After more than a year in the making, Moncton exotic pop band Lovestorm is finally ready to release their third full-length effort. The duo of Nina Khosla and Tim Isaac celebrate the release of Free To Love with a free performance at Moncton’s Empress Theatre Saturday evening.
The evolution of Lovestorm’s sound has been deliberate yet gradual in the years since their 2009 debut album Great Ocean. Naturally, the way that the duo has made their records and written their songs has also evolved as the years have passed.
“The evolution of the songs is always exciting to see,” Khosla begins. “Writing is a little bit nerve-wracking for me but when a song starts to come together, it is so satisfying.
“To make the songs featured on Great Ocean, our debut CD, Tim sent me musical loops by email and I wrote lyrics on top of them. For Overripe, I wrote the songs on ukulele while on Free to Love, I wrote the songs over beats and loops that I created. I knew that I wanted to make a dance album and so I brought my keyboard to Mexico. As I began writing, I found some themes were emerging and I began to discover what the album was going to be about and what these songs as a whole were trying to say.”
Free To Love is not the first time that Khosla and Isaac recorded new music outside of Canada; their sophomore record Overripe was written and recorded in its entirety in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Seeing that the writing and recording process had gone so well for them with that record, there was really no reason Free To Love couldn’t follow the same path.
“I have been songwriting in Mexico for five or six years now,” Khosla says. “I quickly discovered that I love being in tropical Mexico and that being there is conducive to writing for me. There are so many fewer distractions when recording away from home. It is great to get into a project and not get pulled away over and over. That having been said, we definitely faced some challenges with recording in Mexico, the biggest one being the outside noise. The sounds of the surf, traffic, school bell, kids and mariachi were bouncing around the house. We had to resort to putting throw pillows in all of the window-like openings and shut all the doors and even after that, some sounds still got through.”
Once recording on Free To Love had wrapped up, Khosla and her Lovestorm partner Isaac recognized that calling in an outside person to bring the record together in the mixing process was going to be a necessity. They subsequently enlisted the help of Chilean-born producer Diego Medina.
“This record was definitely more ambitious and we really didn’t have the nerve or patience to take on mixing the record ourselves,” Nina says. “We wanted to bring in someone who could sort it all out and make it sound big. Handing over your project to someone else always feels like a bit of a risk but we are very pleased with Diego’s work.”
Article published in the June 21, 2013 edition of The Times & Transcript