Reasons to Stay Indoors

Savoy's fourth studio album from 2001, available on vinyl for the first time! 180g vinyl with silver laminated cover art. Will be released at the same time as "Whalebone", the band's fifth studio album that also has never been available on vinyl before.

Savoy is the band Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitar, vocals and keyboards) formed with his wife Lauren (guitar and vocals), and Frode Unneland (drums and vocals), following a-ha’s separation in 1994. Paul and Lauren wrote and produced all of the songs on Reasons To Stay Indoors. “We worked on our own as usual,” says Paul, “and did the drums in New York at Sorcerer Sound. We had ambitions of making parts of the album quite orchestral, so I would say half the album has the very full production with strings and everything. I think it was the first time we’d worked with Joe Martin as a string arranger – up until that point, I’d done most of that myself. And when it came to the mix, there was a different group of people. Michael Ilbert did a lot, and Zed Nagrano, who was a funny character, helped out a lot on a couple of tracks, like the title track, and also Jason Corsaro, who had mixed half of the previous album, Mountains Of Time.

The birth of Paul and Lauren’s son was a major milestone, and the couples’ joy naturally fed into some of their new songs, notably ‘Against The Sun’, ‘Once Upon A Year’, and ‘Five Million Years’. “Apart from the fact that it drastically changed our lives, and obviously turned it upside down, it marked the end of the ego trip,” says Paul. “The songwriter part of me was still looking for anything to use as a vehicle for the next song, so this became a huge area of inspiration, something new to write about.”

As you’d expect from a man who’d been living in New York since 1988, the co-writer of ‘Manhattan Skyline’ continued to find inspiration in his adopted city. The epic title cut, a personal favourite of Paul’s, elicits the solitude of higher education living, mentioning the prestigious Colgate University in Hamilton. Elsewhere, ‘Face’ stemmed from his wonderment of the Big Apple’s breathtaking panoramas as the couple journeyed downstate.

As Paul explains, the original album artwork couldn’t be sourced: “One of the unusual things with Savoy is that we always recorded the albums first before we went out to look for a recording deal, so a lot of our albums are on different labels. And I see now, going back, releasing all these albums, I find that all the art departments that we worked with are long gone. And also, with external design firms, people have changed and moved on to other things. So it’s really a reflection on the state of the music business.”

The new cover art boasts an alternative shot by original photographer Sebastian Schmidt, and has been laminated in silver, a nostalgic nod to the debut record by Steppenwolf that Paul owned as a child. In today’s digital age, he remains a big fan of vinyl. “I can see why people want something physical,” he says. “The artwork makes a difference when listening, and if you have a decent stereo system the sound will grab you in a different way.”