Here comes the paranoia
Songs from a Solitary Home
Songs from a Solitary Home is Major Parkinson’s second studio album, released in 2010. Born from lucid dreams, sudden bursts of inspiration and long, feverish studio sessions, the album captures a period where melodies arrived fully formed, fragile and overwhelming at the same time. At its core lies the song “Solitary Home” — a haunting, lighthouse-like centerpiece that demanded more than a modest rock-band production could offer, yet somehow grew into something vast and symphonic within those limitations. Blending theatrical rock, rich arrangements and a dreamlike sense of storytelling, the album feels like a journey through inner landscapes, where solitude becomes both refuge and revelation.
Live in a tango & build a house of dreams
A small piece of album trivia
In my younger, more vulnerable years, I used to believe that anything was possible. Pushing forward in the fast lane, melodies came pouring out like fireflies fluttering towards a beautiful nothingness, a vernal force of nature carved out new patterns and made a dusty spectrum of strange colors. Many times these melodies came from the depths of a lucid dream, but when I woke up, they were trapped inside a snowglobe, like a pre-historic animal calling upon its limbs to be reunited.
February came, and I woke up from another dream. I was in a frenzy. Like the city of yellow skyscrapers inside a carved mango, I now had one of those otherworldly experiences that could inhabit a song and take shape into something firm and familiar.
I called Lars and brought him down to the studio immediately. I had the whole song in my head and so many images stuck to it that I was about to explode. I still remember the look on his face when he heard it for the first time. He felt a connection to the song in an ethereal way. We both knew this was uncharted territories, we were out on the ocean together with no land to be seen. I felt like Captain Ahab with hydrophobia.
April came and we brought the band together to record the song. How could we do the song justice within our modest budget? I felt it deserved a big production with horns and big choirs bursting with symphonic texture and drama. I almost had a full musical in my head based on this song, and here we were with a 5 piece rock band trying to capture this monster.
Throughout spring, we worked non-stop to capture the magic of the song while the sun was heating up the tin roof above our studio. These were delirious times. Since the intro sounded like "And the money kept rolling in" from Evita and the guitar solo sounded like Paranoid Android, the working title of the song was Paranoid Andruloid. This still makes me chuckle.
Time has gone by, and to this day, Solitary Home is still one of the most haunting songs we've made, and somehow, the lighthouse of solitude is still beaming like clockwork in this strange cimmerian shade called life, constantly taking new forms.
- Jon