Track By Track: Erik Hassle on new album Innocence Lost

No Words

It was my birthday and I was in the studio in Stockholm and heard my friend Grizzly working on a crazy guitar track in the room next door. I ran in to him and we started working on the song together. Later the same night I sent over our scratch demo to Daniel Ledinsky, who was in New York. He heard the idea on the phone speaker, left the restaurant he was at, went home and wrote the verses and sent it back to us. We finished the song the same night.

Pathetic

This song is about that feeling of not being able to walk with your head held high, not having the spark, being paranoid, and have the impression that you’re in the way, just wasting space.

Talk About It

A guy had had his whole reality turned upside down by a love affair that could only go one way. But it was so sweet, however, as long as any talk wasn’t brought to the table it could last.

Breaking The Waves

This song is lyrically a little bit like the centre of the time when I wrote this album. It’s about the thing that you want that just keeps slipping out of your hands. First it was just a piano song, but when when I was in the studio with John Hill one night he flipped the whole thing in 15 minutes, added the drums and the overall ambience. I’m really happy about how it turned out.

If Your Man Only Knew

This song came about in October 2012, just as I landed in Los Angeles. It's the first song written for the Album and the first song Me, Al Ahux and Daniel Ledinsky wrote together, so it’s a special one to me.

TKO

I started working on this with iSHi in Stockholm and then my friend Billboard made a new track for it. Later on during a writing week in Venice it got finished. I thought maybe at first it was going to be for somebody else, but then it came in as the last song added to the album.

Innocence Lost

I wrote this on a track from my good friend WDL, whose music everybody should check out! The chorus was already there in a pitched down voice, so me and Daniel wrote a story around it. Later on, I recorded it as a Duet with Tinashe and put it on an EP called Somebody's Party.

Silver & Gold

This song means a lot to me because it reminds me of a magical period in LA when I got to spend a lot of time with two of my idols - Daniel Ledinsky and Dave Sitek. We camped up at Dave's house as soon as we had any time over and this was one of many pieces that came along during that time.

FTPA

I wrote this song with Daniel and Joakim Berg way back in Stockholm. One day I got called in last minute to work with Gorgon City in the Capitol studios in Hollywood. They played me a couple of different vibes and on one of them the chords reminded me of this song, so I tried singing it over their track and it felt like it finally found its home.

All Of You All Over Me

This one is about falling in love with your high school sweetheart all over again, just in a different time and place. I did this track in New York with good friend Elof Loelv and Daniel Ledinsky.

Minnesota

This is a really young song. I was thinking of the transition from a small town to the big city in this one. The title was more of a joke first but then it felt so good in the context. It was written in a guest house on the backyard in LA but it feels like it belongs in a far colder climate.

Missing You

“Missing You” was written in the same guest house in LA as “Minnesota.” It was a really emotional night that I will always remember as a time when making music just felt so real and important. Everybody misses somebody and this is a postcard from me to the past.