Biography
It is incredibly hard being in a Danish rock n roll band ‘cause of this damn thing we have called “Jante Loven," which basically tells us Danes not to feel superior to any other man, woman, child or beast. This translates into everyone being very scared of thinking highly of themselves and in the music world means that we’re no better than this band or that band…Bullshit!!! is what Sharin and I said and turned our backs on the Danish kingdom. Don’t get me wrong we love Denmark but we felt we had to leave in order to break the restricting chains of the Jante Law but before we left we hit up the Ministry of Culture for a couple of bucks in state sponsored tour support, called up Hilly Kristal and landed our first ever gig outside Denmark in the filthy and disgusting legendary club known as CBGB’s. David Fricke showed up along with 40 other paid admissions and the rest is pure rock n roll history.Well, not quite. If there ever was a buzz band, The Raveonettes were it! Let me tell you, from the time Don Ienner, the president of Columbia, asked me to play Bob Dylan’s old guitar for him and his posse, to the time I shook David Letterman’s hand on national television, the expectations were on so high you wouldn’t believe it. At that time we had only released an 8 track EP entitled Whip It On and a noisy, low-fidelity album called Chain Gang Of Love. By the time we released our final album for Columbia, Pretty In Black, the commercial success train had pretty much already derailed and we were excited and happy to move on from there…We spent the next 2 years coming up with the sound and songs for “Lust Lust Lust” which was recorded in my apartment in NYC. That album ended up out-selling our Columbia releases and was the darkest album we ever made.We always hated repeating ourselves so we set the bar really high for our new album “In And Out Of Control”. We went to Copenhagen to record in a “real” recording studio with a genuine songwriter/producer and ended up spending a hell of a lot of our own money and an incredible amount of time. For 2 months we struggled with our producer who only worked 5–6 hours a day and took weekends off. Sharin and I ended up spending 15 grueling hours a day alone in the studio trying to figure out what we even wanted this album to be like.It felt like it took forever to find the sound on this album and all the songs were so different from each other which made it even harder. We started treating each song individually instead of finding a common thread for the entire album.It’s a strange mixture of modern and old, dark and happy, it’s about rape, violence, lost love, suicide, not giving a shit about what other people think of you and most importantly being mad and angelic!“Jante Loven” doesn’t mean shit to us ‘cause we know we made a better album than anybody else out there!!!X Sune
