Track by Track: Thomas Dybdahl – What's Left Is Forever

With his latest album, What’s Left Is Forever, Thomas Dybdahl seeks to expand on the huge reputation and popularity built in his Norwegian homeland to the rest of the world. And with a host of high-profile backing musician, and Larry Klein (of Joni Mitchell fame) helming producing duties, this quietly stunning, gently unfurling beauty looks to be a pretty decent ticket to achieving it. We caught up with Thomas for an in-depth, personal account of the inspirations and stories behind the record’s genesis.

This Love Is Here To Stay

The hook came first in a dream (relax, I’m not into mystisicm or spritualism or anything like that) and I couldn’t shake it off, but I couldn’t finish it either. I just had the hook line for a long time – and then I brought Larry Klein and David Baerwald along for a writing session in LA, and we finished it together. The song is essentially about sex. We were envisioning a Thelma & Louise-ish sort of scenario where you knew the outcome wouldn’t be good, but where those last days would be very passionate and lived.

Easy Tiger

This was written in my little communal garden in Stavanger, and is essentially a try at writing a sort of “road map” to my 5 year old son, for when he gets a little bigger. He’s such an active little guy and gets very impatient if he has to wait for things, or doesn’t get it right on the first try. It’s very hard to write a song like that without getting caught up in the cliches too much, or ending up on the wrong side. Hopefully I stayed clear – and if I didn’t, I hope I pulled it off in an okay manner.

Running On Fumes

This song was one of the first ones to get written for what would be become the album. I started this song around Christmas 2011 and I did a lot of pre-production on this one, that we actually ended up using as a base for tracking in the studio. I was just really experimenting with all kinds of sounds and ways to process sounds, as well as ways of preparing the piano and using it in a rhythmical way. This is also where I started using the Fulltone tube tape echo machine, a device that we used a lot on the record. It’s the closest thing to a great big green “make sound great” button that I’ve come across.

Shine

The oldest song on the record. I wrote this about 6-7 years ago in a little cabin that some friends have in the south of Norway. It’s very simple and as close an “evergreen” kind of form that I will get, I think. I always was happy with this song, but tried 4-5 times to record it before without getting it right. I had written it off as a no-go for the record, but when producer Larry Klein heard it the first time he said it was a surefire cut for the album and knew exactly how to do it. We did it in one take in the studio and the band just killed it. It’s very much a performance song.

Soulsister

This started out as an idea for a guitar riff and it was in the same vein as ‘Running On Fumes’. Again, I did a lot of preproduction and wanted to use rhythmical elements as hook lines. So a lot of the percussive things spurred the melodic lines, not the other way around.

Man On A Wire
This was also written in my communal garden in Stavanger. I was just holing up in there for a long time, listening to music and trying to get in the right vibe for writing. This is a very poppy and direct song, and I tried to keep some of the blue thread running through the song, although it is very much a straight pop song. I was listening a lot to Jimmy Webb, Milton Nascimento and White Denim when writing this. It was the hardest song to get right on the record, even though it might be the simplest in form.

{pagebreak}

I Never Knew That What I Didn’t Know Could Kill Me

This one we did very much on the fly in the studio. I had the song and the lyrics (written with Larry Klein and David Poe) and the idea was to sort of move around, following the chords but always staying close to the core harmony. So trying to change as few notes as possible, but still getting the feeling of moving all the time. We had to give it quite a few tries before getting into the zone, which was pretty much what we had to do to get it right. Vince Mendoza wrote some beautiful string arrangements for it, which I later recorded with Trondheim Solistene in Trondheim, Norway.

Interlude

This is just a tradition for me really – to have a little breather like this on my records.

City Lights

Again – written in my communal garden in a stretch where I was writing a lot and being very productive. I sort of found a zone and tried to stay in it. I also experimented a lot with different tunings on the guitar to force a different way of thinking harmonically and melodically. This song was just a try at writing about longing for something else, something better, but also about the realisation that you were never going to get to it – a sort of resignation to being where you are.

So Long

This was written in the same stretch, and it’s also about longing for something else – something new or perhaps old. It’s very nostalgic in a way – and pretty folky. And although it is a ballad of sorts, we were always adamant that we should try and keep a bounce in its step, to avoid it sagging too much or becoming too slow. This is one of those songs where drummer Jay Bellerose really got to show what he can do when approaching the drums in this way. To build an engine that the rest of the track can sort of lean on – it’s amazing to behold really.

The Sculptor

The third song to be written in this same stretch, over the course of a day or two, and it very much keeps the same vibe I think. A very poppy track from the onset, but we tried to keep it sort of mellow and blue and not too light. ‘The Sculptor’ is a very literal title and plays on the imagery of someones who has closed themselves up almost entirely as the years and the blows have taken their toll. The idea being that the right person can and will try to get through these layers and get to the real you, chip by chip. For some reason I always saw the video for this being a sort of cartoon…

But We Did

My favourite track on the record. Maybe because it was written in a special way. I came to LA for the first time, getting ready for a month of writing and inspiration, and when I got the house my family and I had rented it was late at night, we were dead tired and jet-lagged. But for some reason I had a feeling that if I sat down and picked up the guitar right then, good things would come. And this song just kind of flowed out – it was such a great feeling and it happens so rarely that I really treasure when it does. The band really killed it in the studio. They played the shit out of it, in a great take I think. It’s also a performance song, I think.

This Next Wave Is A Big One

There was never any question about what would the closing song on the record. We sort of built the track with that in mind, that we would close the record with something beautiful and pretty bold like this. I did a lot of pre-production on this and we ended up keeping a lot of it as it had the right vibe to build a lot of other things onto it. Lyrically, it’s a sort of variation on the weird feeling you get sometimes if you’re on a ledge somewhere and your mind is playing tricks on you, tempting you to just jump. I got the same feeling when confronted with the Pacific Ocean when I first saw it – such a mythical and magical thing. I was just mesmerised with it and felt it contained just about everything I had ever experienced. I just felt like jumping in.

What’s Left Is Forever is out now through Strange Cargo/Virgin Records.