Track By Track – Douglas Greed – Driven

This is the first track on the album, but it was in fact the last track I finished. I think that I must have sent the label roughly 15 different versions of the album and every time I said ‘’well that's it folks, this is the final version“, of course it wasn’t, and the very last night before the mastering deadline I created this track and threw it into the album. I think ‘’Further’’ is a pretty good opener as it picks you up from some sort of a noisy darkness and guides you into a cotton candy sunrise.

For this album I decided to write all the lyrics myself. It took me a good while to find the right music that fit the lyrics and I think I have like 20 versions of this track on my hard drive. The lyrics are basically about myself, and my good friend Mooryc sings them.

I started this track on a long train ride from Holland back home to Jena, feeling incredibly tired, yet too tired to sleep. I totally forgot about it for a few weeks and was rather surprised when I discovered it between all my draft sketches. If you listen really carefully you can hear the field recording I did on that train ride.

Yeah, But No! is a new project I’m about to start with Fabian Kuss. We spent a week near a small lake in the north of East Germany and recorded a couple of sessions. During the day we went swimming and at night we recorded, drank beer and hunted mosquitos and spiders.

This track was originally supposed to be for the project ‘’Eating Snow“ which I’m running with my buddy Mooryc. But the two of us felt it would better fit my solo album. We crafted it during the summer of last year, when I was based in Berlin.

I think that's the oldest track on the album. The vocals are quiet strange. I used an old vocal recording I did years ago and cut out all the syllables and sorted them by notes. Afterwards I build up kind of a refrain and choir by using them just by their value of note. So I ended up with some sort of fantasy language choir.

I felt an overwhelming urge to add a non 4/4 track to the album. So this one has a 3/4 time signature, which was actually a lot of fun for me to do.

I worked for quite some time on making it really groovy and then asked my buddy Daniel Brandt from Brandt Brauer Frick to record some drums for me – which you can hear after the last drop.

The basis of this track is a remix that never got released. So I kicked out all the stuff which came from the producer of the original and then build up a new one from scratch. As I was sitting in a Berlin café last year there was a group of American techno tourists at the table next to me and one of the lades, obviously totally shitfaced, just said ‘’my mind is a monkey – I can't think straight“ over and over again, and the rest is history.

This was the first track I ever made for BPitch Control. It’s also the first one that I created together with Fabian Kuss. It includes an opera sample as during the last couple of months my love for the opera had grown.

One night one track. Besides all the time consuming arrangement avalanches there are tracks that ”just happen“ within like a couple of hours.

I did “Hush“ when I went to the studio to work on another remix but I didn’t really enjoy working that track so my mind wandered off and spit out this one.

The vocals on this track were sung by Anna Mueller from HVOB. I had gotten to know Anna when we played at Pratersauna in Vienna back in 2012. She was so much fun to hang out with, it was just a matter of time until we ended up making a track together. Originally it was a noisy track with a lot of strange and dirty sounds – but I reworked it, over and over until it ended up being the bassy, beach feely track that it is right now.

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