"Don't Look" - The song and how it came about

This one is actually the newest one out of the five songs we chose in late 2010 for recording. There wasn't much of it when we made the pick - just the basic verse bassline, the chorus and a loose idea about how to string it together. But it's a simple song, and the key ingredients were already there, so we decided to record what we had anyway and make more up as we went along.


As new as it is, "Don't Look" includes a lot of ideas that have been brewing for quite some time now. It has the kind of stubborn approach for rhythm section we like to use a lot, ie. "never do it like it's normally done". As far as I'm concerned, I guess I just never really got over that severe boredom for the standard rock beat.


Or, as the late, great mr. Cobain put it, "moderate rock".

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The basic verse bassiline has been around for awhile. I loved the simplicity of it, although at first I found difficult to come up with any good vocal melodies for it. Initially the riff was meant to be used as an intro for a fast song, but as soon as the chorus came about the song became something different, a kind of a slowly growing mood piece.

The Harbringer of Artistic Inspiration

I've always been amused with how the good stuff seems to come when I just pick up the guitar for a few minutes before heading off to do other things, almost never when I'm taking my time to really do it.


The chorus was one of those things, although - similarily typically - I didn't regard it as anything special at the time of writing. However, good ideas often have the tendency of sticking on to you, so I hummed the chords during long walks with my dogs. I was delighted to come up with a vocal line I would normally never make - and that, as a knee-jerk reaction, I always regard as a very good thing.


Although I do come up with a lot of riffs and song ideas for the band, I never bring in finished songs. That, in my experience, is not especially wise - telling the band exactly what to play denies the music of the creativity you can have in a group. And at the best of times, the song evolves into something else when the band starts to work on it, and you may be surprised of how much different and better your ideas become once you let them grow freely with talented people.


"Don't Look" was one of these cases - when I brought it to Pekka and Jaakko, it was barely a sketch, but in the space of one hour we had a song with a specific direction as all instruments were beginning to find their footing. And, as I was very happy to discover, it promised to be much better than I had thought. So we followed our typical modus operandi: Build and rehearse a song sketch, record it on the spot, add some tracks and ideas later on top of the recording, and then let it sink in during a couple of weeks of listening. And that's pretty much what we took with us to the studio.

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At the time of writing this (26.12.2010), the song is now 99% ready, with almost all the parts in. I'm listening it on repeat, and I'm quite happy with it - to me it really represents some of the strenghts we have as a band, and as our latest recorded song, it's a good example of the direction where Sestina is heading.


Or, as Pekka succintly put it: "At first I thought it was shit, now it's one of my favourites."




Can't wait to unleash this one in a live setting!




~ Markus

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The song listened during writing:

Sestina - Don't Look (work sketch)

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