Feature: Lauri Jarvilehto Decodes ‘Songs About Sadness’
What was the creative process like for this particular album?
My songs get started in roughly three ways. First is from a song sketch that can be some chords, a beat, a melody or even a roughly put together arrangement with several elements. I tend to whip these together both in my home studio as well as with my travel gear, which currently consists of an SP404mk2 and an OP-1. I have hundreds of sketches like these stored on my studio computer. Sometimes I just load a bunch of them in the SP or Logic and start building around it.
The second starting point is lyrics. I have at least half a dozen different lyrics booklets with me, with again hundreds if not thousands of phrases, stanzas and verses. One is in my backpack, several around the house and sometimes I also punch in lyric ideas on this note taking app called Bear. I might then start figuring out a melody and chords for the lyrics on the piano or guitar.
The third is a voice recorder called Tape on my phone. I have dozens of melody ideas I have hummed there, and sometimes they start building up to become fully blown songs. And often, it's a combination of all of the above; arrangement sketches, lyric ideas and melody ideas glue together in strange ways that lead to a finished song.
Once a song gains momentum, I take it to the studio and build a Logic project around it, separating the tracks from the various sources. Then I build elements around the song using the synths, drum machines, guitars, drums, percussion and bass in the studio. Along the process I keep adding demo vocals. Once the song structure, melody and lyrics are done, I redo vocals, solos and other instrumentals using comping to get the best possible take. Finally, I mix the song and bounce it to stems to put the finishing touches on the song before sending it off to mastering.
This process has been refined and honed especially throughout the production of ‘Songs About Sadness,’ and one thing that has changed in recent times is that I don't spend that much time anymore at the computer, but tend to like to create the instrumentals using outboard synthesizers and acoustic instruments.
What did you enjoy most about making 'Songs About Sadness?'
Learning. I think I've learned a lot about songwriting and arrangement as well as playing various instruments throughout the process of making this album. One funny thing was, that I hadn't played drums in about 15 years, but one of the songs – “Typhoon” – just wouldn't click with any programming tricks or drum machines that I threw at it. Finally I figured I'd better try out using real drums on it. I got a kit to the studio, mixed it up, tuned the drums – and already the very first take sounded amazing. It took a bit of tweaking with the miking and setting up the drums – a lot of which I actually pulled from a Ringo Starr masterclass. The end result was that I ended up using live drums on quite a few of the songs on the album.
The other thing is sound design. Throughout my music making career, I've always used a lot of presets, although I have also enjoyed programming synths. But in the last few years, in tandem with gravitating towards outboard gear, I've really got fired up about programming synths. I'm pretty sure that every single synth sound on the album has actually been programmed from scratch using the synths I have in the studio – Prophet 5, Minimoog, Deckard's Dream, Juno-106, Syntrx and a Yamaha SY99. It wasn't a methodological choice really. I just happen to have hundreds of sounds I've programmed in the memories of the ones that have patch storage that I really like. And of course the Minimoog and the VCS3 clone Syntrx don't even have storage, so those sounds you just have to whip up on the spot.
Which song(s) from the album do you think best represents your artistic vision?
I think “Maze” and “Moomin Weather” are the pivotal moments for the album. It so happens they are smack in the middle of it. “Maze” is about exploring some aspects of religion and spirituality and this constant search to understand our place in life, the universe and everything. “Moomin Weather,” in turn, embodies the key message of the album: life doesn't always have to be all song and dance, but sometimes it's good to just embrace the melancholic side of things.
I think in our culture, we've created a bit of a monster with this idea that everybody should be happy all the time. But sometimes it's good – the right thing to do – to just be sad, if sad things happen.
I'm really satisfied with the way every track on the album embodies this idea from various perspectives, reflecting different sides of melancholia in a way that I hope still ends up giving the listener something of an optimistic undertone.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in music?
I've studied classical music since I was five years old. When I was twelve I started writing my own songs. Around that time I was hospitalized and my grandparents bought me a Synthesizer Greatest C-cassette which really blew my mind. I loved in particular the version of Jarre's Equinoxe IV on it. As a result, I started spending a lot of time at a local studio, learning sound design and acoustic theory, to the extent that I came often home really late. Eventually my grandparents got me a Yamaha SY99 synth so I could make music at home. I still have it in my studio.
At around fourteen I decided I wanted to be a professional musician. I did my first commissioned work for TV at seventeen while playing piano at a local restaurant in the evenings. From 1997–2007 I worked as a professional composer, producer and musician, working on more than 70 different music productions – TV shows, albums, commercials and even a stint as a theatre musical conductor.
At around 2002 I started getting disillusioned with the way the music business was shaping up, although I kept working on various projects until 2007. While doing this, in 2004 I started studying theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. That led ultimately to my current job as a professor of practice and non-fiction writer. Through the years, I've still kept releasing music, mostly through the pseudonym Songsworth, even if my livelihood has not depended on it anymore in almost two decades.
In 2018 something clicked, though. I realized I had rediscovered the same visceral joy of music making I had last enjoyed in high school. That's when I decided to start writing and releasing music again under my own name, taking music making and production a bit more seriously. That led first to last year's album ‘North Star Revisited’ and now ‘Songs About Sadness.’
What advice would you give to aspiring musicians who are just starting their musical journey?
I think the biggest – and possibly most painful – lesson I've had as a musician is that in order to create anything meaningful, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. I spent a lot of my professional years trying to be either really cool or really commercial – and often a combination of both. That led many times to quite mediocre and uninteresting music. At some point I realized that my natural self-expression is not very radio-friendly and if I wanted to rediscover my own musical truth (which took all the way until 2018), I had to distance myself from trying to please others.
I think there are two important components to any great art: the truth and the bridge. The truth means that when you're creating, you really need to go deep inside to dig out what it is you actually need to express – not what others want. If you just try to replicate the current trendy sound, the end result will likely be very blah. But once you've established that clarity of expression and created what it really is you need to create, then it's time to try to find the bridge: the way to reach those people who could possibly share some of what you've experienced in creating the music. That's what we're doing here right now: standing on the bridge, trying to establish if these songs could be meaningful for you as a listener.
I don't think my music is for everyone. But I'm pretty sure that if someone listens to it and can experience even a fraction of what I did in creating these songs, it will be worth it.
