We’re getting close to the release of Year Of The Flesh, the second album from Dad Rocks!. Back in July, the orchestral folk-pop project led by Iceland born, Denmark based multi-instrumentalist Snævar Njáll Albertsson enticed us with the heartfelt ‘Body Mass Index’ and now a new wonderful track. ‘Peers’, is being offered in the form of a video. We mentioned Albertsson’s strong feelings about modern technology, in particular file-sharing and copyright issues. In an accompanying statement, Albertsson wrote the following about ‘Peers’ and its video:

“Peers is a song about the flow of creativity and about sharing creative artefacts with each other. It’s about inspiration and it’s an acknowledgement of my creative output as something always already rooted in the culture that surrounds us and as something that is inspired by the existing culture directly or indirectly. Therefore I believe that my music and lyrics to some degree already belongs to our culture. Some of the world’s artists are praised for their originality, but originality stems from a whole wave of inputs, idols and inspirations that one uses in creative practice.

In the video for Peers I decided to rip off good old Dylan to make this point. Bob Dylan, whom I admire for his music and creative genius, found his idol in the legend that is Woody Guthrie. He was inspired by Guthrie to a degree that he almost became Guthrie. One of his most famous songs, Blowin’ In The Wind, was heavily inspired by the old spiritual No More Auction Block and many of his songs were – true to folk tradition – based on known and unknown authors and players that came before Dylan. But this tradition is not something that is merely found in folk music, it is found in every creative community all together, and communities that are now global. On YouTube we see a huge amount of creative individuals copying, interpreting and creating things on their own. Just like Dylan did, but with other tools – a computer and an internet connection, not a guitar.

Being a participant (some say consumer) in digitalized global creative flow is bound to brake some of the systemic rules that now exist. Peers tries to accept that the song is already interwoven in cultural relations, and that the song isn’t necessarily that different from many other songs and therefore the song should also belong to our common culture and not just to me.”

Now watch the video for ‘Peers’. Andreas Sørensen directs.

Year Of The Flesh is out on 29th September and can now be pre-ordered on bandcamp.