CHRISTIAN WALZ – THE CORNER

The Grammy Award winning, four-time Grammy nominee, Christian Walz is one of the few Swedish artists who successfully fuse the distinctive elements of modern R&B, soul and pop into a natural whole. As a vocalist he has been praised for his unique expression, one that, without effort, vacillates between traditional song and soulful falsetto. On the 26th of November Walz returns with his long awaited third album, The Corner.

The new album is comprised of 12 songs that possess the unusual quality of being both immediately gratifying and surprising, revealing new delicious detail every time the song is replayed. The tracks were for the most part written during, and are concerning, Walz’s travels, whether they be about events from New York City, Havana, or Gothenburg, or even just from being camped out in a car on the Stockholm island of Djurgården (for so long, in fact, that the police repeatedly stopped and asked if everything was all right).

It’s been four years since the highly praised former album Paint By Numbers was released, from which two tracks made true hit status, “Wonderchild” and “Never Be Afraid Again”. The first mentioned was the first hit, but with time the second has surpassed ”Wonderchild” in the number of times played on radio. Paint By Numbers also gave Walz his four Grammy nominations: album of the year, composer of the year, producer of the year and male pop artist of the year, the last of which won him a Grammy. “I still saw myself as a boy then,” smiles the 30 year old father of two, “but now I feel like a man.”

The new album was recorded in three places, in Walz’s own studio just outside of Stockholm, in a studio in Gothenburg and finally in a studio in central Stockholm. The first year in his own studio worked well, but during the second year he started to feel a bit alone and cut off. “Everyone disappeared and I was still there. I felt like I was missing the exchange with other people, so since about the last New Year’s I have been renting a studio in downtown Stockholm where I also can have a social life.”

In the past with Walz all song writing and production has happened simultaneously. This time all the songs were written before he and his co-producer started to “dress” them. This makes the basic song structure clearer, strengthening the melody and making the songs more immediately gratifying. Walz’s characteristic feel for fantastic detail is still there, he is still a perfectionist and carries with him a tendency to delay sleeping and eating until a mix is finished, or re-recorded. It’s been known to happen that he has been found sleeping on the floor of the studio. The last seven weeks of the album’s production have been described as extremely intense, bordering on totally exhausting. It’s not a work that was rushed through. The difference now is that Walz doesn’t make excuses anymore for his perfectionism, “I don’t give up until I am one hundred percent satisfied, it’s just who I am. But it’s important to point out that it’s not the most slick or polished work that I’m looking for. Perfection for me can be made up of ‘ugly’ sounds that can perfectly suit a particular song. I’m working on learning to identify that one particular detail that bothers me in a song [and fixing it] instead of throwing away the whole song.”

It’s difficult to pick out any one individual song that represents the work, but if the single is listened to, complemented by the suggestive title track “Corner”, the album’s introduction song, one gets an idea of its breadth.

The title track is one of a number of the album’s songs that is based on reality. Walz was called up by the record company to ask him if he could go to Cuba with only one day’s notice. A music video was being recorded there and if he could make use of the team, already having being gathered, to record his own music video it would have been great. “I was skeptical about going down there without any ideas or preparations and felt a bit like a puppet,” Christian remembers. Still, he took with him one of his friends and went.

It turned out that Walz’s skepticism was well warranted. Days of confusion followed and the video director showed his true colors with his absence. They hadn’t had time before the trip to find out anything about Havana and in the beginning were uncomfortable about going out and about in the quarter where they were staying, in which it seemed that every single window was broken. As time passed they dared further and further excursions and realized in what a fantastic and vibrant city they stayed. After a number of cancelled meetings with the director and the others involved, they finally gave up the idea that there would ever be a music video and started looking at the trip as a kind of vacation. They got to know a local by the name of René who ended up becoming their “inside man”. He fixed them up with a new place to stay by the ocean and anything else they could possibly need. On every excursion they met up with René who waited for them on one of the local street corners. It is this experience that the song “Corner” is about…even if the suggestive lyrics could naturally be interpreted in other ways!

Another song that had its origins in a disturbing incident (to put it mildly) was taken out of a New York City trip. “We witnessed a serious suicide attempt”, Christian says. “A man was going to jump off of the Empire State Building and when the guards tried to overpower him [to stop him from jumping] the man screamed, ‘Why you wanna save me?’ and the title of the song was made. At the base of the building there was a sea of police cars, this wasn’t an everyday incident. Afterwards, we were totally shaken; we sat together at a bar and tried to calm ourselves with a drink. Later, it felt nearly inevitable that we would write a song about what we had witnessed. As we wrote it we felt a bit guilty because writing about the incident had to be, by its nature, speculative, but that’s passed now. You have to be able to allow yourself to be inspired by anything.”

The first single, “What’s Your Name?”, has already been released, and it’s not an overstatement to say that the new album is literally teeming with potential follow-up singles. “Producer” is a seductive R&B ballad, radio-pop song “Atlantis” still has its reggae-influenced backbeat piano from when it was first written, while at the same time, other songs have been totally made over. You’ll find acoustic guitars, different types of string instrument arrangements and those pulsing, programmed polyrhythms for which you’ll likely need to direct your thoughts to the US to find a comparison.

One of the songs that smells the most like a hit is “Loveshift”. It is a strong, driving song that hints of, and harks back to, Philly-soul, and one that Walz hadn’t even planned on having in the album! “In that case I actually listened to the people around me”, he says. “But generally it’s dangerous to listen too much to others. Two people whose opinions you respect can have diametrically opposite opinions themselves, if you listen too much to others it can make you feel incredibly split. I make my albums without a thought about format and target groups; other people can have opinions about which songs should become singles.”

Some of the songs have even had trial lyrics that are later transformed into the final ones. “… [I]t’s important that a text feels natural to sing. A line of text that feels wrong can sink a whole song for me. The goal is to write lyrics that sound like the trial lyrics, are about something important, and feel totally right to sing”.

He quiets, then fires off a lightning smile, “And they wonder why it takes time!”