Norway
duo settle back into life on the road
By Kimberly E. Mock
kim.mock@onlineathens.com
Lessons
one can learn from touring the world: Too much time on the road can
contribute to exhaustion; creative people have been known to disagree,
even fight; tour managers might not always have your best interests at
heart.
These are lessons Eirik Glambek Boe and Erlend Oye know well.
Norwegian duo Boe
and Oye, otherwise known as Kings of Convenience, learned this and more
firsthand after the success of their 2001 record, "Quiet is the New
Loud." Boe and Oye embarked on tours of Europe and the U.S.
The constant touring took a toll on Boe, who returned to
study psychology in Bergen.
Oye went to Berlin to throw himself into his budding
electronica career.
Three years after their initial success, the two friends
came back together to make a new Kings of Convenience record.
As Boe says, reuniting had its difficulties.
"I think what we
both discovered during the break we had from each other is both our
egos had grown even more, and so the kind of arguments we had during
the recording of our first record - they seemed kind of insignificant
compared to the arguments we had this time when we made our new
record," Boe says. "I don't think there's anyway around that. If you
have two creative people, you decide that you're going to do something
together, conflict is inevitable. That's what happened to us, but in
the end, we managed to get a record out. So it was good in the end."
It's difficult to imagine those arguments on the duo's
resulting record, "Riot on an Empty Street."
Each man's hushed vocals and quiet guitar arpeggios meld
together seamlessly on the album's 12 tracks.
Boe explains this is the result of the pair's approach to
writing songs.
"The typical
Kings of Convenience song is the result of one person's idea, maybe a
melody line or guitar part or a line of lyrics. And then you will take
it to the other person, represent it and 90 percent of (the) time, the
other person will say, 'This is not a good idea, that's not working,'"
Boe says. "But then in 10 percent of situations the other person will
say, 'Hey, that's a great song. Let's work on this one.' And then we
just finish the songs up together, writing the lyrics, the second
verse, the third verse - they're already the hardest - and that's where
the collaboration begins. Basically, all our songs are my ideas or
Erlend's ideas, but ... all the songs have the input of the other
person. In the end, we forget whose song is whose."
This week, the
Kings embark on a U.S. tour in support of the new album, and Boe says
the two have learned from their past successes and failures on tour.
"... Touring is
always exhausting, especially when you're a two-man band and you have
to do everything by yourself when you're on-stage - you don't have a
backing band to rely on," Boe says. "... But we are getting more
experienced, we are more aware of the mistakes that we can do when
we're (on tour). ... We never travel early in the morning, we always
make sure there will be time to eat a good meal and have rest before
the concert. That's the three important things, what most tour managers
seem to forget. Artists - they need food and they need sleep. We're
similar to human beings."
Kings of Convenience
When: 9 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 3
Where: 40 Watt Club, 285 W. Washington St.
Cost: $10 advanced
Call: (706) 549-7871
Advance tickets available at www.jomoentertain ment.com
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Thursday, February
3, 2005