Great weekend. Spring has finally arrived or maybe it's summer already. Spirits uplifted, listening to 80's heavy metal with the iPod which is a good sign (the metal, not the iPod).

Spent friday in the recording studio. We worked on one of my reworked compositions from the early 90's, a tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera called Eveningstar. Yes, I do believe what the world needs right now is another tolkienesque mini prog-rock opera. :-) Actually, it's quite liberating to revisit an earlier work which you can treat with an ironic distance. I actually believe in the concept even if I would never consider writing a song like that now, the cynical thirtysomething I am now.

I was working with an old friend Krisse, a classical pianist and a IT entrepreneur. He is one of the prog-rock pioneers in the Finnish counterculture in the eighties (in the eighties people were still so traumatized by 70's prog rock operas, that you could not do prog rock within anything resembling the mainstream). I had a small stint in Krisse's band Rivendell in the early nineties when wrote Eveningstar for them. Recently, I heard their new album, Mars, which I really enjoyed. I had met Krisse backstage after a gig and Eveningstar came up. He graciously offered to rework the song with me in a studio he shares in southern Finland with a Seppo Silaste, another Rivendell guitar alumnus.

Me and Seppo used to study philosophy together in the Helsinki University (he specializes in Adorno). He inherited an idyllic farm where Krisse and Seppo share a studio. I really admire his habitus these days: a combination of farming, composing and programming.

Working from the early afternoon to 1 AM without having a meal we managed to get down drums, bass and vocals for the track. We still need to get down the guitars and keyboards. The musicians did a splendid job: I really admire their combination of professionalism and creativity. The drummer Nikke Lindholm did 83 takes and got better each time. We would have been happy with the things he got down earlier, but he instisted doing more and astounded us by the things he came up with, Listening to the raw mix, I find myself grinning at the crazy things he did. Mikko Jokinen got the vocals down in a few virtuoso takes. I really admire his command of phrasing and rhythm, which I think are the things which differentiate a good singer from a great one.