It’s not every day that a band starts, plays a couple of gigs and then gets signed to their first label. But it happened to Alberta Cross. The band formed when Petter Ericson Stakee and Tyler Wolfers decided the songs they were creating on their own while in another band were worthy of more attention. It may sound like a fairy tale but Stakee doesn’t see it that way at all. Having played music his whole life, he moved from his homeland of Sweden to England and was in a band before Alberta Cross. So all this overnight success malarkey is just that, at least to him. “It took a while to get to that point,” Stakee emphasized during our interview last week. “Then all of a sudden we started this new band and so many people were interested in us.”
To record a third album, Stakee had a lot of new things to deal with to get to the finished entity. There were record contracts that needed to be dealt with and Wolfers left the band in 2013 leaving the singer/songwriter alone in the creative process. “This is the first time I’ve done everything myself,” he said recently. “It’s a fresh start for me. That’s why it’s self-titled.” Although all the compositions were written by Stakee, he was able to bring in some friends to help see it through to fruition, recording up near Woodstock, New York. “It’s this beautiful old church that they’d turned into a studio,” he said of Dreamland. “I’ve always wanted to record in a church. Whether you’re religious or not, the whole vibe in a building like that, when you walk in, you feel it.”
Comprised of twelve unique songs, Stakee feels a strong connection to each one. Some were inspired by jams with friends in his beloved Brooklyn, where he now lives – “I wanted those late night jams to inspire the record. It was very loose, not a lot of structure. I wanted to keep that vibe” – while keeping his finger closely on his own pulse for the lyrics. “I’m pretty stoked to have it out finally,” Stakee told me. “We’ve worked on it for a while so it’s good to finally get it out.”
Why did you take so long?
We had to change a bunch of stuff between records and we toured the last one so much, the last two, that I needed a little bit of a break from the road and from everything just to figure my stuff out.
How was the making of this album different from the previous albums? Anything new you tried or did?
Yeah, a lot. One of the good things, cause I took a long break, I had time to sit down and write my songs. I wrote most of the songs at home in Brooklyn, without anyone around, you know. It felt untouched, like, no one tried to control the way the songs were going and everything. And I produced it myself with my buddy. The last couple of records we had a producer and this one I did myself with a friend so that was kind of big. This one feels a bit purer, you know, than the last two. They don’t feel like they’re completely controlled cause I wrote all those songs too but we had great producers on them and this one I felt like I wanted to do it myself. I’m kind of lucky now cause I live in New York and I have a bunch of good friends that are great musicians here and to be able to pull them in is like quite huge. So quite a lot of different things.
Was it intimidating to do it all yourself?
Not really. I think it was like a good time for it, you know. The band’s been going for a while now and I felt like it was the best thing. The last record I felt like it was too many people trying to get involved and it stopped the creative process and it wasn’t the way I wanted it to go really. On this record, I didn’t have that and I think it made the record much better, kind of like when we started, like how I did the first mini-album, The Thief & The Heartbreaker, when we first started the band. That was a similar thing. Me and Terry just recorded all these demos and then all of a sudden a label came in and they didn’t even want us to record them again cause they said they were good enough. So we just mixed the demos we had and that was the first mini-album we did. The reason why a lot of people like that one is cause it’s just us playing with no one around, no one saying anything. It was as pure as it could be and I really wanted to kind of do that on this record.
Sometimes you can get lost in all the other stuff.
Yeah, exactly. I do like records that have been produced by good producers. Obviously, a lot of great records are out there but my favorite records are normally where it comes more purely from the artist, especially these days where the industry has changed so much.
What was wanting to come out of you this time for the new record?
I don’t know, I think there’s nothing different emotionally from the others. On this record I wanted to do it all myself, which is the first time I really felt like I was ready for it. We toured all around the world for like four or five years straight and it was kind of insane (laughs). Then coming off of that, and kind of growing up, not being so naïve anymore and then like finding a groove. I think maybe that was a huge difference, like emotionally. The way I write my songs has always been kind of the same, which just comes out of me. The sound might not be the same but the emotions are always the same because they always come from the one place, really. But this isn’t the place I’m in right now. That was different.
