OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS with Mikkel Ploug
- Interviews / Q&As
"Writing music is having fun to me, my favourite thing to do. A new tune can take 2 years or 30 mins. I record a ton of little sketches on my phone, often on the go, like yesterday waiting for my daughter's school bus I heard a beat in my head...."
Q. Where do you live and what have you been up to lately?
A. I live in Copenhagen and I just returned from a tour with this trio in Switzerland and Germany. I’m working on many new tunes for the trio as well as preparing our new album for release. I’m also obsessing about Bach’s Art Of The Fugue the last months and lose countless hours trying to play the four voice Contrapunctus I on the guitar.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about your early musical influences? Have they changed much since then?
A. I grew up in a household with rock and classical music. I started on drums at the age of 4 and made the switch to guitar at the age of 11. My influences seem to grow in their own unpredictable directions, in the conservatory I studied Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Monk, then many contemporary musicians and lately it’s been modern classical music by Nordic Composer Bent Sørensen who just wrote a guitarfantasy for me (!). And right now it is Bach who blows my mind.
Q. Who or what inspires you at the moment - be it in music, arts, politics or your personal life?
A. Bach - it's just unbelievable how modern some of his music sounds. I’m inspired to see more younger women playing jazz music and I hope the scene will be 50/50 some day.
Q. Tell us briefly about your creative process when composing, or beginning a new project. Do you have routines or rituals, or is it more spontaneous or serendipitous?
A. For me it’s an ongoing process that started when I was a kid and continues into my professional life. Besides making a good cup of coffee I’m always longing to play my guitars and I have a tendency to always end up writing new music no matter what I set out to do (like practising). Writing music is having fun to me, my favourite thing to do. A new tune can take 2 years or 30 mins. I record a ton of little sketches on my phone, often on the go, like yesterday waiting for my daughters school bus I heard a beat in my head and then I sing it into the phone before I forget. I definitely try to look for somewhere I haven’t been before when starting to write music, so I push myself into corners with a wish to write something I haven’t written before. But I try to let a song write or unfold itself and not push it too hard, so that means sometimes very simple stuff and other times verging on atonal with deep complexity. But in general I try to write a simple, good strong song.
Q. What can audiences expect from the live experience on April 24th?
We have played together for 20 years and toured in about 25 countries so we are definitely a real band in that sense. We are friends who have worked in music together for many years. This trio is a bit of a free playground for us based around my compositions and music by Danish classical composer Carl Nielsen who wrote some very beautiful folklore type love songs 120 years ago. We have fun and and there is lots of freedom in the music.
