This was originally posted on my private blog in Swedish. I tried to translate it, so hopefully you’ll understand most of it! There’s probably a couple of mistakes…
The songs can of course be found on all major streaming services, as well as on youtube.
Everything really started at work. I started my first job as a preschool teacher right after I graduated the university in 2011. I worked with two-year-olds, so all the children had nap time after lunch, and for nap time they needed relaxation music. Blå Stunder. Röda stunder. Gröna stunder. Svarta stunder. (You might not now what this is, but it’s like a crappy collection of crappy relaxation music on CDs released in Sweden.
Anyway, I thought to myself: ok, do it better yourself then! And so it began. I started composing on my piano on week nights for a few weeks, I did what was going to be the debut album ”Först ska vi äta, sen sova och sen kommer pappa” (First, we’ll eat, then we’ll take a nap and then Dad will come to pick you up). The phrase in the title also came from work. We had a child who was very anxious and quite sad most of the day. So that phrase was my way to comfort the child!
The first song I wrote for the album was ”Vi åker till Kina (We’re going to China)”, and I started working in that because my room mate at the time, Frank, wanted to hear “Something Chinese”. I’m not entirely sure that it sounds Chinese, but it still became the start of Sleepy Songs.
The cover I got from my uncle Per and is from his book Skuggsidan. Pers illustrations have followed Sleepy Songs from the beginning and many covers are pictures from his books.
This is what the firs album sounds like!
Relatively shortly thereafter I worked as a producer for quite a few artists (Morgan Dryden, Theodor Elfving and Single Candle) and all of them printed CDs of the productions we made. I also wanted to do that! So I started working on the sequel to the debut album. This time I wanted to step away from the ”classical” setup I used on the first album (piano and strings) and instead wanted to explore the Rhodes piano together with a lot of drum beats. This was also the first time I used the human voice; when my friend Morgan read a short poem he wrote in Chinese for one of the songs.
I printed the thing and released it on CD. The cover art is taken from Den stora smällen (written by Mats Wänblad and illustrated by mu uncle Per Gustavsson).
After release number two (I called it Part 2) I wanted to do something different. Maybe not sleep-music in the same way as the previous two releases. So this is what I did: I made 10 songs (or rather backgrounds) and invited many of the people I produced during the years to write lyrics and sing them to my backgrounds. The goal was to bring in as many different languages as possible and the theme was, of course, sleep.
This is the languages represented: Swedish, English, Danish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, French, Chinese (Mandarin). All the featuring artist can be seen on each song.
Not only did my uncle draw the cover this time, he also sang on the song “Wake me up” (lyrics by Morgan Dryden). The reason the album got the name 48:50 is because it’s after 48 minutes and 50 second my uncle screams ”Wake me up” in the last song on the album.
For the second time, I printed the album on CDs and the cover is from my uncle’s book Måntornet (my kids favorite books btw).
One of the best streaming songs on Spotify from this album was the song When I Go to Sleep, featuring Jonathan Olofsson and Coster. Since that song apparently worked so well I wanted to make more just like it; rap mixed with funky vocals and chill backgrounds.
It became no less than two singles: one without them was with both artists and one only with Mathias Coster.
Cover by Uncle Per from the Book Måntornet (again).
Cover by Anton Jakobsson.
After the two singles I started to lose interest a little bit. It was still the first album that dominated Spotify streams and I was just about to become a father for the first time. So Sleepy Songs died. Or at least fell asleep for a while.
In the next part; I’ll tell you about the revival!