arrangements for concerts

When you’ve got the song finished in the studio and you’re going to perform it in concert, isn’t the idea to approach the studio arrangement as perfectly as you can ? Do you back to square one, when you you wrote the song, and you look at new points of departure from there to preserve the original one ?

That way of thinking came from spending so much time in bands. There are several ways of doing it. A band’s a band of course. A good band is based on good original material, but a band’s song are often more about the material, the foundation and working together than about songwriting. I think in my case anyway, that my songwriting started out being some kind of reaction to spending such a long time in bands. It’s fine, but there are other ways too. Songwriting as a kind of essence that needs to be changed later for performing in concert. The reason I’ve played a lot of instruments and sung myself on studio recordings is often simply for practical reasons. A process that’s taken some time. You can allow yourself the luxury of fiddling around in the studio and piecing the music together. You have the choice and you can create what becomes the basic material of the album. It can take a long time to evolve. It doesnt need to be a band that plays everything at the same time. When the time comes to perform the song in concert you can’t call all these elements together in one place and produce the original components that went into the song, because it took months to produce. It wouldn’t be genuine, you new a new approach. It’s more honest to start from scratch bearing the concert performance in mind.

Livebox interview, 2002