I might choose indie rock instead.

There’s something kind of unsettling in right from the outset having to define so decisively what you are and put yourself into that little box. But everybody does it, because you must. That’s the way the internet works: tagging and metadata, all these hidden clues to pull you into a list if someone looks for a specific tag on a search engine. And it’s all about the internet. It’s a bit unfortunate that you can usually only choose one category though, as it’s not impossible that your music could fit into two, or even three categories. But alternative rock includes a lot of acts that we like or feel some affinity with, so it’s not wrong.

My biggest concern though, is if I write something a bit pop, or a bit punk, as I quite often do. How does that sit with the label “alternative rock”? And where does a song like Under Heaven fit in? I honestly have no idea. A Padded Room varies in style from one song to the next, not least because there are two of us writing the songs. And both Herbie and myself have a history of listening to just about anything good, regardless of how it’s categorized. We draw on influences from the entire history of rock, at least to a certain extent.

I can understand the reasoning behind categorization but there’s something confining about having to pigeonhole yourself and be locked into just one thing. For me it feels like an exclusion from something, rather than an inclusion. But that’s the way the music industry has developed, with radio stations dotted all over the USA, each playing only one category of music. Aiming for their little niche audience and excluding everything and everybody else. Great for an hour if you like a particular category, but does everybody only listen to one style of music? I doubt it.  

The Classic Rock station here in Sweden could and should have been fun but isn’t. The focus even there is far too narrow (mostly metal greatest hits) and I don’t know how many times I’ve turned it off when Joan Jett came on. Hearing a song from 1980 that you haven’t heard for years can give you a boost, but then hearing it again every day for a week or even two is incredibly tiresome. The song I’m thinking of is “London Calling” by The Clash. Great song, but why have I only ever heard that one song from that album on that station? Why not choose another? I think it’s either cowardice or sponsors insisting on only the hits! I’d love to hear something inspiring on the radio, something to get the blood running faster in my veins, but I can’t remember the last time that happened. Though it could have been the very first time I heard London Calling on Classic Rock. x

There are an unusual number of references to God or deities in the songs on this album and both Herbie and I have done this completely independently of each other. We’ve never had a conversation about God, mainly because neither of us are remotely interested in the subject, but we were both brought up in religious families: me as a Catholic and Herbie as a Mormon. We both announced our total lack of interest in our religions to our families in our teens, scandalizing them in the process. But like with most teen “problems”, that was forgiven and forgotten in time.

On Friday 4^th February 2011, I woke up at 2:15 with a melody in my head. I knew from experience that if this was not immediately documented it would disappear and I would remember nothing in the morning. So I got out of bed, went into the studio, got a guitar, worked out chords to sing to and wrote Pray. I wrote all the words to the song before going back to bed at about 3:30, after the end of the chorus came to me: “if I thought God might listen I’d pray”. The end of the last verse goes “that I’d be forgiven and the legless might get up and dance”.  Or pigs will fly. Or fat chance of being forgiven for anything, in other words. I’m not self-psychoanalyzing, but Catholics are notoriously guilty and constantly needing forgiveness for the slightest infringement, with a visit to the local church for confession to a priest.  I did it myself many times as a child, but never as an adult.

Even without the psychoanalysis it feels like there’s residual godliness lurking in our subconscious minds that needs release. This is probably a better way than most for exorcising that.

Herbie and I wrote this collection of songs over a period of several years. We had already written many of them when Göran Nyström came to me in late 2011 and proposed doing a couple of Syd Barrett songs for fun. That turned into an album of Syd songs for Men On The Border (MOTB) in a lavish gatefold CD with a booklet. The follow-up album “Jumpstart” was mostly written by Göran and myself, like the following bunch of singles. All my songs prior to MOTB were shelved for the time being. Herbie’s too. After I was lucky enough to get Herbie and Björn into MOTB playing bass and drums, Herbie brought along a demo of Northern Skies to a rehearsal, just to play it for us. It was great, but typically we had more than enough songs, which is usually the way of it.

It was a bit like that in Tuckers Lilla Kapell, which was Lasse Forberg’s band. Herbie and I contributed a few songs along the way, but the overwhelming majority were Lasse’s, who wrote genuine Tucker’s songs. When I wrote a song for that band, it was basically a Lasse song with my name on it. Copying Lasse’s style to fit the context. I hope that someday, someone will look at the lyrics for all these Padded Room songs. There are forty-six of them (so far) and they’re sadly ignored. Herbie is a great songwriter and a master with lyrics. It’s no coincidence that on all the songs which are credited to Etheridge/Parkin, I wrote the music and Herbie wrote the lyrics. This is usually because if I don’t find something concrete to write about very quickly, my mind goes blank and I get nothing at all. But Herb always comes up with the goods. That’s how it’s been since we started writing together in the 80s. t-f!64�B

In May 2018, I was mixing for real and even if I love doing that, it’s agony all the same. I don’t know how many times I remixed the whole album, but 20 times is not an exaggeration. These days we use Dropbox to share files and I made MP3 mixes for Björn and Herbie to listen to and comment. The comments I got were usually variations on a theme of “it sounds great”. Ten mixes later the comments were “leave it now Phil. That’s enough!” My argument is that I can’t leave it until it sounds like an album and not just a bunch of songs. It must be coherent and I couldn’t leave it until I was as close to that as I could get it. In the end I stopped uploading to Dropbox until I was really finished.

One evening in early August we spent a couple of hours on the jetty by the lake listening to the album on a Bluetooth speaker making plans. On our way back to the house, we stopped on the huge lawn and looked at our shadows, which with the sun behind us were 10 meters long. Herbie had his camera with him and took a bunch of photos of our shadows. Before we got back to the house we’d decided that we had to use one of those striking images for the front cover. I changed the green grass to red/orange in Photoshop.

Mid-July to mid-August I did nothing with the album, or anyway very little. But once I got going again I quite quickly reached my mixing limit and couldn’t face doing it anymore. After mastering the whole album one last time, I uploaded it to the distributor for streaming sites and converted the album to an image for the CD pressing. And learned how to convert the texts on the back cover and the logo to vector. And the front cover had to be in CMYK not RGB. And it had to fit a template for printing. It all felt never-ending, but of course it did end.  After listening to the same songs hundreds of times over the course of 10 months, I was not exactly longing to hear the album when the CDs were finally delivered on 17^th September 2018. My normal reaction to a finished album is that it can take 6 months before I can bear to hear it again. That is not the case with A Padded Room. It took only two days for me to check it out and I listened to the whole album twice over. And enjoyed it! And again, the next day. No anxiety at all. There are one or two small things I could have done better, but it’s nothing I can’t live with. I’m a happy camper! W6C�B

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�7B

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.