10. September 2017 By Walter Price 0

Billy Momo Says: Second Album, Drunktalk

Drunktalk this on on Billy Momo #29.

Drunktalk was our second album.

It was written and recorded during a time that on paper should have been a really bad time to get shit done. In the beginning of the process I was on parental leave with my daughter, and at the end of the process, Orren’s son was born. But we were really focused anyway somehow. I recorded a lot of stuff with my daughter on my lap. You can probably even hear her doing her best googoo gaah gaah in the background on some tracks. Orren recorded his ideas at home and sent them to me and I arranged them so that we could record them with the band when we had time to meet up in the studio.

This is the first album that the band was more involved. Maybe not so much in the arrangements still, but we didn’t play all the instruments ourselves as we did on Ordinary Men. We had been playing live with the band for awhile and really wanted their playing and attitude on the album. So we were comfortable with letting go of the control a bit.

The Coffa (bass) was the only new guy on this album. His audition is what you hear on The Weekend.

We were in the studio fiddling around with that track when he stopped by. Tony had played with him before and thought that he would be perfect for Billy Momo. He literally was in the studio for 20 minutes. He came in, said hi. Heard the track once. Played it through once and then we pushed record and played it once more. And that is what you hear on the record. That is also the first track that I started pretending like I could play the piano. And that was fun so I just stayed behind the piano from then on. Up until then, I had mostly been playing guitar and banjo in Billy Momo. I think everybody was happy I stopped doing that. I’m even worse at guitar.

With Drunktalk we experienced our first two hits (from our perspective they are anyway). First, we had the title track Drunktalk. It got a lot of love in the press and blogs all over the world. For awhile it had a thousand spins a day on Spotify. We were super happy and thought we had peaked.

And then out of the blue, we got an email from a friend. He attached a link to a trailer for HBO series Better Call Saul and asked us if the track in the trailer wasn’t a Billy Momo song.

More Billy Momo wisdom at The GTC archive

Sure was! They had used our track Wishing Ain’t No Sin as the main theme in the trailer. The trailer had over a million views already and we didn’t know anything about it. That changed a lot for us. Suddenly we were able to reach way beyond the Swedish borders and got some real attention by press and radio. Super exciting times in camp Billy Momo.

We spent the rest of that year on the road going all over Sweden and even reaching the UK and the U.S. That banjo riff on Wishing Ain’t No Sin changed the world for us, and it just happened by chance. We had just finished recording Wishing and were just sitting in the studio talking before we went home. While we were talking we had the track on in the background and Orren was just noodling about on the banjo while we were talking. And I just stopped him in the middle of a conversation like, “Dude! What are you doing? We have to record that before you forget it.” Orren was like “You think we need to? I’ll probably remember it.” But I just fell in love with it straight away and wouldn’t take any chances. It made me think of hooks like Timbaland’s production on Missy Elliotts Get ur freak on. Sometimes stuff like that just happens if you create a creative space for yourself where everything is allowed. You don’t have to think things out. They will come to you if you let it. That whole album was like that. We were just in a super creative space in time and just went with it. We weren’t in control. Good times and good people make great music. Simple as that!