Love To Blame (Commentary Version)

[Spoken word interview/commentary]

[Stephan Groth] Hi this is Stephan

[Anders Odden] I'm Anders

[Geir Bratland] And I'm Geir. And we are Apoptygma Berzerk

[SG] Love to blame was the first Apop song that was written after the Harmonizer tour and after we put out the Unicorn EP
So this was actually the first song that we made for the You And Me Against The World album. For some reason it was also the last song that we ended up recording for the album. The actual recording was done at the House of APB but most of the guitars were recorded at Geir studio in Oslo

[AO] I heard Love to Blame back in 2003. Stephan was playing guitar on it and I asked him if he was serious about playing guitar and he was very excited about this new kind of style. And I just basically told him he would need me back in the band if he was going to do an album like this

When will you be whole again?
We've both been down that road, going nowhere
Still you ask is love to blame?

[GB] I always loved this song. Always felt it had something. He sent me the files and asked me hey, can you play around with it? Can you give it what it needs? It actually just, I think all the parts just came in and Stephan worked with it with the MS-20 synth riff, just tricked the rest of it

[AO] It was always a problem to actually find out how the song was going to end up. We had so many different versions and recordings from different time periods. At the end we had the shape of the song like it is now but I felt that it needed some extra touch or extra riff kind of thing. I sat down in Geir studio jamming on his acoustic guitar when he was cutting the track and just told him you know maybe I should just record some stuff with this guitar and see how that works out. And we just took the guitar up and I just jammed thought the song and all of a sudden this riff came through and its now the riff that brings the break in the song into the last chorus and it is a very important guitar part of the song which was made up by accident

When will you be whole again?

[GB] Regarding the drums? We were kind of short on time since this was the last song to record on the album. So I asked Frederik to like bring his bass drum and hi-hat and snare over to my studio. My vocal booth is so small that we couldn't fit the drum kit and Frederik in there, so we had to put the drum kit inside the vocal booth while Frederik was sitting outside the door playing on it. And yeah that's actually the drums that's on the song it's recording in my hall basically in my hall and in my vocal booth. And who could tell? I think they sound good

When will you be whole again?
We've both been down that road, going nowhere
Still you ask is love to blame?

[SG] We ended up mixing Love to Blame at the Lydlab studio in Oslo together with Ulf Holand. Ulf is one of the best mixing engineers in Norway, he has mixed tons of cool stuff that we like over the years, bands like Lucifer, Turbonegro, A-Ha, and other stuff. So we were very excited to work with him. He actually ended up mixing some other songs on the You And Me Against The World album. Songs like Back On Track, Maze, and In This Together. That's it. Enjoy the song

Still you ask is love to blame?