KIE’S MEMORIES OF APPROACH:

As with Experience, the initiative for this album came from Mikko.

The first album had been a nice project and it had left a good taste in our mouths. It didn’t gain any commercial success, and we only played three gigs with it, but we still felt good about it all.  We hadn’t thought of it as anything other than a necessary and creative one-off for ourselves.

In 2004, when Mikko brought a minidisc with five new songs on our family vacation to Egypt I remember listening to “River” on the dunes behind our Sharm El-Sheikh hotel, pondering whether to give this project another chance.

I had just finished working with my first theatre music pieces and new ones were already lining up. That new and interesting world was keeping me rather busy.  If we were to do this, most of the writing had to be on Mikko’s shoulders again. At Mikko’s end, the process took a while, and it was only after the second set of the songs that we decided to give it a go. In early 2005, we asked Sami Kuoppamäki to come to the studio with us to record these new songs. At the time, we were lucky to have my old bandmate Jukka Puurula working in a youth center studio in Munkkiniemi, and we booked him and the studio to have the drums recorded. The actual building of the album, the tracking, arranging, and production was done by just Mikko and myself as Jonne was busy gigging with his other bands.

When it comes to working on the album, I remember that the summer of 2005 was terribly hot and the ventilation in my small studio in south Helsinki was poor to say the least. On the other hand, maybe because of its central location by Hietalahdentori, we ended up getting some great guests to feature on some of the songs. We spent almost nine months working on and tweaking the album. We were free from any kind of commercial pressure and just wanted to make an album we could be proud of.

Once the album had been mastered and was ready to go, Mikko shopped it around with all the major labels. Many employees, especially in the A&R departments of the labels, were known to us as they, too, had played in famous Finnish bands. Regardless of our shared background, none of the labels were interested in releasing the album. The responses were along the lines of, “Haha, nice that you guys have been creative and so on, BUT you do know that this kind of proggy shit ain’t gonna fly AT ALL”.

A little disheartened, we kept looking for other alternatives and learned that The Rasmus guys, who at that time were the gold fingers in the Finnish pop and rock business, had just formed their own label, Dynasty Recordings. Lauri and Pauli, together with their manager Antti Eriksson, heard the album and got enthusiastic about releasing it through their new setup. It was a huge relief for us when the ball finally started rolling.

Receiving the Finnish Grammy (best rock album of the year) for Approach felt pretty good, especially after being rejected by basically all the people in the business who SHOULD know when they have something special offered to them.