Just short note to tell you that we’ve started a collaboration with wonderful German singer Sonja Hewer, who will sing on a couple of Bus Stop Dreams-songs on the upcoming album.
We are thrilled to say the least.
More info will of course follow but for now you can enjoy her singing with her band Sonic Season:
In 1989 I went to India for 7 month. Most of that time I spent in Calcutta working as a volunteer for different aid organizations.
There I learned to know those who had almost nothing and often lived on the streets.
I dare say that they became my friends but to some extent we came close.
I hadn’t brought any camera with me, as to not burden me with things, but there and then felt the need to document these people.
Getting a descent camera wasn’t easy in India at that time, but I found an outdated second-hand Russian Zenit-E on the black market.
I took maybe 15 rolls and had them locally developed. When I got home I forgot them after some time and now they’ve spent more that 20 years in a drawer.
But I think they deserve a better fate as these people still speak to me when I look at them now.
So I will scan a few now and then and put them here.
If not as a reminder that dignity and hope has nothing to do with what you own or not, but who you are and what you stand for.
/Lasse
I haven’t told you about it before here on the blog, but I also run a music blog called Meadowmusic.se, where I present new Swedish music. It’s a type of of music blog called mp3 blog, which means that there’s also free mp3 songs to download from the artists I present.
I and some other friends started the blog in 2008. We knew of so many great Swedish artists who we thought certainly deserved more attention, and an mp3 blog seemed like a good way of presenting this music. Well, here I am three years and 700 blog posts later trying to keep up with the flood of good music that pours into my mail box.
I’ like to think that there’s quite a span in genres on the blog, as it reflects my taste in music or at least music that I can relate to in one way or the other, but of course there’s a lot of music that I don’t cover. What’s fascinating is that I receive tips from well-known record labels as well as completely unknown artists that no one has ever heard of. And I don’t make a difference between them; if I like it I write a post about them, as simple as that.
And if I write a post, moments later the music in the post appears on other sites as well, like Hype Machine, Shuffler.fm, Elbo.ws where it’s shown to hundreds of thousands of people who love to discover new music. It means that an artist, whoever he or she is, in a flash can get more exposure than if he was published on one of the bigger Swedish newspapers. That is fascinating and the net in a nutshell I think.
Well, you’re more than welcome to have a look at Meadowmusic. There’s a music player on the page which you can start and browse through all the songs on a page, and if you want to download a song, you just right-click it and choose “Save link as…” or similar. I have gathered a few songs here below from past posts that you might like.
Frida Selander – Mountains Define You
The Rumble – Rock ‘n’ Roll Is the Medicine
Kids – My Sincerest Apologies
Vidar – What Did I Know
Six Figure Transatlantic – All Over Town
/Pär
Here’s a premix version of the song “Easy”. It will be available for a couple of days, so you’ll have a chance to see where we’re heading with this one. Download if you like to keep it. Later on this song will be available on the upcoming album.
/Edit
We’ve removed the song now. We’ll come back soon to show you more songs we’re working on.
Tonight we’ll send a premix version of the new song “Easy” to our mailing list. If you want to hear it, you can join the list here: http://busstopdreams.fanbridge.com/
As far as we can see today, this song will not be released as a single, as we’re heading for the full album for our next release. We do want to show you, though, our progress with the songs and we appreciate all the feedback we can get.
This is a premix of the song which means that we have yet to spend a couple of days in the studio to finalize it and then send it to mastering. Here’s a take from the recording of the vocals with Tobbe Möller earlier this year.
You’re at home, in the kitchen doing the dishes. You look through the window and see your two sons, 8 and 10 years old, having fun att the playground further down the road. You smile to yourself and turn your attention again at the dirty plates and bowls in the sink. Minutes later the noise from a car startles you and you look up again. You see a dark van speeding up down the street, away from you. You look back at the playground, and your kids aren’t there anymore. You panic, run out the door, screem for them, but noone answers. Your kids are gone and nobody cares. There’s noone to call, noone to go to and noone to help you.