You said, “People need a journey and this is it,” in regards to the album as a whole.
Well, the whole concept of records is like pretty important for me and everyone is saying it’s not important anymore, which I don’t believe in. It’s like writing a book. Why just write a chapter, what’s the point in that? Just writing one song. I just think it’s kind of boring. I think people are really into music when they have a record. They want to put it on and they want to listen to the songs. It’s like they’re into a gig and they go there and dream away, focus on something else for a second, and I think that’s an important thing. I did that for some of the records I bought, just put them on and listened through them. If it’s one song, I might as well listen to the radio or something.
How true to life is “Get Up High”?
(laughs) Well, I think everyone has kind of felt that, the highs and lows, you know. It’s funny, cause when I write songs, like lyrically, a lot of the times they just come out. They come to you and you don’t know where they come from. I just wrote those lyrics and it all came out and I recorded it. It’s not like I was sitting there thinking about writing them down. I just sang them, I listened to what I was singing and I wrote it down. So that’s exactly what I felt at the moment. So yeah, at that time when I wrote that tune, it was definitely a low but that’s kind of how our music is and I write about all that kind of stuff. But it’s not like it’s the only thing, it can also lift you up. You need them both.
Have you always felt more compelled to write about feelings as opposed to more story songs?
Yeah, maybe (laughs). Sometimes when I get too much like feeling or too specific it can get too much. The storytelling stuff is really cool too cause then it’s not like insanely personal, how some tunes can be. Some songs I write, they can get really personal and I feel like I almost can’t sing them. It’s happened a lot, like on the next record and other records, I write songs and they almost get too close and I choose not to put them on the record because they would be a nightmare to tour them cause they’d be too much. But I’m trying to get into that a bit more. I’m trying to mix it up. Some songs on this record are like, well, it’s not like everything is about me either, like I’m only writing about myself. A lot of these songs are about a person or people around me or someone I see or someone I know that is going through something. I can imagine what a person would feel when I write about that. Just cause I’m writing “Get Up High,” I’m not writing just about me being like hungover in bed at the moment, you know (laughs).
Which song on the new record would you say changed the most from it’s original composition to it’s final recorded version?
It’s more like production stuff, not too much like arrangement stuff. We had early demos we made of some of the tunes and they were a bit more like electronic or something. Sort of like “Isolation,” for example. We did the first demo and I just played it on keyboards almost and that’s how it sort of came out. But then we turned around and went to record it live in the church and made it fit the record a little bit more. Other ones, I recorded alone at home and I played drums and stuff and literally it was on my lap cause I had all the ideas for it and then I brought it to the band. A lot of them I had a clear idea of like bass and some of the drum ideas and then I had my drummer coming up with some drum ideas. “Beneath My Love” was a big one. It was like the biggest production song maybe on the record. I wrote it and I thought it was going to be one way and then we sort of turned it around and built the song a little bit on the groove and that made it all psychedelic. It’s a really simple riff and I built the whole song around that and brought it to the studio and then we worked on the production to make it a bit more interesting.
Are you more comfortable writing on the road or do you prefer waiting for breaks and times at home?
I find it really hard to write on the road. I haven’t done it that often. I wrote a song on the last record on the road; “Lay Down” was written in Florida and it came out of nowhere. But it’s not often cause you’ve got people around you all the time, you’re always pretty tired, like during the day, and during the nights when you’re finally waking up, you do a show and after the show you’ve built up all that energy and you can’t write. And you can’t really write during soundcheck. So I find it really hard to write out on tour and I think a lot of people do actually. There’s not that many people that write on tour. At home you have time to think and you experience stuff and have time to take it in more than on the road. I just came back from a month on the road in America and it’s hard to even remember what happened on the tour. Not because I was like drinking through or anything (laughs), it’s just you play a show every night almost and it’s a lot. Every day feels special but you just can’t remember.
