Jonas Lindberg is a multi-instrumentalist who, along with his band The Other Side, creates modern, accessible progressive rock that combines influences from the classic (Pink Floyd, Genesis) to the modern (Spock’s Beard, The Flower Kings). The band is about to release a new record called Time Frames and Jonas recently took some time to chat about it.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Jonas Lindberg interview –
On the three-year delay between records – Well the delay probably came (because) in this period I became a dad for the first time. A lot of energy and time goes to that. Then another part of it is that I am doing everything from the writing, the songs, to recording demos, to recording all of the instruments, mixing, editing, not mastering, I’m hiring a mastering engineer fortunately, but everything else and it takes a lot of time. Especially because I am not working full time with this. I have a regular job, halftime as a guitar and bass teacher, and I also freelance as a musician. So sometimes there might be several weeks between before I can do a session.
On whom is in The Other Side and how he decides which parts he will handle – Well who works with me? These are people that are friends that I’ve known for a long time. Most of the guys I studied with when I studied music in northern Sweden, in Piteå, and we’ve been hanging out ever since. When I moved down to Stockholm, I got to know all of these other guys/ Jonathan (Lundberg) I knew a bit from before because he also studied up there, but I got to know him once I moved down here, and Calle (Schönning), the other guitar player. They’re all friends and people that I enjoy working with and hanging, hanging out with and they all are all incredible musicians as well. Who wouldn’t wanna work with them?
Obviously, Jonathan is recording all the drums because I am a, a terrible drummer. He does that first. This time I sort of decided, because I play bass and I play guitar, and I play keyboards and sing, and all of that. So, I recorded everything that I thought sounded good with me playing it on top of his drums. Then I sort of gave the other musicians, like the guitarist, I gave them all the guitar solos because they’re much better at that. I also asked them, “Is there anything that you want to play, any riff that you want to play that and we can replace with you or overdub or do you have any ideas for something that isn’t here that you think should be here and then we can try it out?” That’s always really cool because that gives another level of the performance because they come, come up with stuff that you would never have thought of. For choosing vocalists, I sing all the demos. So, it’s quite obvious what is going to be the female vocal, because that sounds really weird with me. Then I choose the one that I think I sound good. Then Jonas (Sundqvist) gets all of the other stuff because he is always the main singer.
On if he pictures the journey of a record while he creates it – Yeah, I’m not always thinking of it when I write music, I just write music. So, I didn’t really think that I need an epic here to conclude the album or anything like that. I just wrote something, and it ended up being 17 minutes and then I had two long songs, all of the songs are long, but two epics. To me, that’s always nice if they kind of start and finish the album. Then it was all only a matter of which one is going where. I tried it both ways. I tried to switch things around and to see which song order gave the most compelling journey.
On Jenny Storm’s performance on “The Wind” – I managed to film her while doing that. I was doing this video log. You can hear me asking in that episode, “Did I get that on camera?” And she said, “Yeah”. That’s the take. She didn’t do many takes on that one. I just said to her, “I want you to sing something like Marie Fredriksson from Roxette, that type of style”, and she was like, “Yeah, sure”. We recorded I think three takes or something and just chose the best one.
On when he decides who would give the best vocal performance for a track – I have one song that that wasn’t, it didn’t end up on the album, but I thought that this would be perfect for Jenny and I could hear her voice on that, but I’m saving that for later. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes I really write for, this is gonna be a female vocal, like for “The Summer Queen” from Miles From Nowhere was always written for a female. Sometimes it comes down to I can’t do this. Somebody else will have to. It sounds terrible with me.
On if he is always writing – Yeah, my phone is always with me. It’s filled with fragments of ideas and little rifts or chord changes or stuff. It’s always growing in my head too. If I remember something, it’s like, yeah, it’s gonna go there and this starts playing around in there. That’s also really useful to have because it might be that I’m not having too much time in the studios so that I can demo stuff. So, whenever I do, I always have a bunch of things that I can start with or even sometimes it’s a complete song, with chorus and verse and maybe lyrics. To me, being a dad now, it’s very for me to be effective once I go here. I can’t sit here, and I wonder what I’m gonna do today? I need to have a clear picture of something. So, the voice memo is really useful.
On who he is currently listening to and his influences – Well, I’ve been listening to a lot of The Flower Kings and Spock’s Beard, for many years. But I don’t really think that, “well now I’m gonna create an album that sounds like them”. I write music and then I draw from my influences all the time. So, if it starts to sound like it’s capturing all of those eras probably means that I’ve been listening to all of these at some point. Like now, lately, I’ve been having a really big Steven Wilson. I started to listen to all his stuff for the first time, actually. So that’s also kind of an eye-opener.
On if there is anyone he would like to collaborate with – Oh yeah. That’s hard to answer because there are so many. I’d like to work with everybody. I was thinking, since I’m having a, a Steven Wilson period now, I was thinking the other day that it would be really fun to go play live with Steven Wilson for some reason. I just had a thought, and also, it would be really fun to get to write music with someone like Neil Morse sometimes and just see what it’s like, what can come out of it.
On if he has any plans to support the record with live dates – Not yet. I’m, I’m thinking about it. We haven’t really played live as a group together for over 10 years and we have three full length albums in that time, so there’s a lot of music that we need to rehearse. But I’m sort of planning on, I don’t know when it’s gonna happen, but sometime probably spring wise, a kind of a release concert at least…Economics are always a thing, even, even here in Sweden, and I know a lot of bands choose to tour in Europe because it’s closer to everything. I haven’t never tried that. I’ve always been touring with other artists in Sweden or Scandinavia.