This nightmare scenario is probably nothing you have to worry about, but if you are poor and live in Mali, Burkina Faso or Togo, this is reality. There it happens every day as slave dealers kidnap and buy children for transportation to the Cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. There they are forced to work under extreme conditions, beaten and constantly exposed to pesticides. Because of the cheap labour, the cocoa is sold cheap to companies like Nestlé, Hershey and others, while they in turn can offer us cheap chocolate with a taste of child slavery. 70% of the worlds cocoa comes from the West Africa, which means that it’s very likely that it’s present in the chocolate you eat if the package doesn’t say otherwise.
Two years ago I watched the documentary “The Dark Side of Chocolate” a film made by Miki Mistrati & U. Roberto Romano and I was chocked. It’s an eye-opener where they closely examine every step of the supply chain of our chocolate; they even managed to go inside a plantation and interview some of the kids. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. (There’s an embedded version in the end of this post)
After I had watched this film I somewhat naively expected fast and strong reactions from people, just as the headlines had shouted out some years before, that clothes from H&M were made by Chinese child workers and wares from Ikea as well, which in both cases forced these companies to act fast and do something about it. But not much happened, at least not in a magnitude comparable to the other cases.
It seems, though, that it started something, an increasing pressure and awareness which at least has made most companies realize that they have to do something. But a little something isn’t good enough and one has to remember that Big Chocolate has profited on these child slaves many years and successfully stalled efficient legislation in their home countries, fully aware of what has been going on in the plantations. Hershey, the biggest cocoa buyer in the world, has hardly taken any action, until this February as a result of the campaign “Raise the bar, Hershey!” by International Labor Rights Forum.
Last Friday I was in the supermarket with my daughter and she wanted a chocolate bar as Friday candy. I asked her to at least choose a chocolate bar with the “Fair Trade” certification, which she agreed to. But it was hard to find. Only some bars from Lindt had the mark. We discovered, though, that some of the more expensive bars from Marabou (Kraft Foods) had a Rainbow Alliance Certification which in the description sounded fair. When we read on the backside of the package, they stated, though, that they only guarantee that 30% was slave-free, which means that 70% of the cocoa is not accounted for. Why? Well, they claim that there isn’t enough slave-free cocoa to buy on the market for the entire chocolate bar, and I guess when it comes to the cheaper bars without the certification they are cheap just beacause of the slave labour.
Apparently there are companies like Lindt that guarantee 100% control of the cocoa and I for one are going to try to choose brands (here is a list of other ethical companies) that are less dirty than the others, or at least look for Fair Trade marks.
Shady business doesn’t like light, it thrives because of the darkness and this is my little pocket torch contribution to hunt down some shadows. I hope you go and fetch yours.
/Pär
The Dark Side of Chocolate:
Today we shed our tears for the demise of a an inspiring and fantastic musician, Levon Helm who died away from us today, too early. I’ve never seen him play live; the closest I got was in the late eighties when he and two other The Band-members were supposed to play at a festival, but they had to cancel in the last minute. Nevertheless Levon’s and The Band’s music has been something that I have always come back to, again and again, ever since I found them.
Since I was too young to experience them in their heydays, I discovered them in the early eighties, in a sort of backwards manner. It was Martin Scorceses movie of their last live performance, “The Last Waltz” that caught my attention. The line-up with Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and many others got me curious and before I watched the movie I bought the corresponding triple vinyl of the concert. And It was fantastic, and I still think it is. Here’s one of The Band’s and Levon Helm’s finest moments from this film, together with The Staple Singers, “The Weight”:
/Pär
Recently Tobbe Möller visited Lasse’s studio to record the lead vocals for the new song “Easy”. Lasse Thomasson has written the music to the song and Fredrik Muscos the lyrics.
We’re happy to have Tobbe Möller on board, a brilliant songwriter and singer. If you haven’t listened to his solo songs before, you can visit his Facebook page. Here’s the clip from Tobbe’s visit:
It happened somewhere in the middle of the nineties, when the music stopped for me. I felt like I had run into a dead end and I couldn’t find a way out of there. There was no new music that satisfied me and I was somewhat bored with the old one.
