Well, I suppose we start off with the biography, and where better to pinch a biography from than Erik's official site. It reads:"Erik Norlander is a progressive rock keyboardist, composer and producer from California. He has written and produced over 30 albums since 1993 with his chanteuse spouse Lana Lane, his band Rocket Scientists, his own solo albums and numerous guest appearances. Erik's evocative keyboard technique is reminiscent of the legendary Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Patrick Moraz and Jon Lord while still very unique and forward-moving in its own right".
What it doesn't tell you is quite how cool and emotive Norlander's music is, how he somehow takes the vintage 1970s analogue keyboard sound, and reinvents it for the 21st Century, without being either glib or retro, and - perhaps most importantly - what a damn nice fellow he is..
Jon: I have just been listening to your album. It’s really, really good. I am really impressed by it.
Erik: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Jon: So tell me. How did The Galactic Collective come about?
Erik: I would say it started in around 2000.
I had been asked to do several shows as a solo keyboardist and what I would do is take a bunch of you know my favourite classic analogue synthesisers and put together a kind of electronic oriented progressive rock set, or a progressive rock oriented electronic set, depending on how you want to look at it. I would take the best songs; instrumental songs that I had written for various projects and then perform them solo in set. And I had actually done this for nearly 10 years all over the world really - in the US of course at various festivals and concerts, and then in Japan, in Europe and it started becoming a regular thing where I was doing the solo bits almost as much as I was doing band concerts and proper 4 or 5 piece band shows.
And there wasn’t really a recorded representation of it. I had a few videos here and there, but whenever I would do these events and people would say oh this so great I’d like to get a CD of it, there wasn’t really any specific product to point them to. I would say oh well that song, that’s from the Lana Lane 'Secrets of Astrology' album, that song’s from the Rocket Scientists 'Oblivion Days' album or that song, that’s from the 'Erik Norlander Music Machine' album, and so you’d have people combing through 15 or 20 different releases to try to get a representation of the set that I played.
So I started working with a concert promoter in Ohio in the kinda middle of the United States, in 2008 and this is a woman named Dena Henry. I met her at the 'Rites of Spring' Festival which is the big prog festival in Pennsylvania in the north east US which is a kind of big hotspot for prog rock.
Its also completely the other side of the country from where I live. In fact Pennsylvania is actually closer to England than it is California.
Jon: Wow I didn’t realise that
Erik: Yes geographically its about 3,000 from California and about 2,500 miles from England.
Jon: Good God
Erik: I know, it’s a huge country this one. In any case Dena started doing some concerts in Ohio and in Canada, and kind of just the general north eastern part of the US. And we brought my band Rocket Scientists out there a few times and I had done a couple of these solo keyboard shows like I mentioned and Dena said to me, ‘ You know you should really meet some of the musicians out here in Ohio.’
And again Ohio is quite a ways away from California where I live –I think it’s over 2,000 miles. She said you know well you do the full band concerts it obviously has so much power and drama and such a nice theatrical element, but when we have to bring out 4 or 5 people from California, it costs us several thousand dollars in air fare and arranging back line equipment rental, and all that before we play the first note on stage or before we even sell one ticket. And this is kind of the curse of progressive rock because we want to put on these great theatrical productions but it’s not like we can go out and play for 100,000 poeple every night or even 1,000 people every night.
You know, a typical successful prog show you’re talking maybe 150/200 people who come to a club date. So I wanted to do a lot of these things, but it just wasn’t financially possible and I just kept turning down show after show because the budget just wouldn’t allow it. And so Dena started introducing me to these excellent musicians out in Ohio and I played with a lot of them, and just kinda got to know the guys and then decided to put a band together. And the purpose of the band was to finally come up with this project called the Galactic Collective that would take the very best of my instrumental catalogue that I had been performing for nearly 10 years at that point.
And we would start doing full band shows of this music. So I ended up settling on the three main guys Freddy DeMarco on guitar, Mark Matthews on bass and Nick LePar on drums, and we set up in this typical American Ohio basement – you know this concrete room underneath some of the guys’ house, and we just started working up these songs. And it sounded so good that Dena and I thought we need to make a record, we need go record this and kind of make a definitive statement for this collection of songs because even if you took recordings of those various albums it would really sound like a hodgepodge because they expand a period of 15 years and they’d come from all kinds of different albums so sonically they would sound different and they wouldn’t really have the continuous feel as these concerts that I was doing.
So we found this beautiful studio in Cleveland, Ohio which thanks to the economic downturn as I believe the politically correct term is, we were able to get for a very good price and the studio had this beautiful 9-foot Steinway concert grand piano that they had purchased from the Cleveland Symphony and they also had a very nice Hammond organ there. These are two things that are kinda big to bring from California so it was nice to find a studio that was kind of built around those instruments. And then I brought in my usual rogue’s gallery of analogue synthesisers, I think I brought in 3 mini moogs of various vintages and my Alesis Andromeda analogue synthesiser. I was actually one of the designers of that instrument so that one has been fairly near and dear to me, and then a few other things.
And we set up in this beautiful studio and basically recorded that album live in the studio, with a few overdubs, but for the most part it was all done live, just like we’d been playing in the Americana concrete basement for weeks before that, and we of course brought in a high definition video crew to document the whole thing. And that’s really how the project came into existence. I looked at it as sort of a way to document this work that I’d been doing for the previous 10 years, and kind of as a milestone release and rather than doing the traditional kind of best of hodgepodge album I really thought this was the right way to do.
So there’s a very long-winded answer to your question.
And that seems a good place to break for today. We will be back tomorrow (and quite possibly wednesday) with more from this remarkable man. In the meantime, check this out:
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