Zahl

Zahl solo

Geir Zahl got two albums for christmas when he was 11. Knutsen & Ludvigsen´s "Juba Juba" (norwegian duo playing childrens music, great stuff!) and Bruce Springsteen`s "Born In The USA".

Around the age of 16 Geir Zahl started playing guitar in the basement with his childhood friend Janove Ottesen, fooling around writing weird songs and lyrics, having a laugh and no ambitions. Then songwriting increasingly became more serious, and later these two campanions went on to form the highly successful oilbarrel banging gypsy-rock punk-adrenalin-infused act Kaizers Orchestra.

Five years and three albums into Kaizers Orchestras career, Zahl is ready to release his solo album "Nice For A Change". Different in many ways from the spastic eastern european expression of Kaizers, Zahl this time explores American style singer/songwriter, americana style music with english lyrics.The echo of the Knutsen & Ludvigsen and Bruce Springsteen albums never let go....

The album was released February 19th. 2007. Stay posted for more information about shows and tour plans!

text taken from Zahl's My Space site

For the Save-Me-Kaizer Christmas calendar 2006 we did an interview with Geir about his solo-project, going a bit deeper into his musical past and present. Here Geir talks about his idols, his ambitions and the way he works...

Interview from 15.12.06

At which age did you start getting interested in making music? Which instruments have you tried out?

My two first albums that I really listened a lot to were Knutsen & Ludvigsen’s „Juba Juba“ and Bruce Springsteen’s „Born in the USA“. I was 11 at the time. Kaizers and my solostuff are spawned from those two records, you know, to make a long story short. Also I was very taken by the grunge thing when I was around 16. Kurt Cobain was a hero, and 1991 was a great year to get into music. Great albums that year from Red Hot Chilli Peppers, U2, The Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against The Machine, Cypress Hill, Nirvana. Also, as you might know, I’m a big Tom Waits fan. Got into his stuff at around 19- 20.

Instruments. Strings turned out to be the thing for me, not violin like, but bass and guitar. Had a brief carreer in a school band as a clarinetist. Fucking hated it.

What music did you listen to when you were young?

Not that much really. My brother Jan was really into Queen, so I listened some to that. Queen has some pretty cool stuff, but it was never "my" music. Nirvana felt a lot more like it was my stuff, a generation thing sort of. Speaking directly to me.

Can you remember the first album you bought yourself?

I remember buying DumDum Boys’s „Pstereo“ on vinyl. Think that must have been one of the first I actually bought myself, must have been around 1990. Huge investment that was. Never really bought a whole lot of records.

When did you start writing the first songs for your solo project? Which song was the first one?

I had been fooling around with some scetches for a while allready, but I really sat myself down after Kaizers’ first european tour in September/October 2003. Janove and Susanne were having their second kid that fall, so he wanted us to take three months off because of that. I got the feeling that I’ll need to be able to stand on my own feet, and not have to rely on someone else if I want to keep on doing music. So that gave me the push to explore the stuff I had been humming on in my head, and the time to figure out what my expression would be like. I sat there for two months basically. Put together songs and worked a lot on the lyrics. Also it took a long time for me to figure out how to sing this stuff in an okay way. I didn’t do a recording of anything until the fall of 2004, one year later. Basically just in fear that the recordings would suck compared to how much I liked the songs as ideas. So the fall of 2004 I sat down in my kitchen with one mic and my mac and recorded a simple demo that I gave to the musicians that now play on my album.

Do you write the tunes first and then the lyrics or the other way round?

Mostly the song first, then lyrics. I have to get to know the song well before I can find out what words it is trying to say. An exception would be “Friday Nights“, I got the first line for that song („It seems like every woman’s a widow“) from a toilet wall backstage at the Columbia Halle in Berlin one morning. We had parked our nightliner there and had a day off, and were totally hung over from a mayhem night at Wild at Heart the night before where MLK (Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur) paid for the bar tab. That sentence just really spoke to me, and I figured out a melody and some follow up lines for it right there and then.

Your solo project is called simply „Zahl“. Was that clear from the very beginning or have you been trying to find a name for your project?

I had some ideas for band names, but the other guys wouldn’t hear of it. "If it works for Cash it works for Zahl" as Bård, the guitar player said. Kind of a strange name Zahl, and short, so I guess that’s all good. We’ll see, if everything goes to hell maybe I’ll blame it on the name thing...

Which bands or musicians would you say were the role models for your solo project?

Stuff that me and the guys in the band have listened a lot to, like Bruce Springsteen, Ryan Adams, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Lemonheads, Jayhawks, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, Damian Rice, The Band. Great songwriting is something that really appeals to me, so I try to write really good songs, first and foremost. I guess that´s what everybody tries to do, but hey, you asked!

Will you be going on tour with „Nice for a Change“ next year? If yes, any ideas if Europe is on the menu?

We will tour in Norway in February/March, and hopefully get some summerfestivals going here. No plans for international gigs yet, but we’ll see how things work out here first, and if there is any interest from labels and booking companies outside of Norway. I’d love to come on tour with these guys in Europe!

Does the title „Nice for a change“ also relate to „something different from Kaizers Orchestra“?

Hehe. The Hellraizer has some time off...I really like the line in that song that goes "why don’t you change and be nice for a change". Maybe that’s why I picked it out too.

Do you already have new songs for a second album?

Yepp. Like almost ten of’em. Not all finished though. Also have some left over stuff from this session, some more quiet stuff. But first we´ll have to see if anybody wants this first album, I can’t afford to make another one if nobody buys this one. Laws of fucking physics that is.

Thanx for this interview Mister Zahl!