Sondre Lerche

I started trying to write songs when I was 8 or 9 years old.

Sometimes, you can't seem to find any song on the radio that you like.

I have this idealistic and maybe naive thought that almost any song can be anything. If you record one song today, it would maybe be exciting and cool. But I could record the same song next week and it would be something completely different.

There's a lot of crappy music that people like, you know, all over the world, and Norway is definitely not an exception.

I feel, in a way, on a record, you can be more subtle. In the live setting, everything gets amplified. The dynamics are more extreme in concert.

I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.

You know, I play in small, intimate venues; I'm not an arena performer.

When I write, I'm sort of old-fashioned in the sense that I like to write something that I feel I could just perform alone, obviously, because I do that a lot in concert.

I don't particularly enjoy standing alone and recording my own voice or my own stuff. It's sometimes fun to do for demos and stuff, but I really enjoy the social act of recording records, because writing it is so lonely. And it has to be.

I'm a big Bond fan.

Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I've made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel.

I usually enter the studio with a mix of songs that I've been listening to that are relevant to the sound I want to achieve.

I've come more to terms with the fact that I sound like myself. No matter what I do, I sound like myself.

History shows us that the songs - the myth, the experience and the emotion - live longer the less you explain.

People need to put my music in a perspective where they use other established artists from the past, and almost all the names I see related to my music are great musicians.

I work with really cool people, and so far I haven't been approached in any embarrassing manner when it comes to image.