The Astronaut: An Interview with Lights & Motion
Chase the stars with Christoffer Franzen and Lights & Motion. We sit and talk about the album, the journey and the future.
From the embers of a thousand stars comes the music of Lights & Motion; the musical project of Christoffer Franzen. A self-taught musician of introspection, his music is a dream-like journey into the stories of his imagination. Written through the clouds of insomnia, Franzen has painted the night sky with his latest album Save Your Heart. Released via noted indie label Deep Elm Records just months after his debut, Save Your Heart has received praise and accolades from countless sources, all citing Franzen's ability to turn the greatest of human inspiration into music.
We sit down with Franzen to talk about his craft, his passion and where his journey will take his listeners.
Congrats on the release, how does it feel now that the album is out after all those months of work?
Franzen:Thank you! Well you know, it's sort of a weird feeling, because I have been working so hard and so focused towards making this album a reality that I haven’t really stopped and taken a look around. I never took a break after releasing Reanimation, my first album, because once that was done I got this feeling that I kind of have right now, which is a feeling a completion in the sense that this has been the big goal all along, but also a bit of emptiness due to the fact that this is something thats been taking up most of my life for this past year. You go from working 40 hours a week non-stop on this thing and then all of the sudden it's done, it's out, and people hear it for the first time and it's somewhat scary. It's been yours alone for such a long time and then you get to share it with the world, and I think that this is something that all creative people experience, the gratitude of having your work being noticed and the fear of letting it go, and to say that this actually is the finished thing, and I'm not going to work on it anymore. It's out of my hands. I feel proud
What about all the overwhelmingly positive feedback?
Franzen: The feedback, as you said, has been overwhelmingly positive and that's so humbling, I can't tell you. Because you don’t really think about this things when you are in the middle of the process, or the eye of the storm as I like to call it, because then it seems so far away until a possible release, so you sort of just focus on the music and that lays before you. But to get this much appreciation is extremely fun and something I never count on because who knows what people are going to think. But for the most part, the thing that makes me really amazed is that people still take time of their day to actually sit down and listen to something that I've created. That still blows my mind, and to be able to share this music with people from all around the world, it gives me endless joy. The feeling is like you are alone in the creation, because I always work alone on these Lights & Motion albums, it's just me in a dark studio all through the nights, but then you walk out the door when it's all finished and suddenly I feel like I'm in a band of 30,000 people, it's absolutely amazing. I really feel like I have a close bond with my fans, and maybe it has something to do with what I just mentioned before, being alone in the creative space, but I feel such a commitment to them, and it's that personal interaction that makes me work that much harder in order to achieve my goals.
How did you get started with the “self-learning” of music?
Franzen: That's a good question. I first started playing guitar when I was 16, that was the time I got my first ever acoustic guitar for christmas, so I began pretty late. Then I practiced for probably 4-5 hours every day (my poor mom and dad) and then I got into bands and all these things that you do as a young musician.
After a few years of things not really taking off, I started to feel this itch to not having to depend on other people for creative purposes. I used to wish that I was a singer and not just a guitar-player because then I actually could steer the ship a bit more and not be forced to check the schedules of 4 other people with busy lives.
I managed to get access to a studio, a very simple set-up, and during a time of sleep depravation and insomnia I started to basically spend all my nights there by myself, just fiddling on different instruments and ideas. I used to record small pieces of music that sounded awful, but I loved it because it gave me such creative freedom.
I would go there on saturday nights while everyone was out partying, and I wanted to join them but I just couldn’t let go off the studio. Just 30 more minutes I would say when they called and I would be there until 5 am.
Eventually after battling with this thought that I wanted to do something by myself, I decided to buy a bass-guitar, some drumsticks, I started to play the piano, and even though I didn’t really know any theory, I could hear when it resonated and that was a big kick. So I would try all these different instruments and record myself over and over in layers so that I could make it sound huge and not just like one guy in a dark room. I just had such a need for control and I knew exactly what I wanted, so I ended up doing every single sing by myself. I learned all the instruments I needed for what I could hear in my head, I recorded and recorded and recorded until my ears bled, and slowly I got better at it
I now have two albums out, and still I have no formal training. I have been responsible for composing, playing, arranging, engineering, producing and even mixing. And that's what I always wanted. To be able to go from the first fleeting idea to a finished product without breaking the chain of command, which in this case is just me.
I have never actually considered myself to be that musically gifted. I always just said that you just gotta put in the hours and practice. And a lot of that self doubt was blown away after I took the courage to record Reanimation. And that I owe everyone out there who has emailed me, written on Facebook or soundcloud about how they enjoyed the music and made it a part of their day. That was incredibly humbling for me, and for that I will always be grateful.
Save Your Heart comes less than a year after your debut, how did it come around so quickly- was it just natural inspiration to keep writing?
Franzen: After Reanimation was out I felt that I had so much creativity left that I didn’t want to stop. I jumped right in and started recording ideas, the first of them being ”Heartbeats”, the opening track. Even though it was written probably 1 month after the first album was out, I already knew it was going to open my second album, whenever that was going to be or whatever it was going to sound like. Then of course I would sit on things for months, just listening back and forth and adding sprinkles of sonic fairy dust and try to really make it shine in it's own right. I tend to work like that; very fast and effective when laying down the foundation, but then I spend an enormously long time finding the sound for things, getting into the arrangements and the production side of things. In the opening track there is probably 80-90 different tracks layered, and if you listen really carefully in good speakers I'm sure you would be able to make it a lot of details in the background, ambient movements and stuff that you might not think much about but if you were to take those sounds out, a lot of the magic of the song is lost.
