Your Bitches

Here are the lyrics for my new single Your Bitches, sing along!

YOUR BITCHES

you always pick the ones
with really tidy hair
who have nothing much to say
except ‘when can we go home’
‘I wanna cook for you’
‘I’ll make you feel young’
‘I wanna make you healthy’
although, when she makes love
she’s quiet as a mouse…

sometimes you gotta go out
to drink and to smoke
and to do bad things
to flirt with the girls in short miniskirts
you burp and you puke
and you sleep on the sofa with your shoes on

wonder what she sees in you then?

you always pick the ones
with schedules and gym cards
who get drunk just once a year
and hardly ever curse
yeah, you always pick the ones
who get on with everyone
and if they don’t like me
they will never ever come clean
so just shut up
come on, shut up

so that we can go out
to drink and to smoke
to do bad things
to flirt with the girls in those short miniskirts
oh, you burp and you puke
you sleep on the sofa with your shoes on
yeah, you drink and you smoke
and you flirt with any kinda girl with any kinda skirt on
yeah, you burp and you puke
and you sleep on the sofa with your shoes on

wonder what she sees in you then?

Astrid and The Drunk Lovers make a record and play their first show

It's impossible to have anything much to tell about recording an album. It's fun and ugly. Day by day everyone begins to look worse. Intense energy, boredom, excitement of the new, fear.
But now we're in the second from last day of mixing. At this point all perspective, distance and good will is gone. It's just uncertainty, fiddling with small frequencies that make all the difference. Nerves. The band is dispersed all over Scandinavia, waiting to hear what happened to the songs.

Getting ready for the first gig with A. S. & The Drunk Lovers at Bar Loose. We played so loud some people had to leave. But I promise to work on this, as we are not trying to be Dinosaur Junior. We tried to do a red-wine-thing on stage but it sucked. Anyway, it was impressive.


Don't go jogging for the first time in the spring with someone who runs all the time, is twice your height, and even does streching afterwards. This put me off for weeks.


Studio recipe: Garlic. Ginger. Onion. Good. (But no chili)

Astrid Swan & The Drunk Lovers fall for eachother

Hello from the studio. Here are some pictures from the first week of recording the new Astrid Swan album. The big news is that I have a dangerous band now and they have a name: The Drunk Lovers. The good news is that we rock and our songs are catchy!

Berlin Hearts

Inside a cab that stopped at the red lights in Mitte. This is a story of two people who traveled all around Berlin in cabs. It seemed totally sensible at the time.

Breakfast in Prenzlauer Berg. The end of the official work days and the beginning of the official holiday. A watershead. Notice the bee on my apple with dusting sugar. I don't have a picture of Niko at this breakfast, but he looked like a blond Serpico (below)who had just climbed home through a window, two hours earlier. The sun was shining mercilessly on his face. It was ridiculously warm and cheerful in that part of town.


Yelka took us to her and her friends' new little summer cottage next to a big river, which may have been the Rhine. It sounds romantic that way. Anyway, it was so big Yelka insisted it could be mistaken for an ocean. It was the Berlin Ocean. We drove in a 1970s Opel Recordf with seven people. I got the lucky seat between the driver and the shot gun – it was a quilt or a sleeping bag from the 1970s, dipped in some unknown oil. We drove from Kreuzberg through the West on the longest and widest road for a long time. At the cottage Macke had to first fix some pipes and then he got to save Yelka's sailing boat from sinking.


On Sunday we went to a big flea market in the East. I learnt about MSG and we went to a thai place free of it. We also discovered the massiveness of the Soviet streets and building blogs. And the graffiti. All this was brought to us by Jonas, our guide of the day (below).

This picture is boring. It represents a long Friday walk, which we embarked on partly because we got lost. We saw the Brandenburg Gate, to the right of this picture. And a lot of grand buildings with no life, but a lot of past. I was too tired to read about the history of the Gate, but I wanted it to be old. Most of this walk I thought about having a latte. This is evidence of the little tourists in us. The dutiful camera man and his dead dog, two steps behind.
Then there were nights. They bit into our days and made us zombies.

There was playing and all the lovely people who took care of us and found us instruments and even clapped their hands at shows. There was Yelka, the incredible DJ who was supposed to be recovering at home. Falafel, Red Curry and the 'Best Meal Ever'. And the Eagle Boston citizens with their homes close by and their incredible Berlin hearts.
Niko did all the shopping. He found this hat on Monday. I had lost my sense of style. Or direction.
Soundtrack to this post: 'Berlin Heart' from The Dears –Missiles (2008)

It takes a while to reach the home ground after some touring. I just cooked spaghetti. The first time I made food in a couple of weeks. Yesterday I just walked around in the apartment listening to music and wondering where I was. At night I thought I must be in another hotel because our bedroom looked so white. I'm home.

