THE ABBA UNCOVERED EXPERIENCE
Welcome to the first day!
One of Us
Today we are getting started for real! I'm happy you're here. One of Us has been one of my favorite ABBA songs for a long time. I know it's not the most known one, but we need to mix it up a bit :) With the movie "Mamma Mia", it did get some revival! Here is a little bit about my process creating my rendition. You can watch the video or read the text below!
How One of Us came to life.
One of us was the first single released from this EP and it was also the first song we rearranged. It felt right starting from where it all started so to speak! :)
If you recall the original version of this song, it has a very groovy bass line. But the songs has a fragile, longing and honest tone and I heard this quicker, folky and lighter pattern underneath. That's how I decided on the acoustic guitar for this one. And as I've told you earlier, I already made the decision to go heavy on the strings and add acoustic instruments as needed. No more voices other than mine singing the melody, to not imitate what ABBA already done. And also, I love strings so I wanted to test out if I could replace the voices with strings. My co-producer Andrew is a great guitarist and we tested some variations of guitar picking. The chords is almost just as the original, and we just tweeked the ending a bit to create some tension.
The first rough demo
We recorded a quick demo of the song which we didn't plan on using at all. We were in the same room, my singing leaking in to his guitar mic and vice versa. It was just so we could start arranging the strings and so the string players could have this as a reference when recording their part. Funny how we then ended up using most of it, despite recording both new guitar and vocals! It's something with those first takes... You can listen to the demo version here. And even though we used a lot of it, remember this version is the raw, unmixed, unpolished version. Before pressing "record", I took this picture of Andrew.
The strings
The string arrangement were a collaboration between the two of us. Andrew has a lot of experience as a string and orchestra composer so I thought it would be fun to arrange one of the songs together. It was a lot of sending the string score back and forth... But finally we were happy!
When it came to recording the string arrangement, Andrew connected me with some talented musicians from Philadephia where his home and studio are located. I'll tell you more about that day, later on! But you take take a listen to one of the takes by watching the video!
Listen on your favorite platform!
Click the image to go to your favorite listening platform! And you can download it to your library below.
Some live videos of "One of Us"!
This first video is from a livestream during spring 2020. It was actually my first livestream after the pandemic started. The second one we recorded as a teaser before the single was released. I was fortunate to be accompanied by my friend Alex on guitar on both of these!