Messed!Up
Quality singer-songwriters are a rare breed, especially for someone like me who occasionally has pointed out that the singer-songwriter market is “super saturated”, and accordingly there are only three acts worth my hard-earned money: Feist, Tom McRae, and Gothenburg’s post-rock trippin’ Albert af Ekenstam.
Ekenstam released his debut album “Ashes” in 2016 featuring ten songs of fully-formed and beautifully-presented craft fusing everything from Bon Iver to Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, and the record was well-received among international critics, particularly in the German-speaking region where FKP Scorpio, the major tour organizer, booked Ekenstam for a full tour the year after its release.
Today, four years after “Ashes”, Ekenstam is struggling under the pressure of releasing his second album. Aside from the much sonically quieter EP “Hundred Miles” released in 2018, it has been silent although not intentionally. Ekenstam tries hard to fight self-doubt and pressures of the second album syndrome, but he knows how to do it – it’s all about doing it.
We met up with Albert at Pustervik to chat about his post-rock influenced type of music and how hard it is to write a second album. But we started off with a recap of the Roskilde Festival and his former band, post-rock act Tempel.
“I was a guitarist, not a singer”
I remember a great show with a band called Tempel at the Roskilde Festival 2014, but didn’t know it was your band until just recently.
(laugh) You were there? That was an awesome experience.
A few years back I only played guitar, I didn’t sing or anything else. My mom died when I was twelve and the same day I decided to spend all my time learning to play the guitar, and I practiced almost six hours a day until I was 23. Then I lost the fun in it, I actually lost it completely and fell into a depression. But something good came out of it in the end because the idea of me starting to sing and do things on my own started to grow during that period.
And I changed things. I decided to only do music I like and it wasn’t jazz, that I mostly played at the time, and I started Tempel with a friend of mine, Filip Leyman, and released a record. We got booked for some great shows quite soon; Icelandic Airwaves; Roskilde Festival and a few more festivals.
The point is that there was barely any promotion at all for the record even if Kning Disk released it. They’re always great to deal with, but Mattias who’s running the label was going through a rough time and we did all of the work on our own.
Tempel’s music is quite far from what you do now, it’s post-rock, but how much influences have you brought with you? It sounds like some songs on “Ashes” have quite many post-rock elements in them.
In Tempel I probably wrote 70% of the music and you can hear lots of influences of Tempel’s music on my record, especially on “Angel Liz”.
I have a background in instrumental music, I played jazz, but it was never what I wanted to do because I always felt out of place. That’s why I started Tempel. But it is far from being a singer-songwriter, I know.
But I have always been singing although not in a band, just at home when I worked on my own music just because I thought “I can’t sing, it just sounds horrible and I can’t do it”. I was a guitarist, not a singer. I’ve never taken any singing classes or practiced in any other way until I started to write my own songs, but the thought that “Someday I just have to do it” has always been with me since I was 18. And very slowly it grew from being an idea to become real, and Tempel turned into a solo career.
But it must be quite different for you to play solo shows compared to have a band on stage when you consider the orchestration you have on songs like “Angel Liz” on the record?
Yeah, and that’s a huge problem for me when I’m booked for solo shows, it doesn’t feel right without a band on stage and I really don’t want to do it solo either. Well, I can play short sets solo but you won’t access the whole soundworld of the music as a listener then. I love how music evolves dramaturgically, with highs and lows just like in post-rock music, but to do it on stage requires a band.
A concert is just like a movie that follows a dramaturgical model, that’s how I see it.
The Sophomore Slump
Everyone has heard about the “sophomore slump” or “ the difficult second album syndrome”, it’s an enduring concept in music mythology. Bands and artists put their formative years into creating an explosive debut that draws on their whole life experience, and riding high on the success of their debuts (which may have been written over many years) bands go into the studio to record their second albums just to find it’s really hard to repeat the success of their debut.
However, for Ekenstam it’s far more complex than writing the harmonies although the debut brought with it lots of pressure on writing an even sonically better record. It’s a battle against self-doubt in terms of writing lyrics and how to pull a good story together. Above all, it’s about organizing his writing sessions to “get the job done”.
Your manager told us that you are working on a new record which would be your first release since the 2018 EP “Hundred Miles”. How is it progressing?
I’m slowly getting there and have done a third of the songs I need for a record, at least how I want it to be. But I need something to happen in life to give me inspiration to write because it’s my life stories that translate into songs.
My problem is self-doubt that stops me from continuing with some ideas if they’re not good right away. I just put them into a box, a folder on my phone, and let them stay there. It makes the song-writing process and the time to finish the record very slow, but it has a lot to do with me not seeing myself as a singer, it was just something I felt I had to do, otherwise I couldn’t release music on my own.
