Second Hand Orchestra
Reimagining The Wide, Wide River
"In 2020 Karl Jonas invited the brilliant Scottish songwriter and artist James Yorkston to his small club in Stockholm, Sweden. And the Second Hand Orchestra was asked to support J.Y. that very night. So we did, but what was not expected was that we also ended up, improvising, on stage with James for his encore numbers. Was a great night. So, something clicked between us and we all quickly went into a studio the morning after to "start up something"... James played us new songs and we all listened and then tried to back him up. And that was the start of the album 'The Wide, Wide River' by James Yorkston & The Second Hand Orchestra. We did one more recording session with him and the album was finished. Like a whirlwind... Then came the pandemic. James wrote us a month later and asked if we wanted to do an instrumental dub version of a track from the album. We went back to the same lovely studio where we recorded the album with James (Lars Fredrik Swahn's studio in Solna) and tried to remember and revisit the songs we recorded with him a month earlier. And not wanting to copy what we previously did, we focused on fragments we remembered and improvised around it. And started building our own instrumental songs around the original. Very loose and free. No rule in this school. We recorded it live in two days. The last track 'The Secret Beach' was recorded at the main recording sessions with James, but did not end up on his album, so we figured it should be on this, instead."