New year, new shenanigans.

Have been cleaning up the orchestrations and preparing the tracks while downing red wine and opening presents. Yes, it's the holidays again. Busy busy busy.

Tomorrow it's new years eve and I'm amazed how this album is STILL in production, and that IT IS in fact still in production. Thinking back on the year it's been really rough and tough ride. The highs barely pushed the lows to an acceptable level.

It's bittersweet fun reading up on old journals and production notes as if there would be no force majeure clause in real life, this album would have been completed already. The original plans stuck only in that way that when we finally got somewhere to record and got there in one piece to record, everything went according to plan. Outside of that, everything was batshit crazy and all you could expect was to expect nothing as next week number was as sure as a throw of a dice times another random integer.

If you've missed it, a week before drum sessions were to begin (February), a 17 year old girl set fire to our practice flat and studio (January). I broke my foot trying to escape the flames as I had to jump from the second floor with a already twisted ankle (fell down a staircase a few days before that). That broken foot later healed poorly, and got twisted into a deformed position and developed osteoporosis. This all plus my brain being marinated in painkillers hindered my work pretty effectively the first quarter of 2010. A week after the fire incident, our bass player quits for personal reasons. So drums were recorded in April, when we should have been finishing up guitar and bass recordings, and bass recordings were pushed as far up so we could find a new bassist and have him rehearse all the albums songs for recording plus the old ones for shows. Also, my acoustic guitar got stolen a week after I've recorded the acoustic tracks. Bittersweet luck in a way, meaning, lucky it didn't get stolen before I recorded the tracks...

As I had to engineer, i.e. jump around wiring cables and placing mics with a crutch, it provided pretty much a nifty challenge as using an unexperienced engineer would be more trouble than good, and hiring an engineer costs money we didn't have. Have to pat my back a bit and say that luckily I made such a comprehensive and well done sound plan so I didn't really have to concentrate on technical stuff, just try to get good performances.


But not to moan and rant about our good friends would-ha, could-ha & should-ha, there were also good distractions. As the opportunity to participate was far to big for us to pass on, the Deathstars and Paul DiAnno tours came up by surprise but screwed up some plans. Copenhagen Live gig screwed up our new plans that we made after the arson.

Now, as everything is recorded and I'll start mixing it next month (next year :P), I'm personally amazed how it's still somehow got recorded. As aside from the things I've already listed, to add to the cake all the personal problems like stress, depression, burn outs, money problems and me divorcing my live in wife and mother of my child and moving to a different town broke off my ass and with a shitty leg and things like that didn't really speed up the process.

But as we're tripping down a staircase on memory lane I might as well point out that wading trough shit like that really fueled the concept and artistic side of the whole project. Give some time and a flower might grow out of a pile of shit. The lyrical side really thrived as I wrote the bulk of the albums lyrics during spring/summer of 2010, just during my personally worst period. Even though I developed the lyrical concept and structure from December (2009) onward, like some sort of twisted fortune telling book of life as it really correlated a lot with everything that happened to me in 2010. But with the concept ready, in writing lyrics I just had to fill in the empty blanks. Knowing what every song was going to be about and the experience to express myself better I was surprised how easy it was in the end.

And looking back, taking a relaxed schedule, especially after the fire and all that, was a great, albeit slightly frustrating, move. If we would have just rushed through and tried to run as fast as we could while we were constantly tripped and pushed in the dirt, we'd just have scraped knees and smeared in shit. Frustrating in that sense that we all (the band) live in this "new" Lunar Path, while all of you have just outdated "Broken World" to go by as reference.

Knock on wood, but hopefully this "Finnish Democrazy" is ready next year. On the bright side, if somebody tries to kill us (again :P) and succeeds this time, at least the album is recorded, so someone else can finish it up.

Until then, happy new year and hopefully next year will be better! :D

/Jonas