Tomorrow evening I’ll be standing on a stage in Paris preaching for you who’ll be there! I look forward to it!
Don’t miss it! Come to Point Ephemere, 200 Quai de Valmy en Paris ’round 8!
Today, it’s a cloudy Swedish day in Sweden, and I listen to Charlie Haden’s remarkable wonderful album, The Liberation Music Orchestra while I am dealing with paperwork, that I should’ve done for a very long time ago.

This record, or actually its cover, has once inspired me and my friend Karl-Jonas so much that we changed the name of our band to the very same - LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA.
Still before we had recorded anything yet, we called us THE POWER OF JONAH AND JENNY. We were fond of that odd, but powerful name. It sounded a bit Biblical, and that was good. But it also had a nerd-flavour, which was not that good - It reminded us of groups like Belle and Sebastian (very popular in Sweden at that time). So, no… We never really established that name.
When we recorded our first demo, 1997, we lived in a sunny apartment on the first floor, and that place brought us our name: FIRST FLOOR POWER. Â Some people in the neighbourhood had now heard of us: We played as much as we could at night clubs and bars, and we were very proud of our band and talked a lot about it all the time. In fact, there were only one problem with it - THE NAME! No one, ever, could hear what we said - FIRST FLOOR POWER - it sounded so fluffy, the mouth were immediately filled up with saliva every time you had to pronounce it. “What?? FIST FLOWER POWER!?” It didn’t feel right. At all. We were not ready to be huddled together with hippies or flower power. We were straight. A’
Aright. Let’s find out something else, we thought, something that sounds better… We spelled it: THE-GREAT- ORGANISATION! Wow, cool, we liked it! So we explained that we had changed our name from FIRST FLOOR POWER to this.
But soon, a slightly cold wind started to blow each and every time we tried to identify us as THE GREAT ORGANISATION… Ok, “The Great” sounded good. That word was… great. But “Organisation”, didn’t that word have a offensive charisma?  It had a touch of a nazi-club or something. Shit. We got cold feet.
Ok, now we were desperate! We can’t have a name that gives us the creeps!
We stayed up for three whole nights - writing, rhyming, speaking in tongues, searching for the essence, the serum, the key word, the clue! We almost fell into a coma, but just before we did, Karl Jonas put on a record he had bought a few days before. It was Charlie Haden’s LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA!
Oh yeah, here we go! Let’s steal this name! It was the best name we have ever heard, and we stuck to it for almost a week. But then, again, we begin to wonder how the word “Orchestra” would affect our forthcoming career. It was still 1997 and we could barely play our instruments. Were we really the members of an orchestra? No. But we were definitely back were we started, almost. We took back our old name FIRST FLOOR POWER, and since then, we have never changed it again. But, please have a look at the cover of our debut album “There is hope” from 2001… A piece of Charlie Haden has got stuck forever!
