First you build a studio - then you record an album...

Band: The Wannadies

Members: Pär Wiksten, Fredrik Schönfeldt,
Erik Dahlgren, Christina Wiksten,
Stefan Schönfeldt

Present position:
The band has recently, through their own record label intRecords, completed negotiations with Cooking Vinyl for the world wide release of the album 'Before & After'. The first release will be the single 'Skin', due on the 9th of June. After having gone down the major lable route, we sat down and discussed how we wanted things to be done in the future. We agreed that the real fun is when you come up with great ideas and then realise them yourself, from start to finish. "Yourself", in this case, also meant involving good friends to help us.

We helped Nille Perned, whom we've worked with on two previous albums, to build a studio. It was supposed to take a couple of months - it took us almost a year. We tried our ways with new technology - and old. We learned stuff and found a lot of truths about how things are supposed to be done, truths which were thrown away as we shouted "There are no rules!!"

Ideas for songs started to turn into actual songs. We played them for lovely/mad/fantastic video director Garth Jennings (also made the Hit, Shorty and Big Fan videos) and ace art director X-Lars Sundh (he is behind all Wds artwork since -94), who both started to shower us with ideas about videos and sleeves.

It started to sparkle.

We knew that we wanted to release the album on our own label, intRecords, but realised as well that it would be good to cooperate with some company that had a good, working distribution, and who could help us with promotion and stuff. We played some songs for a few interested partners-to-be and finally decided to release the album in Scandinavia through the Swedish record company National and in the rest of the world through UK company Cooking Vinyl and it's associates.

Early on we had the idea to make the album in two halves, happy versus sad, fast versus slow, or whatever. It was called 'Before & After'.

We decided to make the best record in the world, on our own, and then we did.

May 2003