ABOUT

I often get asked if I consider music my hobby or my job. As it is ultimately both, I always say I like to consider music my lifestyle. What is my hobby, then? Everybody needs a hobby! Since the age of nine, my biggest hobby has been everything associated with James Bond. I have long since lost count of the times I have seen the movies or read the books. I have visited film locations and met actors, actresses, and staff from the film series. I have been part of fan clubs and made some of my best friends in the fan community. I have immersed myself in books, documentaries, and podcasts about the subject. Being a musician, I have, of course, developed a big passion for the music from the films.

The music from the James Bond film series was among the first I got really obsessed with, and it became part of the soundtrack of my early youth. These wonderful scores have inspired and continue to inspire the way I write music to this very day. The idea of doing “something” with this legacy has been in the back of my head for at least 15 years, but the timing was never right. I played both David Arnold’s album “Shaken and Stirred” and Franck Pourcel’s “James Bond Themes” a lot when I was a kid, and I think those albums set the spark for this project. Both albums show that Bond music can be altered and rearranged in clever ways. Some years ago, I bought Randy Waldman’s brilliant album with big band arrangements of themes from superhero films and series, and that further fueled the idea. My main focus in the last few years has been my own band, Pymlico, but in early 2022, when I had just sent off our seventh album to the record label, I knew I needed to do something else for a while. The time for me to do my James Bond album was finally here!

There have been countless James Bond albums released over the years in almost every style and genre imaginable, but the vast majority of them include only the title songs and give the rest of the film music very little attention. I wanted to do this differently: skip most of the title songs, dig a little deeper, and set focus on the scores and all the marvelous film music. The objective I gave myself was to turn the orchestral film music into instrumental electric rock tunes while still keeping both the grandness of the originals and the typical James Bond vibes alive. I allowed myself to change the tempo, the grooves, the chords, and the keys, but I always kept the melodies intact. I made space for solo sections and added intros and outros to get the right song structure. Sometimes I took a theme from one film and fused it with a theme from another to make a new, coherent piece. It was important to make the new arrangements work as their own entities. My biggest challenge was to limit myself—there is so much great Bond music, and an album can’t be six hours long!

Finding the right musicians for the different songs was, on the other hand, a much easier task. Everyone I asked to play on this agreed to do so without hesitation. I cannot be more grateful for the energy and creativity everyone put into this! I am truly lucky to have so many talented people in my life and to be able to call them friends. A lot of time went into this project as it grew bigger and bigger, and it is the longest I have ever spent on an album. I am very proud of how it all turned out, and my James Bond album became for me everything I had ever hoped for—and most importantly, I have had a tremendous amount of fun putting it all together!

– ARILD BRØTER