Today marked a huge first for Silent Call - our first interview. Intense! I ended up talking to this guy called Christoph, from Germany. I was trying to record the interview for posterity, so I could have something to listen to when I’m home alone and things are slow - but I don’t own a telephone with a speaker phone function. So I ended up wiring up my microphone into my POD; blasting the input gain, putting huge amounts of compression on that - and now, I can barely hear him in there, Christoph, wheezing away amidst all the electromagnetic noise left over from the birth of the Sun, and if You try really, really hard You can discern something while Your mind works in “A Beautiful Mind” decoding mode, but as it’s so quiet You’ve been forced to turn up the volume, so when my unmitigated response comes booming back at You - I tell You, I have sensed the end of the world. And it is no pleasant end.

It was weird talking to someone so far away though - and easy to have little mental images of what the room of the person You’re talking to looks like! All I ever wanted a few years ago was to tell my side of the story. After the Big Breakup, I kept reading interview after interview and getting more and more infused with anger and putrid bitterness - but You know what? I felt none of that yesterday. I was just talking to a really cool guy who listened to our album and wants us to do well.

Thanks for curing me of a real malady, Mr Poeschl. Whatever Your room looks like.

I’m sitting at home working on some really cool material we’re going to be releasing when our album hits the shelves - it’s a documentary film of sorts, and I harbor hopes to answer some questions that I harbor still more hope someone will want the answers to. Sound cryptical? Well, check it out on our release day and You’ll see

Video editing software is not particularly fun. But hopefully the finished product will be

I just received two phone calls from HÅkan at the studio in Gothenburg. I feel so good talking to him. He told me that they would do their absolut best to rectify some of the problems that have happened somewhere along the line between recording a perfect take, and not hearing it in the finished product. They would do everything they could.

In the limited time available to them due to our constrained mixing budget, I really believe and trust they have done their utmost. And I hope and believe that in the end we will have made a record we can all be proud of. If someone had told me I’d be here, releasing my second official album - and such a great one at that, when I was seventeen, I would have sold my soul to be where I am now. So You know what? I’m going to kick back and enjoy this for a while. And worry about all that stuff some other day.

A guy emailed me today saying he thought my last name was much cooler than his *lol* First time for everything, I suppose. A good day.

Why does the music industry always leave such a bitter aftertaste in Your mouth? It seems that in those two words, ‘music industry’, the focus is so clearly shifted toward the latter, away from the former. It is so easy, so frighteningly easy, to lose track of one’s creative process and spark when this is set against the insurmountable institutionalized obstacles that the reality of music production represents…

The album is nearing the end of the post-production process now, finally, although as so many artists before us we are being put into a position of needing to accept compromise as a way of getting our music out. For one of us in particular this will be a personal blow both heavy and ultimately unnecessary.

But You know what? That’s life! We’re in a place so many other people would give anything to be. We can’t lose our hunger over needing to compromise with people who are, after all, depending on us to give them their daily bread. Perfection is a luxury bil-payers can ill afford. So go ahead, life, meet me half way, I know we’re both working like animals to make it. In the words of the great Don Dokken: I don’t mind, and I don’t worry. I will survive.