How did you and Deep Elm come together? It seems like the perfect fit for both of you.
Franzen: Deep Elm signed me back in 2012, after hearing one of my first tracks called ”Home”, which was released on my first album, but back then it was only a demo. I knew them through Dorena who I had met in the studio, and I thought that they would be a perfect fit for my vision of this project. Since then, John (who runs Deep Elm) and I have been working very close throughout this entire process. They give me complete trust and creative space, and I look to them for everything surrounding the releases to the day to day givings of me sending them tracks and asking for their opinion. Its's been working really well I got to say, for the both of us. I'm just grateful we got the chance to meet because it was a series of small stuff that led us there.
Listen to music from Save Your Heart:
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You talk about music similar to painting and how your songs have a certain hue to them, what are your favourite “colours” to paint with at the moment?
Franzen: Yeah that's right, and I understand that it might be a hard and abstract concept to grasp but I really do think of music in terms of colors. If something sounds earthbound and calm I immediately think of colors like yellow and brown, whilst sounds that have a big quality and a sort of distance to them are blue/violet to me, and blue/violet was exactly what I wanted to bring into this record, Save Your Heart. This is all very visible in the artwork as well, done by an amazing artist called Elias Klingen. I went to him and I pretty much said; “Look. I have all these colors in mind and I want to make em shine and blend together to represent the music I'm writing for this album. It's called 'Save Your Heart', so maybe that could be a starting-point for you. I want the colors to feel alive and to illustrate the sonic identity of this record.” He did an amazing job, I couldn’t be happier with the results.
I wanted this album to venture higher up in the skies, towards the stratosphere, and then stay there. In comparison, Reanimation is more earthy for me, it takes place down here while Save Your Heart is up above the clouds in terms of the sonic identity.
What was your process for writing Save Your Heart, did you write a lot of the material at once, or was it more of a gradual process?
Franzen: I never really took a break, but the process was different. Some stuff came right away and then I worked on it for months. Snow was an early one, and I probably did 3 different versions of the outro before settling on the one you hear now, and that's also how I work. I search for that, in my mind, perfect thing.
Some of the tracks like “Save Your Heart” and “Atlas” came to life just 3-4 weeks before the mastering was scheduled to begin. Then we have tracks like “Sparks”, “Bright Eyes” and “We Are Ghosts”, who have in one way or another been sitting around on tapes for years. I tried to dust them off and I obviously changed a lot of things within them but It's kind of funny to think that these demos I made back when I was just alone in a studio with no name or anything, would end up on this album all this time later. Very rewarding for me personally.
Your songs have a very dream-like, stratospheric aura to them--- would you say that Save Your Heart has a distinct “theme” or story to it?
Franzen: I always try to think conceptually and visually while I write. Reanimation came from me not being able to sleep, and by chance discovering this amazing world which I would get lost in, and I never wanted to wake up. I would sit in my studio at winter, 4 in the morning, looking out the window and see everything being lit up and covered by snow, and I would feel like I was the only living person awake in the entire city. That was pretty magical sometimes. For Save Your Heart, I really wanted it to be an escapism as well, but the main thing for me with this one was that determination of having the courage to go with your passion, and not cave in even though it's easy to do. This project takes up a huge amount of time and effort in my life, and sometimes it's hard you know? You see friends and family doing “proper” jobs and giving in to the “conformity” of society. At times it's a struggle not to let your passion go because it's hard doing this. And that is really what Save Your Heart is for me. It's an encouragement to stick with the things you love and see them through. If you find that thing, you owe it to yourself to keep it alive. I think that's extremely important. For me it is.
Do you have a particular track on Save Your Heart you can say was the most satisfying to complete?
Franzen: Well it's hard because every song has different things related to it, but if I have to pick one I would say “Heartbeats”. Simply because that song turned out exactly as I had hoped, and it was the foundation on which I would then proceed on with the other songs of the album.
Will you be touring in support of the record?
Franzen: I would love to tour, but right now it's not planned at all. I spend so much time writing this music that once I'm done, I sort of step out into the world again from my studio and realize that it's a much bigger place then I remembered, and so if I were to tour I would want to do it just as had envisioned it, like I did with my music.
It would take a lot of planning and ambition, and I have simply not had the time to do that properly yet with touring. But I'm thinking about it a lot now so who knows..
Now that you’ve conquered the stars so to speak, where do you go next with Lights & Motion music?
Franzen: Haha, well I definitely want to keep writing. I might release some new music next year and in the meantime I want to keep writing film music which I have been doing a lot this part year in between the more traditional L&M songs, and these pieces of music has become quite popular on Soundcloud, so that's a big ambition right now.
I would love to score a film someday. That's a big dream of mine for sure. I am such a movie-goof and I probably check IMDB on my phone 5 times everyday for new trailers, so being able to score one one day would be so cool.
Who knows...
If listeners can take one thing away from your music, what would you like that one thing to be?
Franzen: A sense of hope.
Lights & Motion's new album, Save Your Heart, is available now via Deep Elm Records.