The transition from vinyl to CD:s a few years earlier wasn’t really helpful either. I had hoped that I would appreciate the better sound and enjoy the comfort in being able to play music for hours without swithching CD:s (I had a 5-CD-player). What happened instead was that I was struggling to build up a new music collection that would replace all my vinyls, realizing that I couldn’t afford to have it all and I ended up buying a lot of best of-albums or the latest albums from favourite artists that made their best work ten years earlier. The comfort just got me lazy about choosing what to play, and the real music experience wasn’t there anymore. On the radio they were playing R’n'B hits all day long and I thought: “They don’t create good music anymore”.
But hey, it’s only music, it’s not the end of the world! For me it was almost like that, though. I was starving and there was an emptiness inside of me that I didn’t know how to fill. Lucky for me, I was saved by love.
I met this wonderful Spanish-Brazilian woman, who walked right into my life and later on became my wife. One day she received a package of CD:s from her brother in Brazil, containing music from some of her favourite Brazilian artists. Instead of snearing at it, as I would have done some years before, I decided to give it a try and listen without any preconceptions. And in that decision I must have unhinged a closed door in my mind, for what entered through my ears was a completely new music sensation I hadn’t experienced before, and my world changed.
I didn’t understand a word, but the new harmonies and soft voices spoke directly to me from across the world. Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania, Chico Buarque all knew how to open my eyes. Instead of stopping there I decided to look for more, everywhere I could. When I went to Spain later that year, I spent hours in record stores listening to music, and I travelled home with a lot of new music. Rock and pop in Spanish, flamenco singers, jazz and other stuff.
When music started to surge through Internet about ten years ago, I dived into it wholeheartedly in a quest to push my boundaries further and further, and I still do. Even though I listen to a wide range of music, I feel today that I’ve only scratched the surface and that there are so much more to discover for me. Compare that feeling to what I felt in the beginning of this story, when I obviously told myself that there was nothing more to discover; a horrible sensation.
I do believe that most people would have richer lives if they opened their mind for more new music and not only for what is served on the radio. 20 years ago, the possibilites were limited by the size of the record store shelves and the record label wallets, but now everything you could possibly imagine is just a click away. It sounds easy, but now the problem is the reverse, finding the true gems with your name on among loads of other gems.
The radio won’t help you. On the radio, with few exceptions, they don’t want you to hear new music, they want you to hear music you already know, because otherwise they believe that you will switch to another channel. The people below, though, can help you. These podcasters and bloggers are the ones that dive into those heaps of music trying to find something they like, and they play it for you, hoping that you will share their love for this new music.
Here are some podcasts and blogs that have played our new single “Come Together” or in some case one of our other songs in the past month; a good starting point I thought, since you begin here with us, Bus Stop Dreams.
Parasites and Sycophants is a great music blog with a tag line that led me to write my music discovery story above: “No, the music never stopped. You just let yourself get old.”
Michael Angel’s Cosmic Grab Bag
/Pär
Every Monday Justin Wayne airs his show on the net full of new independent music, interviews with artists and more. Every show can be streamed or downloaded from The Justing Wayne Show site. A lot to discover there and highly recommended if you haven’t listened to it before. We were happy to be included with the song “Come Together” a couple of weeks ago.
Steven Wheatley is a true podcast veteran. His latest Dalecast show, where he also played “Come Together”, was his 799th show since he started in 2007! There are heaps of great music to be found here, and you can download his shows on the Dalecast site.
Speaking of veterans,the Homegrown podcast started as early as 2005. Nic, the excellent host, presents not only independent music but also poetry and prose. A very nice show to discover and I’ll certainly put this one on my subscription list.
Another pleasant surprise was that Rawrcast featured Come Together the other day. Rawrcast is not a music podcast, but rather a podcast about computer gaming, with a lot of discussions and info about online-gaming and related stuff. I have since then tried to throw some fireballs to the tones of “Come Together”, and it worked perfectly.
I’ll be back with more tips about podshows and music blogs within short. /Pär
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