For songwriters today, you have to treat music as a community. That’s How I connected with Mattias Granbom. Through the Song A Week 2017 group, I heard Mattias’ music and enjoyed the ethereal sound. Click play and read on, see if you take a little journey through Mattias Granbom’s music. The lyrics are in Swedish, there’s a partial translation below.
Story Behind “En I Taget”
I was walking home after seeing a friend, it was late, pretty cold and some snowflakes were falling down silently. Often my head feels like a tangled ball of yarn and all the thoughts in my head are fighting for space. But this evening I was in a good place and it felt like the thoughts were allowing each other to take their time. Since the song is in Swedish I tried to translate a short bit of it:
’’Snön den föll så sakta den kvällen
Och landade mjukt
Tankarna kom en i taget den kvällen
Dom som brukar trängas och bitas
Gav plats åt varann’’
’’The snow fell slowly that night
And hit the ground softly
The thoughts came one at a time that night
Those who usually jostle and bite
Gave each other space’’
I thought to myself that the snow flakes and my thoughts were very similar: the snow flakes came one by one, slowly, just like my thoughts did this very night. I stopped for a moment and wrote down a couple of sentences in the memo-app in my phone, and the morning after I finished the song and put chords and a melody to my lyrics.
The recording process was simple, and made in one take. I used two mics; a Shure SM58 on for the vocals and a Studio Projects B1 directly into an interface. A small amount of EQ and compression and a large hall reverb on an aux-send for ambience on the vocals.
Mattias Granbom Links
Mattias Granbom Bio
Growing up in the capital of Sweden Mattias began playing music as a teenager when he started playing the guitar. In the following years he played in various bands, started recording music at home and desperately tried to figure out which part of music-making he enjoyed the most: playing, writing, recording or producing. Inspired by Jens Lekman, at the start of 2017 he decided to start a new project: to write, record and post a new song every week on Soundcloud. When Mattias is not playing music he works in a kindergarten and bakes a lot of fresh baguettes.