British musician Passenger (Michael David Rosenberg) recorded his latest album Young as the Morning, Old as the Sea, in New Zealand.
Mike Rosenberg’s new album – currently rating no2 on the iTunes chart – could only have been made in New Zealand.
The English singer-songwriter, who performs under the moniker Passenger, recorded his latest LP at Auckland’s Roundhead Studios.
And the album, called Young as the Morning, Old as the Sea, was partly inspired by New Zealand’s landscapes.
Rosenberg, a school friend of Ed Sheeran’s, shot to fame when his song Let Her Go took off. It was 2013’s biggest-selling single in Britain, and the music video has over a billion hits on Youtube.
Rosenberg, who will perform in Auckland and Wellington early next year, travelled around the South Island before settling in Auckland for three weeks to record.
The musician spent a day recording at Roundhead on an earlier tour of New Zealand, and “fell in love” with the space.
“As soon as I walked in it felt really natural and right, and that’s all I want from a studio because all you’re trying to do where you’re recording is be yourself, I think, and give a really honest and good performance. I’ve been in studios before where they’re all really expensive and sort of feel like dentists’ waiting rooms. It doesn’t really fill you up with creative juice. Roundhead just felt so loved, it just felt like everybody who worked there and everybody around it had this sort of love for it and wanted to make it brilliant.”
When his producer suggested they try a different studio to the Sydney space where Rosenberg recorded his previous three albums, Roundhead was one of the first spots to spring to mind. Auckland was a good meeting place for Rosenberg’s band members who played on the album, who were based in Australia and the US.
Rosenberg and his band members stayed in Auckland for three weeks early this year, living together in an Air BnB rental off Ponsonby Road. The space available to them at Roundhead enabled Rosenberg to do something he hasn’t been able to done since his earliest days as a musician: record with a full band. He thinks that’s produced a better album.
“For me, because I’ve been a solo performer for so long, the idea of a session band is sometimes a nasty one, that idea of getting very able musicians around you that play your music but maybe don’t feel it, you know? That’s like my worst nightmare. I knew all the guys pretty well anyway, but over that period of time, we just very quickly became very close, and I think that’s super important for a band to have that chemistry and have that bond. I don’t think you’re ever going to create great music with people you don’t feel like that with.”
On Young as the Morning, Rosenberg traded in people, the usual subjects of his songs, for songs about nature. “There’s this new theme that keeps on running through all the songs which is this kind of nature, wilderness, landscape thing going on, which I think is a really nice kind of shift,” he said.
“I just seem to kind of be more and more drawn to these – probably as a result of touring and being in cities the whole time – to the peace and quiet that you find in these spaces. And I guess getting a bit older I’ve started to appreciate the glory of mother nature, without trying to sound too cheesy about it.”
The problem with talking about nature like that is that you do sound cheesy. But is singing a better way to go?
“It’s not like I set out to write David Attenborough, the album,” Rosenberg said. “It was just one of those nice accidental things that once you’ve got a group of songs together, you’re like, ‘I can really see this being a kind of thing’. I think as long as it’s by accident, it shouldn’t be cheesy.”
Although he’d written most of the tracks before he arrived on our shores, Rosenberg has no doubt that being in New Zealand affected the eventual sound of the record.
“I think recording it here gave it a really special – again I don’t want to sound cheesy about it, but it did give it this really special energy, I think,” he said.
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