Collector's EP

Despite being considerably light music, the whole EP was made of a lot of pain. Although being outdated - if only you'd know what stuff is coming up from DCX soon - these songs are too good to be left unreleased. The songs belong together and stand that way in the similar style across. It's time to release the songs as this Collector's EP -- Enjoy! Erase You This song was the DCX entry track for Eurovision. It got started by three writers Hölli, Forsby and Tracy Lipp, who wrote the basics of the track and then it got turned in to DCX style by Joel. This didn't go without drama though. Two of the writers supposedly had a publishing deal with the former DCX booking agent / manager, but Joel didn't want to sign off a third of his copyright royalties in exchange of nothing. This led to the publisher extorting he gets his share or Joel won't get anything, basing on the idea the other writers would've not had a permission to promise a share for him for finishing the song. The song didn't exist in any registered form before it was made by DCX though. A week after the publisher's declared the blackmailing Joel announced on the DCX website the 10 year long co-operation with the former booking agent / manager / publisher has come to it's end. Afterwards considering it was this song to end that road with lyrics "no wasting time .. start erasing you from everything" is just ironic and hilarious. So DCX went to take part on the Eurovision in Finland and after 3 months of public votings DCX was number #5 out of all 540 contestants. The voting was a scheme of the national media company though to exploit artists' fan base in having the artists and their fans advertise their own page, thus trying to gain free exposure for the contest throughout Finland, and in the end the voting had nothing to do with the competition -- The finalists were pre-approved by their inside jury before the voting took part. What is great is DCX were at top positions at other independent voting charts - one being Finnish and the other one international - and we were at positions #2 and #1 on those charts! As DCX left the Eurovision contest Joel decided to pull up a music video of the song, and ordered light equipment for the arranged video shooting a few weeks in advance. The video recording event took place at a large palace in Tampere Finland, which had been closed for 14 years but rented from the town ministry after long talks. Everything was at stake of going wrong when The Netherlands had a little snow fall and the local post couldn't deliver the ordered light equipment to Finland -- not a day earlier than one day before the actual filming! The video shooting day was really hectic with even no time for eating and the script had to be modified on the fly to fix every character's time tables to fit the available filming time and daylight time. The filming went really great in the end. The next 30 days Joel spent editing the piece together and the video saw daylight 24th of March 2012! Fallen Angel This song was originally in production in 2004 already under another title "Drift Away" for a side project called Liquid Black, and the text had been written for this gothic dance band. The original form was a ballad and by time the first version was done it had had four different singers, two guitarists, two violin players, a bassist, a keyboardist, and even an old Moog bass synth recorded at a distantly located large studio up north in Finland. DCX's Olli made the final version for Liquid Black with singer Capri, who was a close friend to Aki Sirkesalo, a well-known Finnish singer, who died at the tsunami disaster in Thailand in 2004. Capri was crying in the studio, while singing the song with lyrics "drift away with sorrow". Later on Joel thought it would make a great first ballad for DCX and the lyrics were re-written by American writer Charlie Mason before starting the production in DCX style. Joel and Katri, who was DCX's singer back then, entered the studio in 2006 to record the vocals for this track. The outcome wasn't as good as expected and they tried recording the song again a couple of times afterwards, without ever getting the final vocal tracks for the song. Joel tried changing the direction to more pop by turning it over to something Timbaland would have done back then - with more rhythm'n bluesy vibe and hip hop to the beat. It got never finished though and in 2009 DCX had the notable change of the lead singer when Bettina came in to replace Katri, who went on to pursue on her solo career in Finnish music. Joel had to face he still is no man of ballads, turned up the tempo and the track instantly found it's place. After years of struggle, "Fallen Angel" was released as a single in early 2011. Bang Bang Bang This song was the last of it's kind, where Joel recorded first with Katri and then with Bettina on the lead. Katri had already announced her opinion about the "new style" with the previously recorded song "Meet This Day", that it should be the last 'hip hop' vibey dance track they would do and wished to have no more of this style. But as Joel always wanted to push her boundaries with vocals to always get the new and unique blend of singing on the record, it led to hard and slightly bitter work at studio hours to get every nuance right. Joel still regards the rapping "telephone speech" Katri did on the middle eight part of this song one of the very best vocal performances she did with DCX throughout the years (the other ones being "Don't Break My Heart" with the nearly crying astounding voice, and a side kick project called "The secret of monkey island" with a 17th century Creole-Caribbean accent that took 3 hours to get it right with three vocal phrases in the recording session). Being in studio is serious business, and not always fun. The song was under construction while Katri jumped on her solo career, and Joel wrote his own rap parts at this very time, which shows the pressing mood and bitterness in the lyrics - "...hoping to shine in the way she changes the floors, she's gotta be different for the perspective, breaking down the walls" Second verse depicts the importance of Bettina joining the crew as the new lead singer - "…your new emperesse makes us largest and sets the mark you use when comparing other's Britney fetishes, need to let them loose" Joel wants to emphasize the texts he writes are not to be taken personally by anyone, but rather he finds the inspiration and energy from his own life events to tell a story in a song and make it dimensional for the song to have at least two different meanings for the listener. "The four years we (Joel, Katri and Olli) toured together bound a connection between us and it was like any long time relationship coming to an end… it's never easy on anyone's spirit to separate ways with someone you've been through so much". It's a love song, the traditional story of divorce, but on a multi-angled level! Meet This Day This song has an interesting background to it. It started first as Joel's remix of Britney's "Piece of Me" in late 2007, but after Sony in Finland declined their use for the remix due to it being too hard to try to clear up with their American counter parts, Joel decided to write a song over it and pressed delete on Britney's vocals - the production was 100% his own after all. Joel did the whole song using a sole Macbook and the basic plugins available on the Logic Studio music sequencer, and excelled nice with the setup. However the manager of DCX back then was not pleased with the song and told it's not ready, so it never got released or published. DCX still went on to perform it live on TV at a festival event and later Joel got a full share of copyright royalties for the first time (and this was the actual end of him writing publishing contracts on the DCX songs, which 4 years later lead to more drama and firing of the manager). The reason why the song was not released in 2008 was the manager, but one local deejay got a hold of a copy of the song and it went #20 on the official dance chart in Finland. At late spring 2008 Joel started working at a plastic factory and the song was on-hold for years. During the stressing factory years Joel could manage to write only 1 song in a year, which led to diminishing of the DCX brand when there were no new songs coming out. Later Joel recorded "Meet This Day" with Bettina in the studio, but also kept Katri's vocals there in the background, so the feeling he originally visualized on the song would not be transformed too much and break the mood. The song itself tells how DCX as a group do things their way despite how the present jet setters may diss their content and rather only go after the looks of artists. It's one of those few DCX songs against the shallow values of the modern days.