First there was Berlin, then Sweden. Two different countries, two different bands.

Berlin - the duo's first trip abroad
we thought there might be more gigs and more press etc. because Spartan Picnic came out on October 10th in Germany, but in the end we had two shows in Berlin and then a weekend for ourselves.
Sweden - with my new Swedish band
Started on Monday with press in Stockholm, then two days in Lidköping and Skövde rehearsing with Coma and Sebastian. Then gigs in Gothenburg, Eskilstuna and Stockholm as part of the Mokoma Tour 2008.I will get to the juicy bits and photography soon.
Here is a list of music that helps me to land:
Kevin Tihista's Red Terror - Don't Breath a Word
Elliot Smith - XO
M Ward - Post-war

Tour with Eagle Boston

The Duo was scheduled to play two shows (Tampere and Turku) last week with a Berlin-based band Eagle Boston, before both bands would perform at the Flow Festival 2008. As usual, it's hard to remember to inform everyone about every detail regarding these little trips. This time around Rami (our livesound person) only found out once he turned up at Kaapeli that we were touring with another band. But when he turned up at 4PM there was another more pressing matter: Antti from EB had taken one look at the van and noticed that one of the back tires was very flat and in no condition to be used. So the trip started with changing of the tire, which combined with Helsinki's 5 o'clock traffic delayed us for an hour. By 9.30PM in Tampere Eagle Boston looked like this:
It turned out we complimented each other nicely as EB have two bass players and we have none. These were some of the topics we picked for bonding that night: Your rider vs. ours, cool hand-pressed merch, Finnish history from Lalli to Mannerheim, Tampere vs. Manchester, Berlin, 9/11 & airbus accidents, education and jobs, state of Finnish music business vs. elsewhere, boots from Mexico, the desert god, measuring air pressure in car tires.
The next day Eagle Boston went to the Tampere market square for breakfast and some dancing. All I know about it is that they were happy and emotional afterwards with their raspberries and Yelka's impressive double CD by Pispalan Sällit. There were no lakes to be seen on the way from Tampere to Turku, but there was a long discussion in the backseats about longing and its different translations: Kaipuu jonkun luo...
And in Turku there was a very cold lake in which all the Germans swam while the Finns stood freezing and making sand ducks.

In Turku it was time to set up the merch table again, and to play.
At the end of our set we invited Eagle Boston on stage with us to play a six piece version of Bloc Party's SRXT. We were hoping someone would have filmed/recorded the song and stuck it in Youtube, but nothing has surfaced...it'll always be a classic moment in our collective memories then.
We stayed up until morning (again) in Turku, and in a bizarre sometimes threateningly violent way it was worth it.Everyone danced with Macke, to either Young Marbe Giants or to Pispalan Sällit:At the end we were sleep deprived and ragged. We ended up driving to the festival area in Helsinki and leaving our gear there for the next day. The A.S Duo packed everything under the main stage only to find that the next day all the synths were wet and damp. At home I found a yellow Kimble piece in my purse. It's nice to have band affairs like this. They don't always happen.

The Duo

On the hottest day of the summer we drove to Harjavalta and played our first duo show at Karmarock 2008. We arrived early, had time to get lost, found the motel (á la Twin Peaks), thought there was no rider for us backstage... Here is the changing room backstage:
And this picture was taken to see if the hat's OK:
OK, the duo felt a little uncertain on stage due to the newness of these facts: Rhodes, Fender amp, Korg synth for Astrid and singing and Yamaha synth for Niko (he wasn't so bad on the drums). It was fun to play, but after the show we could only talk of the many many mistakes made. Also, Niko's synth kept falling off of its makeshift stand in the middle of songs, landing on his foot and making unwanted wrong notes over what ever we were playing...And I kept looking at Mikael (who wasn't there) when ever there was a wrong note, before realizing I'm fluffing all by myself. But hey, we got some very nice thank you's from the audience and from other and highly valued musicians that night:By the time this picture was taken we had been informed by more experienced Cosmonauts that in fact we had a rider if only we asked from the backstage kitchen. Suddenly we had more friends and enemies than ever. A special thank you to the kitchen girls for our later entertainment and for saving us from a really long walk back to the motel.
Compromised items: Stella McCartney - Peony (RIP)