The front cover art for Follow Me Home, the ninth
album by Oslo, Norway’s I Was A King
(Coastal Town Recordings, Oct. 28) displays dotted lines that
correspond to colorful cutouts on the back cover, one for each of the album’s
twelve songs.
This is an innocent, childlike prompt to play it like
a puzzle, literally, but on a more figurative note, this bit of fun also feels
like a suggestion to fill in the blanks on what these songs mean to the
listener.
Album opener “All
This Time” is a just shy of two-minute prologue, foreshadowing the bits of
melancholy carried throughout the album, fully realized on the following cut “Down.”
Gentle whispers
from the ground
you’re awake
but you’re still dreaming of the sound
when the shadow calls
breathing down your neck
awaiting a response
The feelings these lyrics evoke are moving, delivered
with the insistent, singular-sounding combined voices of the band’s co-writers Frode Strømstad and Anne Lise Frøkedal, and bringing about
that deep understanding of shared human condition that, even when packaged in
the few minutes of a pop-rock song, is powerful enough to move mountains (and
navigate fjords!)
In the case of I
Was A King, the band has been around long enough to navigate without a map.
Follow
Me Home is clearly the sound of hard-won confidence.
Formed by Strømstad
in 2006, with its debut album released in 2007, I Was A King continued at a steady pace for the next seven years,
appearing on almost as many record labels throughout. Some may say the band’s
sound went through just as many iterations during this time.
2009’s self-titled sophomore album featured
contributions from Sufjan Stevens
and Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor (on the Follow
Me Home single “Growing Wild”
you’ll be reminded of Sufjan’s banjo
flourishes mixed with the opening notes of a Sonic Youth tune.)
2010’s Old Friends brought elements of Big Star and The Stooges into the mix and in 2012 indie rock icons Robyn Hitchcock and Norman Blake (of Teenage Fanclub) came on board to co-produce and perform on the
band’s major label debut You Love It Here.
Following 2014’s Isle of Yours, I Was A King finally took a respite before returning for 2018’s Slow
Century. 2020’s Grand Hotel followed.
2022’s Follow Me Home is perfectly titled.
The album feels like kicking up your feet in front of the fire after a long
journey that was trying, but filled with experience.
In reality, that warm fire would have likely been
welcomed during the Follow Me Home recording sessions.
“We recorded Follow Me Home in December of 2021
in a building that had been a very important hub for Norwegian music over the
last 20 years,” Strømstad explains. “While
we were making the album, the building was emptied, and the heat and water shut
off. It has since been demolished.”
Even under these considerably less-than-ideal
circumstances, Strømstad and Frøkedal managed to make another
reality of the time – producing these recordings during a lockdown – work to
their advantage. The minimal take on the sound that I Was A King had been traveling towards all this time is its
strongest asset on Follow Me Home.
“The previous two records were very band-oriented,” Strømstad says. “We felt that doing it
as a two-piece this time would be a fresh approach, playing instruments we
normally don’t play just to get some different ideas and textures and keeping
it as simple and organic as possible.”
With Follow Me Home, Strømstad and Frøkedal
had to fill in the blank spots in their process, just like the art that adorns
the album cover. When the audience places the pieces, a colorful image emerges.
Follow Me Home, the ninth album by Oslo, Norway’s I Was A King, arrives on Oct.
28, 2022 via their own label Coastal
Town Recordings. Contact Josh Bloom
at Fanatic for more information.
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I Was A
King | Links
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Josh Bloom at
Fanatic
Promotion | Contact