Like doubting your ability to write lyrics?
Especially that part, but I’m working on it quite much and have my best friend Sumi [Gothenburg artist] helping me out, she’s like a sister to me. Without her I wouldn’t have finished any songs at all and that makes her extremely important to me.
There’s a good network of musicians in Gothenburg and we usually hang out and share ideas, like Sumi, Filip Leyman and Kalle Vento who play live with me, Anna von Hausswolff and a few more. They all have their own projects but we share ideas and help each other out.
You said that you write on your life experiences and that they’re important for your lyrics, but isn’t there a line you shouldn’t cross and become too personal?
Yeah, I know about that and it’s really difficult, actually horrible, for me to read my interviews, especially if I talk about personal experiences (laugh). The worst moment was when TV4 [Swedish TV channel] did a reportage on me and did a story about my mom passing away and me working at the hospital, just a horrible story that didn’t come out very well. At that moment I just wanted to disappear from the face of the earth (laugh).
On the other hand, I don’t know what to write about if I don’t use my life as inspiration. It must feel genuine to me. It’s something that has bothered me at times and I’m trying to find new ways of writing lyrics. Writing music and singing feels natural, but writing the lyrics is just dreadful. I want it to be just as natural as writing songs, but luckily I have Sumi to help me out. She understands what I want to say.
I just send her a crappy text with random words or something I’ve almost finished and she gets it all right. She means everything for my lyrics.
But isn’t it also a lot of pressure because of how well your debut album was received?
Most definitely! That’s the reason I throw away so many ideas even before they get a chance to grow a bit. I’m suffering from it, it’s emotionally painful and I walk around like a ghost some days and wonder “What the fuck is wrong with me” (laugh). I just have to get back on track because when I’m on stage I feel complete like nothing is missing in life.
I just need to become more organized and start to schedule song-writing sessions, but I’m not good at it at the moment. If I don’t do it I will spend the time laying on the sofa and watch TV (laugh). I just haven’t reached that panic yet where I start to organize things, that’s why it’s a slow process at the moment. On the other hand, the songs I’ve finished so far are much better than many of the songs on “Ashes”. I just like “Angel Liz” and “The Devil Bird” on that record, that’s what I’m proud of. On the next record I want more songs like those, maybe ten like that, but it won’t happen (laugh).
I released the ”Hundred Miles” EP two years ago, and it’s quite different than “Ashes” and has more stripped songs, not this big sound as on “Angel Liz”, but it was intentional because I wanted to try out a new direction.
Does it mean that the next record will have a bigger sound and be more similar to songs like “Angel Liz”?
I have quite many ideas on the overall sound of the record and it will be a lot heavier than on “Ashes” and with more post-rock elements. I’ve experimented with the sound quite much lately.
I grew up with post-rock and hardcore, that kind of music is part of my soul and something I listen to quite much even today. And it’s not that different from what singer-songwriters do; it has the same kind of melancholic and meditative feeling in the music.
Since you’re a bit stuck in the writing process at the moment I guess you don’t know yet when to release the record.
I need to have it done by next year and release it during 2021 and just hope that things have changed enough to allow for live shows again. Then I need to find a German label or agency to get back on the German-speaking market again. I’ve been away for a while and have to rebuild my brand in Germany again. It’s not like José González who can do whatever he wants and people will still remember him (laugh).
But at the moment it’s all about me and how to organize my song-writing, that’s where the pressure is. I just have to get myself together and get it done (laugh).
And when the new album is released you plan to tour Europe? I remember you playing at Reeperbahn Festival a few years ago and it seemingly opened some doors for you because you toured Germany quite much after it.
Yeah, quite much happened after that show, but not only in Germany, I played shows in Austria as well and was booked for some great festivals. Some of my best shows ever have been in the German-speaking area, much because FKP Scorpio booked me for a tour quite early in my career, a bit too early to be honest. I wasn’t big enough yet and it didn’t pan out in the best of ways. They booked me at too big venues at times, even if I told them “Hey, I don’t have a German label that can promote me yet”, but they didn’t listen. I wasn’t ready for it at the time and should probably have done lots of other things before a tour like that. But I did some really, really big shows.
All this happened just a year after I released “Ashes” and it was quite many solo shows which meant I had to work extremely much. I’ve never been that tired in my whole life (laugh). I could work night shifts at the hospital at my ordinary job, take a flight in the morning just after I left work and play in Germany in the evening. That was a tough period, but fun (laugh).
I’m still a new artist even if I have released one record and toured it quite much, but people forget about you when you haven’t toured for a while. But I still have contact with many of the venues and people I met during that tour and maybe I can use those connections to get back again.
Photographer: ©Richard Bloom
Photo gallery
Albert af Ekenstam pages
Messed!Up Recommends
