I edited my profile with Thomas’ Myspace Editor V4.4
PAPERPLANE WILL BE OUT WITH HIS DEBUTALBUM "HOW TO GET TO THE SKY" DURING 2007. ITS PRODUCED & MIXED BY PEOPLE BEHIND ACTS LIKE THE CONCRETES, PETER,BJORN & JOHN, ANNA TERNHEIM, MERCURY REV, ED HARCOURT.
ITS PURE POP AT ITS BEST!
PAPERPLANE IS LOOKING FOR A NEW RECORDING HOME ABROAD.
SO IF YOUR LABEL IS A GREAT ONE, PLEASE LET US KNOW!
ERICS OTHER BAND "EPS TRAILER PARK" IS STILL ON GO AND ITS MORE OF A FOLK/ALT.COUNTRY/LOFI/SINGERSONGWRITER/SLOW MUSIC THING.GO TO: WWW:MYSPACE/EPSTRAILERPARK
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT PAPERPLANE CHECK OUT THE WEBSITE WWW.PAPERPLANEMUSIC.COM
DISCOGRAPHY:
Grow Young 7" (Imperial Recordings/Rough Trade 2006)
How To Get To The Sky (Mondo Nuevo, will be released during 2007)
REVIEWS & BLOGGING ETC. ABOUT PAPERPLANE
Absolute Noise
Indiemusic
Snow Globe Universe
Alien Hits
Fried e rice
THE BIOGRAPHY & HISTORY OF.
Eric has always been a prolific artist and songwriter, or at least for as long as hes been in the music buisness. There is photographic evidence of him being music-oriented at age six, when he got a "little band" drumkit for christmas, but in the following years, hockey was his main interest. Growing up in Visby, the capital city of Gotland, getting to play mainland teams was not always easy, but Eric, despite being small, was quite successful. He got the chance to represent his beloved home island in "TV-Pucken", the major national tournament for teens, where major stars like Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin (and, well, all the big national players.) are first seen on TV.
For Eric, however, another career was beckoning. A musical instrument, a "totally ugly Lita Ford-style guitar" was purchased, and a heavy metal band was started. "We wore zebra pants and played Dio and Saxon covers" he discloses. Top marks in my book of course, but this was also where his songwriting days began. A little later, he saw a guy in school who had made a cool drawing of a man with a guitar in the art class, and he approached him through a note written on his locker, telling him that he was a songwriter and how about they meet up.? "That started the band that would later be monostar. And the guy, Linus Larsson, is today one of Swedens top pop producers.(Ed Harcourt, The Concretes, Tobias Fröberg, Peter,Bjorn And John, Mercury Rev, Nicolai Dunger). With Eric as the songwriter and Linus as the producer, as well as playing guitars and singing in the band, Monostar rose to a certain fame, playing at Hultsfred, touring a lot, even abroad to some extent, and releasing records on MNWs "indie pop" label Soap, famous for its stylish design, and the label for all the aspiring indie bands of Sweden in those days.
Monostar "called it a day", as english music journalists sometimes like to describe it, in -99, and only a year later Eric had released the first album, "Apartment Recordings" from his new project, EPs Trailer Park, where he could work in a more intimate singer/songwriter style, something which was not allowed in Monostar. "Linus is a producer, you know, there had to be effects on everything…". Linus followed as a musician and stayed for that album and the next, "Lesperit descalier", which came out in 2003. EPs Trailer Park is Erics own project, where he calls the shots, and various friends and musicians help out both live and on recordings.
Songwriting has always been the great passion for Eric, and songs come real easy to him. "Ive never had any periods of writers block, except for when Ive been really depressed. It just keeps flowing. Playing live is great, but not sitting in a tourbus for hours on end, drinking beer, carrying amps, ending up in bed with someone and regretting it, and getting paid by the local mananger with ’a punch in the face. Its a hard work. I ask him if staying at home and writing songs is more his kind of life, and he replies that its more of a question of survival instincts! But with Paperplane hes hungry for the road again. Point taken…
His work is mostly done from his bedroom studio, and I mean literally bedroom. "My apartment basically has a bed…and loads of instruments crawling all over the place". This way of doing everything himself has also given him a greater skill for production. Most of it is done in a slightly old-fashioned, "acoustic" manner. Eric is not a big fan of the modern school of doing everything with midi and virtual instruments, digital editing and so on, at least not for his own stuff. Eric says about his songwriting "I set the computer program in record mode and play the whole song through…if I make a mistake, I do the whole thing over again. Its good practice for coming arrangements and production."
Artistically hes back in the classic pop fold again, with the excellent new project PAPERPLANE, which takes him in a slightly more lush and polished direction than the country/folky-tinged EPs albums. Although the songwriting itself doesnt sound too far removed from the EPs albums, neither in melody nor lyrical themes, it is perhaps in production, arrangement and instrumentation that it differs, the EP albums being generally more stripped-down and rough. You could also say that Paperplane sounds a bit more "british" and EPs a bit more "american", but thats only my impression
The mandatory "influences"-talk, reveals the interesting fact that Eric and friends were in fact into lonely, older men with guitars (Dylan, Young, Waits, Springsteen, you know the type…) even BEFORE the indie explosion. For most of our generation its the other way around, you started out with indie, and eventually found your way to the sixties, and were then commanded by music journalists to go forth and buy albums from the above mentioned names. Indie never really happenned at the time Eric was growing up in Gotland, so by the time it arrived, Eric and friends had already been wearing vests, scarves and top hats, and playing 12-string Rickenbackers for some time. So you might not be surprised that one of his gurus is actually Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers!
Nowadays hes into a lot of different stuff. To be able to write a really good song from simple components "like, the chords from ’knocking on heavens door’" and still putting your very own mark on it, is, in Erics book, the essence of great songwriting. Having heard his music, I have to say hes one of the people who can do just that. His best tunes are simple, but gives me the kind of chills that only a select few, such as Neil Young, Brian Wilson and Roy Orbison can, and he has a way with lyrics that sets him apart from many swedish contemporaries, and will probably serve him well out there in the future field.
/Aron Lamm, Mondo Nuevo
