Warwick Avenue

Warwick Avenue
Let It Out

Jakob Illeborg - vocals
Rune Funch - guitar
Jakob Falgren - bass
Nikolaj Torp - keyboards
Kristoffer Sonne - drums

"The whole idea of the band is a 20th century idea," says Jakob Illeborg, the singer and frontman for the emerging pop rock & roll ensemble Warwick Avenue. "The band itself is very much 21st century."

The five musicians in the musical collective known as Warwick Avenue hail originally from Copenhagen, which Jakob describes as "a wonderful place to have children. It's clean, it's safe…but if you're young, you long for things that are not safe. We needed new challenges. London gave us enormous challenges."

Two of the group's members--Rune Funch and Nikolaj Torp--had originally played together in Denmark as part of a modern jazz group called "Once Around The Park," whose debut album, "Unity," earned the Danish equivalent of a Grammy for Jazz Album of the Year in 1997. After attending Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music, Rune enrolled in the Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen, where he met Anders and Kristoffer.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Copenhagen, Jakob Illeborg--who'd fallen in love with America at the age of 14 when his father was teaching university classes in Madison, Wisconsin--was cutting his chops performing in a variety of local bands. One afternoon, on a whim, the five came together to see what it might sound like. "Some of the guys were at conservatory, doing this and that," Jakob remembers. "I wanted to make a proper band with them. 'Let's see if we can write some songs.' The first song we wrote is 'Ordinary Things' (which appears on the group's breathtaking debut album, Let It Out). It's a key song…with a bit of a Neil Young/'Out On The Weekend' feel to it...I always adored 'Harvest' as an album. 'Ordinary Things' was the first song where we pulled it off. It became a guide to how we should write."

Deciding to leave the "safe haven" of Copenhagen at the close of the 20th century, the five lads migrated to London, moving into a communal living situation in a house on Warwick Avenue. "At first, it was a bit like summer camp," Jakob recalls, "a bunch of guys let loose in London. We depended on each other to get things done. We are very much a collective. There's room enough for everyone in our music, we want everyone in the band to have a say in the music."

The house on Warwick Avenue became a metaphor for the band's music and the ideal moniker for the group. "It's where we lived and is part of the song," says Jakob. "It could be seen as describing our musical world. It rings in a certain way. Warwick Avenue is a state of mind."

A "great fan of American authors and songwriters," Jakob citing musical influences like Neil Young, Bob Dylan and the Band and literary heroes like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller as sources of inspiration behind the group's exquisite cut-diamond songcraft. "It's quite simple music," Jakob says of the songs on Let It Out, "but it's quite detailed simple music, if you know what I mean. They are quite a lot of layers in the music. It's an album that you can come back to years later and hear it differently."

Each band member has contributed songs to the album and it's this collective collaborative chemistry that gives Warwick Avenue its distinctive sound and sensibility. "It's not invented worlds," Jakob says of the band's lyrical inspirations. "It's very often real world, or part of our world. There's some free association as well. I try to take something quite personal into the songs because it gives them an extra dimension. People might not understand what that personal reference is…but, of course, I do…and they can then use that as they want to."

It's this uncanny ability "to universalize the personal" that gives songs like "Picture You," "Beautiful," or "At The End Of The Day" their subtle power and translucence. "'Picture You,' says Jakob, "is a ballad, a lost love song which is dark and desperate, but not moaning. It had to be a life goes on kind of thing. Melancholic, I'm falling to pieces, but I'll get on with it. Lyrically, it's something I'm quite proud of. If a lyric is good, the song is always better."

While playing in the streets of London they were seen by a European promoter and invited to play at one of the biggest music festivals in Europe, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. This was a huge honor since Warwick Avenue was the first unsigned band to be invited to play the prestigious festival.

Over the last year and a half, Warwick Avenue has been working with British producer Richard Norris in Eden Studios in London bringing forth an album, Let It Out, mixed by Richard Norris and mastered by Bob Ludwig.

"We're Danish, we've lived in London for a long time and now we're signed to an American label," says Jakob summing up. "We sometimes see ourselves as being a bit outside everything. We love London,