In the beginning, were you more interested in singing or learning to play guitar?
I don’t know, playing guitar wasn’t bad. If you play a lot of guitar it just comes, you know, so I wasn’t too worried about being a good guitar player. I even went to like music college for a second. But I never really cared about being that good with it. For one, my dad’s been a musician for his whole life as well and he was never taught and he is like one of my favorite guitar players. He doesn’t know any kind of, like if you played a scale he wouldn’t have a clue what it is or whatever. He wasn’t taught anything. But for me it was all about, from the start, writing good songs. That’s what I was always into from being a kid almost. Writing songs was so fun and trying to be better and better with that. So with writing songs and going through different ways and what kind of music I wanted to do, that’s kind of where I found my voice too. When I started to write certain songs in different ways, I started to sing higher. When I was in London for a second, I sang a bit lower and then I started to sing a bit higher (laughs). I don’t know, I think it’s more about the songs always and I didn’t really care about being good at one thing. But you write and you start to get the vibe and you start to play better guitar and you start singing better and it just comes. I never wanted to be like the best guitar player ever or the best singer. Not really.
You guys played a lot of big festivals and since your songs usually have strong emotions or stories, do you think that sometimes the messages kind of get lost in a big festival environment as opposed to an intimate club?
I love playing big festivals and we’ve done a lot of them. To me, I think it’s all about mixing up the show. Like when you do clubs, it’s a totally different thing. But festivals, it’s always over the weekends and people get away from work or whatever and normal life and let loose so it’s like a pretty fun show to do as a musician to play for people that are having a good time. I love doing them. Then clubs is a different thing. It’s a bit more intimate and you can try more things and the set is a bit longer and you can try like a B-side or whatever you want to do. You can mix it up where at festivals you normally do like an hour or fifty minutes and you try to do a real pumping set. It’s normally a great time and I’m looking forward to doing more of them with this record.
You caught on pretty quick when you started Alberta Cross: You got signed, you put out a record, you went on tour.
Yeah, for Alberta Cross it was like that but I’ve been playing music my whole life. I’ve played music in Sweden, then I went to London and I played music in London forever and I worked in coffee shops and bars. I mean, the only thing I did was play music really and then I was just like a terrible coffee shop worker. I was like this useless person (laughs). We would jam all night long and I would sleep for two hours and then go and open a coffee shop or something and work and make muffins (laughs).
But I always played music and I played in my other band before Alberta Cross. But then I started to write songs aside from the last band I played in. Me and Terry, I went to Terry’s place and he sung them and we’d like record all these new songs I wrote cause I was inspired at the time and it felt pure and that was going in a good direction. Then we decided to leave our other band and he moved back to like his folks’ place, really far out east, and I used to take a train out there every day and record all these songs. Musically, it was a really inspiring time, all the stuff I wrote felt good. Then we sent out that to the people that were interested in our old band and it was really quickly that people got into it. I think cause we didn’t try to get signed, we didn’t care about industry really. And we were in London at the time and it was a bunch of bands sounding like Joy Division or whatever and we were suddenly completely different.
But yeah, it was a weird thing for Alberta Cross. But it took a while to get to that point. But then we started this new band and so many people were interested in us. It was really like literally three shows and we had like every bloody label there (laughs), like the whole of England. So it was kind of weird. It wasn’t like an overnight thing, like I just started playing music and all of a sudden I got found. Some people do that and that’s like a terrible thing for them cause you’re not ready and you don’t really know where to go and really naïve and you’ve got all these people trying to control the way you sound or whatever. But like I said, we were kind of ready and kind of knew what we wanted to do.
So what is going to happen for the rest of the year?
The record just came out so I guess a lot of things (laughs). We’re doing some dates with Norah Jones, some theatres. And then we’re doing some New York shows and I’m going to go to Europe and do some stuff. We’re going to start all the major touring in January next year. We’re doing like a European tour and then an American tour and Canada tour. Just tour a bunch, I guess. Get the record out and drop a video soon and just keep on going (laughs). We want to get the record out to a lot of people.
