Fredrik Boqvist
Born in Sweden 1979. And started at an early age practice the guitar and started writing songs. Day or night didn’t matter. Music was pouring out of my ears and hands. I formed a punk band and carried my guitar case through the town of Kristinehamn. The birthplace of many, many great unknown bands that never made it outside town or past the teenage years. That is why I decided after graduating music high school and make it alive through the Swedish military service to move to Gothenburg.
Over the years I’ve played in different bands while also releasing and creating music for my solo project. In my solo projects I can be free to create whatever I like musically, while in the bands I tend to stick to less diverse genres and concentrating on being the lead guitar player.
My stride as a writer, performer, producer and everything between is to create at the peak of my knowledge and achievement. Sometimes my knowledge of a subject is less than average and a painful and time consuming process in becoming better and better begins.
Ever since hearing Simon & Garfunkel for the first time I’ve been fascinated by vocal harmonies and I can easily get carried away doing too much harmonization over my own lead vocal parts, that I often have to retract large harmonic parts because I realize that potential listeners might not find it interesting. A song almost always start with just an acoustic guitar and lead vocal part, but then I never am able to keep it that simple. So I start adding stuff. I love adding strings and brass parts in. And I arrange the songs by testing out new layers of instruments. Adding and subtracting, until it sounds as I imagine it in my head.
The recording process Is a really time consuming process. The easiest parts are always the guitars, but after that it can take a long time recording and re-recording drums and vocals. I remember one song where I recorded the drum parts and added everything on top of that and when I played the song for a friend I realized that the drum part was making the whole song injustice, so I gave up and ended up adding drum samplings instead. It would have saved me a lot of time doing that in the first place, but sometimes you tell yourself that ”I can live with that not sounding like I can hear it sound in my head”, but then you realize that you are just fooling yourself.