Flying High (1999 Mixes)

Joel Kalsi tells about the background of the song; I was sitting next to my work desk one late evening in November 1998 after having been rolling some notes for riffs on a new song. There was one fly flying against to the brightness of the lamp I had on the table and constantly burning itself in the heat. I saw it in a way the fly was a girl who burned herself repeatedly in these bad relationships that constantly dragged the girl in to them. Something appealing and dangerous, self-destructive but she couldn't avoid it. So it inspirated me in to writing this song, which had a work name "gone with the wind" back in the day. I was 18. The next spring, spring of 1999, was a break from school for us abiturients and meant for reading everything through we had studied in the past 3 years to prepare for the final graduate exams. I recall reading only one physics book because this spring was perfect time for honing skills on music, and that it was. We recorded the "Flying High" song in home at my room with singer Päivi Ikonen (Mattila) who was also graduating from the same school that spring. The recording took 4 hours and we did it with a Neumann TLM103 microphone. Then I spent the next 2 weeks full days editing vocals and searching for the best takes. I think the computer was a 133MHz Pentium and it was so busted all the time that I had to run constant renders of the audio tracks one bar at a time to hear how it sounds in real time. Kind of a "try-and-error" type of a method but it was the only thing I could do. My friend Ari was around to help me with mixing and we mixed the song on his Yamaha 01V. The first version was ready, I think in June 1999. It was the 5th song EVER that I had heard to be using AUTOTUNE (the other four were Cher, Blümchen, some boy band maybe Five, and someone 4th that I can't recall) and I did dig the way Cher abused it only at certain points at vocals, keeping it special, so I wanted to have it the same way on Flying High -- just a tad of pepper and salt. But it wasn't good enough, I wasn't happy with it, so soon I started working on a new mix with more energy and weight. Guess it was September when the new mix was done, called "ORIGINAL MIX", and it was a lot better than the first one in the summer. I had been already spreading the first mix a bit on the internet and all this MP3 thing was very new back then, so it was kind of easy to have people exited about the track (well, those of us who knew what an mp3 was) and download it. There were also remixes by other guys, like the german guys Messa and DNS, who gave nice different approaches to the song. But also the new mix wasn't as good as I wanted it to be -- I still felt there was something more to deal with here and it wasn't everything I could do with the skills gathered that year. I could still push it a bit further. So I started working on even a new mix, which I wanted to be harder than the previous two. There was a glimpse of trance-kind-of arpeggiating melodies coming up since the very end of 90'ies had seen the rise of melodic trance in the underground scene, so this was something that was so totally fresh that had to be incorporated in the song. So it was a nice blend of AN1x and Juno2, and the riff was extraordinary for the time. Also the harder banging stuff was coming up (notice that one big game changer "Brooklyn Bounce - Bass, beats and melody" came out one year later!) as a german group "666" had been bringing their heavy dance beats for a good while already and there were other groups, like Scooter, also banging hard on their bassdrums. It was somehow obvious to make it a hard stomping track, there was no other way. After tedious couple of months of work the final 3rd and biggest version of "Flying High" was ready, and I felt it's so perfected that if I wanted to change something and try making it better, we would next have to re-record the vocals. So I decided we are there and I can't make it any better with the skills I had. It was November 1999 -- a good 363 days since I started writing it in November 1998. At first it was called just "Flying High (radio edit)" but after many re-makes today we know this version by the name "1999 radio edit". It caught off at internet at rapid speed. One month later I was walking on town with Ari and a car stopped at lights next to us. We were listening to their sub woofer equipped car stereos and singing along, "hey this track sounds pretty good.. what is this?" and it wasn't until the very chorus that we were like "WTF??". We had heard the song thousands of times for the past year and then we couldn't recognize "Flying High" when it was played in such out of context way! Someone wrote me from Florida Tampa Bay how he was driving after some car to a parking lot after hearing this dude playing "Flying High" in-car. He had copied the CD from a friend who downloaded it from internet. It became a large success back in the early days of mp3!