I buy quite a lot of music, spend quite a bit of money every year on it. I've tricked myself into kind of believing the last couple of years that I do it because I want to be up to date with what is actually going on in the current music scene, and that might be true in a sense. I need to listen to a lot of stuff, hear different genres of music, learn to understand and appreciate them from a songwriter's or a producer's point of view in order to keep myself writing good stuff for Timescape. To put it simply, I need new ideas, new approaches, and I need to stay on the edge. Foolishly stupid, you might think, 'cause he's just playing in a progressive rock/metal band and there isn't supposed to be anything new and/or fresh there, it's supposed to follow a formula of long, winding and complex songs and structures. Well, I don't agree. However, tonight I remembered the real reason why I buy so much music. It's just because I'm still looking for that one song, that one album, that one line of lyrical perfection that moves me, that touches me, that makes the hair on my arms stand, that sends shivers up and down my spine, that makes me realize again and again and again why I'm doing this. It's just because I love music. I love words and how they make us feel, how they make us think, cry, smile, laugh, feel like we are not alone, feel like we are part of something, feel like we can connect with people we don't even know. This is really why I'm a musicaholic.

Let me tell you a little about two of my favorite bands and one of my favorite artists to make this picture a bit clearer.

Marillion - Of course I had heard of them, I knew Kayleigh and Lavender and knew that they had a singer called Fish that wore masks and painted his face on stage. I didn't own any albums, I can't say I had heard any of their songs on the radio, until I started playing with Timescape. I think it was when we released "two worlds" and the reviews started coming and someone said that Timescape from time to time sounded like modern day Marillion. I was of course curious since it was an impossibility that I had been influenced by them in my songwriting. I started picking up their post-Fish-era albums on a recommendation from Kerim. I instantly fell in love with "Season's End" and "Brave." I bought all their albums, including the Fish stuff, and I rebought all the remastered albums as well. I found a band, much like Timescape, that didn't care what they were labelled as. They've been called progressive rock and Genesis rip-offs for 20 years, but everything they've done post-Fish is so far from Genesis the comparison could as well have been "Slayer rip-off." You get the point...
Anyway, they released a new album almost a year ago. I signed up for a pre-copy ordered directly from their own label "Racket Records"... I never got it. I downloaded some clips from the net and thought, well no biggie... the album don't seem very good anyway. Finally I ordered it again last week and received it this week. Have to keep the collection complete you know... Popped it in the cd-player with no great expectations at all. Song number 3 and 4, "Map of the World" and "When I Meet God" knocked me off the floor instantly. It struck me. I love this band. The way they play, the way they write and arrange and the way they don't give a fuck, neither about current trends nor about staying "progressive rock" (whatever that means) just to please some people that grew up with Fish-era stuff.
Case in point. Great songs, great lyrics, great feeling. I love music again. Ok, to be honest, this is not the best album they've done, there are fillers on this album as well, but the songs that stand out made me realize...

Garbage - a love of mine from about when their 2nd album "Version 2.0" came out. I look upon Garbage like I look upon Marillion. They don't give a fuck. Garbage is of course a tee bit more trendy both in looks and music, but seriously their audience consists of everything from 10-year-old skating boys to 14-year-old girls to hip people in their twenties, to musicians like myself to men and women in suits. And they still manage to write their hearts out. The arrangements are as fresh as anything Madonna would put out tomorrow and keep then in mind that they've been working on this album for 2 years. How could they possibly have known what would be hip two years from then? They couldn't. They took what they liked, they made it typical Garbage. They didn't give a fuck about their label, they put out a pretty mellow album instead of doing something really trendy. I think that's cool, to say the least... and in the words of Butch Vig, "A song can never have too many cool guitar-riffs..."

Tori Amos - how did I discover her? I'm not sure, but I do think it was because I had a crush on some girl that kept talking about Tori Amos and the way she expressed herself musically and lyrically. I didn't want to be lost in upcoming conversation so I of course bought a lot of stuff and not only found myself liking it, but loving it. First of all she's an extremely talented pianist, secondly and more importantly, she's a fabulous songwriter and has a way with words only the likes of Steve H. (of Marillion) and a couple more have. Well, she just released an album filled with cover-tunes. Cover-tunes written solely by men, where she has put herself in the woman's perspective of all these songs and interpreted them accordingly. Some might say she butchers the originals, I say she plays them the way only a genious could have interpreted them. I think it says it all when a female pianist takes Slayer's "Raining Blood" and makes a piano-ballad out of it...
Tori doesn't give a fuck either. She never did. She always went her own way and she's got a hardcore following, may they be aspiring pianists, aspiring poets, young boys, young girls, old girls, old boys. She has something to say and some of us do listen. And when we listen, we sometimes find that fantastic stuff that we're always looking for.

These three albums made me remember the real reason I buy music and continue writing music myself. I don't give a fuck. I want to write and express myself, and I understand that everything might not fit into the little pigeon-holes or small circles or rectangular genres people like to put on music, but like I said, I don't give a fuck. I do this only because I need to write and because I love music...

Take care & ATB
Johan