Sweet Sweet Music spoke to Roger Houdaille  about releasing 2 new records, structured psychedelia, hour-long live streams, and the upcoming tour.

And, YES, he covers Gruppo Sportivo‘s ‘Happily Unemployed’!

Nowadays mainly singles and EPs are released. You come up with 2 new records?

Funny you mention that…there’s a non-LP 7” single coming out in a couple of months! I love all formats, and indeed this year we released a lot of singles up until the release of the album.

What’s the story? How did the records come together?

It started as one record, honestly. But as I was working on Hue Spotting, I was recording lots of covers and for a time they were being released once a week as singles as I mentioned. I had plenty of pop-psych tunes that matched the direction I went with the new album, Hue Spotting. As a last-minute decision, I decided to create Spotting Hues as a companion covers album to the main disc. Around last summer, the other Ex Norwegian mainstay Michelle Grand said she wasn’t interested in working together on the upcoming album so that gave me a little more freedom to do something a little different and more psychedelic than usual. That’s my favorite genre, structured psychedelia, so I had a lot of fun putting it together. It took the longest of any Ex Norwegian record I think. Also, because of the uncertainty of who was going to be on the album at first. It ended up just being me and my old high school friend Fernando Perdomo jamming out the songs, separately in our respected home studios.

You have been very active on social media in the last couple of months. Easy?

I hope I make it look easy! But, no, for me it’s rather difficult. I’m not naturally a social media person, so it’s a bit of a task heavy endeavor in the sense that I need to pre-plan and schedule even the most basic of posts. And it doesn’t help that I set unrealistic content goals, like hour-long live streams every week of songs I’ve never performed before!

It’s so hard to predict the future but what are your goals for the rest of the year?

Yes indeed it is very difficult to plan certain things right now although there’s still lots to do or that can be done. I’ve been playing a lot of catch up, organizing and improving the business side of things as well as finishing up some ideas and projects I’ve had. One of which includes attempting something never done before – an Ex Norwegian record with guest artists on each track! As I alluded to earlier, a single “And I, Lover” will come out around October. Also in the works is a mega box set of the first 10 years of Ex Norwegian. This would be for release sometime 2021. And a proper follow-up album to Hue Spotting will probably come out sometime 2021 too. Also pending for next year is resuming our European tour! So, I look at the rest of the year as prepping time to ensure next year goes smoothly.