On Making Sure Their Songs Don't "Kill" Each Other

Faint barking. "I'm sorry, there is this dog in the upstairs apartment," Highasakite's vocalist/songwriter Ingrid Helene Havik muses from her Oslo lodgings. "It's really upset. It's a puppy." Havik then explains the lonely pup has been barking for "one hour… I just feel really bad for the dog."

Highasakite have spent the best part of the last few years touring off the back of the release of their stunning second album, Silent Treatment, so it's just as well Havik doesn't have any pets. "They wouldn't think of me as their owner," she agrees. At the time of our chat, Highasakite just completed a "promo round" (their new album Camp Echo is ready to drop), which took them to "London and Berlin", and so Havik has understandably spent the last couple of days "sleeping and working out".

Havik had already heard one of her own songs on the radio even before Highasakite took flight. "We hadn't really started the band quite yet," she remembers. "It was just me and Trond [Bersu], the drummer, that had made this demo. We had to put it into some kind of website where you can be picked up by the channel and then, like, you're the week's 'Untouched'." On when this demo first received radio play, Havik estimates, "I think it was maybe Christmas 2010 or something, I don't really remember. Yes, we were in Prague and we were trying to get a Norwegian radio to listen to our song being played for the first time."

"If two songs are a bit too similar in kind of the mood, then they will kill each other."

She met Bersu at Trondheim Jazz Conservatory and Havik shares, "I hated that school". To Havik, there was way too much "improvising without any purpose" on the curriculum. "I just didn't get anything out of it," she laments. "I did my singing exam, but there were a few subjects that I didn't complete and I'm not going to, either." When asked whether any of her former teachers have reached out to compliment her on how well she's doing with Highasakite, Havik answers immediately, "No". So would she be interested to know what they think? "No, I don't care."

Highasakite is now a five-piece ensemble and, when asked how long ago it was that this incarnation first graced the stage, Havik hesitates, "I think that was in 2012 [European] summer, yeah! We played at a festival on the east coast and then the day after that we played — all five of us — at the Oya Festival, which is really huge, like, the biggest festival in Norway. So it was an exciting time." Havik describes her country of origin as a "festival country": "It's at least a hundred festivals."

Pondering her proudest achievements with Highasakite to date, Havik points out, "I think this record is something I'm really proud of. I'm proud of the songs I wrote that I was afraid that I wasn't going to manage to — songs that could be this electronic — and I'm just really happy about that. And also very proud that we work together this well and, yeah! Found common ground where we wanted to be in." Highasakite wound up with a surplus of material to consider for Camp Echo and Havik elaborates, "There were a lot of songs that we didn't use and that we left behind. Some were because of the time — we didn't have enough time to finish it. We just had at least 20 songs that we went through and then we just had to pick out songs that would be complementary to each other; like, if two songs are a bit too similar in kind of the mood, then they will kill each other. So we just have to [pick] songs that are in the same kind of world, but not the completely same mood where they will kill each other, do you know what I mean? I never abandon songs; I just have to use them in some way."

"It took a really long time before I started writing my own songs, because I didn't really realise that I could."

Havik compares her songwriting approach for Highasakite's latest album with that of its predecessor, which featured the oh-so-catchy Since Last Wednesday (yep, you do know it; the one that goes, "He would ne-ver do graffiti…"). While putting Silent Treatment together, Havik recalls the band "weren't very comfortable". "We didn't know each other that well and my ideas weren't really clear enough and, yeah! It was just very weird." Constant touring is a surefire way of getting acquainted. "Yeah, we know each other very well," she acknowledges of inner-band relations these days. "It's definitely helpful." As a result, while working on Camp Echo, Havik observes, "The ideas were a bit more clear from the beginning".  

"With the Silent Treatment album, I had a piano [while] writing the whole album and with this one I was more interested in, like, using our synthesiser players in the band; we have two keyboard players in the band and I really wanted to use it to its full extent. And also Trond, the drummer, has started programming drums the last few years so that was really cool to use as well. And so I made [songs] on Logic and tried to find, like, cool synth sounds.

"We didn't collaborate any more on this album than the previous one. I write the songs and the lyrics, and then we all arrange them together, just like on the previous record." Even so, according to Havik, songcraft is "kind of just reaching in the dark sometimes". Would Havik describe herself as a perfectionist? "I wouldn't say that, no. I'm not a perfectionist at all, no. I like to leave things a bit raw, but yeah! At the same time I just know when I can't do it better and so I'm not like this very picky person."

Havik wrote her first song when she was "19 or something". "It wasn't with my own lyrics, I just used a poem by Emily Dickinson," she shares. "So it took a really long time before I started writing my own songs, because I didn't really realise that I could and, if I tried, it was so awkward." When asked what the turning point was, Havik offers, "Um, I just did it, I think. And also there was this teacher that helped us." We're talking about Havik's previous musical studies, before she went to "the jazz academy", and she praises this "really good teacher": "[It] was like, 'You have to write a song and then we are gonna play it,' and that was my first song. And then I think it turned out really nice and then I just started thinking like, 'Okay! Maybe I can write something'."

Her mother is a singing teacher and Havik reminisces, "She just sang a lot with me, like, gave me a microphone and just sang along with Mariah Carey." When told that seems way too advanced for a beginner, Havik counters, "Yeah, well, it didn't really matter if I didn't sing that good, because she would be like, 'Oh, you're so good!' So it didn't really matter because I was, like, four." Fast forward a few years and Havik describes her bedroom walls in the family home: "I had posters all over the wall. I had [posters] of the Hanson brothers and Spice Girls and All Saints, yeah! That was, like, the time when I just had all the posters that I could get on the wall [laughs]."