Our story so far: Inspired by Ashbury Height’s “Skeleton Tree” experiment, I decided to do the unthinkable – release five of the dozen or so demos I’ve sent to the other Milkmen over the past year. I’ve already posted “Her Name is Witch” , “Billy Wants a Voodoo Doll” , and “Hillbilly with a Meat Cleaver”.
My philosophy of demos uses to be that I should strive to make the demo sound as much like a finished, polished song as possible. Hell, I even mastered a few of ’em before submitting them to the rest of the band. Don’t do that. Just get the basics and move on. The hours you invest in getting just the right snare sound on a demo is time that could’ve been better spent songwriting.
“Only The Dead Get Off At Kymlinge” will obviously need some extra work if it’s ever to see the light-of-day as an official Milkmen song (I should switch “Now I’m drinking champagne” to “Mixing trains and cocaine” as well as replacing that “Stop freaking me out” part). That said, i think that this demo still has all the basic elements for success. Plus, it’s based on the the greatest Urban Legend of all time: The story of the Silverpilen.
Back in the 1960’s, the city of Stockholm purchased some new green commuter trains and, apparently, the company which manufactured the trains tossed in an unpainted, silver demo model into the bargain (see, never spend too much time on your demos!).
Well, the Stockholm Metro network decided to not bother painting the Silverpilen (“Silver Arrow”) and to not put up and advertisements inside of it (If you’ve ever ridden the subway or a commuter train in the states, you know what I mean). Then they decided to run the train only late at night to maximize the number of drunken Swedes who would encounter it.
Around this time Metro also abandoned work on the what was to be a new station at Kymlinge – effectively creating a semi-complete “ghost station”. So, drunken Swedes + mysterious late-night train x ghost station = the Urban Legend that people who boarded the Silverpilen would be taken to the Kymlinge stop and hacked to pieces.
Bara de doda stiger av I Kymlinge