Finally!!!

I have been waiting for the day I get to write this blog for almost a half a year. And now when I finally have my MacBook open for it, I don’t know what to say…;) I’ll try anyway…

They say the second album is the hardest one for any artist. I really hope they are right. It has been one hell of 12 months building the puzzle that never seemed to get there, but now looking back at the stuff we did, I would not do anything different. Probably there are a few lessons to be learnt for the future anyway…

We had barely any pressure recording the first album in 2005. We just had the dream of a real album in stores some day and we made all the decisions together with our producer Jukka Backlund. This time it was all very different. And of course it’s great that every one in our team wants to make the best out of us, and it’s actually very special to have a team working for you as hard and passionate as they do, but the fact that you suddenly have 30 people telling you how the song should sound and what the lyrics would be, makes focusing very hard. There was also an additional challenge since Jukka (our former keyboardist-producer) decided not to be a band member any more. Finding the same “great 1st album mood” in studio seemed impossible. And… To make it even harder we decided to build our own studio. Building the place took longer than we expected and when we started recording the first tracks for POPGASM, we were already 4 months late… Well done boys, nice start ;)

We recorded almost 40 songs for PopGasm. That's a lot. And there are many versions of many of the songs since we didn’t feel good with the outcome. For example “Bad”, the song we have already played live many times, was recorded 5 times.

POPGASM

I think it’s good that we lived and grew up for three years in between the 1st and 2nd album. I must admit the 3 years were quite a roller coaster and if we had tried releasing anything earlier, it would not have been something we would have liked. We needed the time to really stop for a moment after all the good and all the challenges that came along with the career. I have a feeling that if all goes well, we’ll be able to deliver new stuff a bit faster in the future.

Anyway. We like pretty simple music, stuff almost anyone can sing along as you can hear on the first album. That goes again with most of the songs on POPGASM. And I love that. We also wanted to try new things and to really challenge ourselves. In the beginning we almost took one step too far from our roots, but as time went by we realized that we are actually steadily on the Sunrise Avenue tracks. What I really like about our music is that it’s so normal in a way and you can tell that we are just normal guys doing what we love the most. There is nothing too fancy about Sunrise Avenue. Hope you get what I mean.

Now looking at the 14 tracks on PopGasm, I am very proud of us all. It’s suddenly exactly as I dreamed. There are many songs that could be on our first album and also many new fresh surprises. And some things the critics will probably hate us for, but life is not fun if it’s too safe. For us, music is not about being credible or following the rules of a certain genre. Our job is just to entertain the people who want that from us, so we wanted to take things even more relaxed this time. We wanted to be very brave. Be prepared ;) There’s even a full 24-person string orchestra (ahhhh) and we made them also do something they probably don’t do every day ;)

The only thing that I really wanted to get better for the 2nd album, were the lyrics. Sure we come from Finland and you can’t expect us to write brilliant stuff in English like Coldplay or the Foo Fighters do (being from UK / USA), but I guess I just wanted the stories to be a bit deeper and more personal. And I think we made it. It’s still no poetry, don’t worry. Wouldn’t fit to my simple half German mouth…

So now they are all asking me if POPGASM is better than the First one…? If I ask my mom, if my little brother is better than her first son, I know she has no answer. Well, I hope she doesn’t… ;) Or try asking your girl / boyfriend if the second kiss was better than the first one. We all know there’s nothing like the first kiss, but if you kiss a bit deeper and really let go with the second one, it can be as special as the one you started with. Then it can lead to something great.

POPGASM is a better second album. Even though it sounds better (technically) than the 1st one due to better toys in studio this time, there’s still a lot of emotion and the gang feeling there all the way. The things that should