biography

Birth
The story of Sidewaytown is one of these weird yet wonderful things that happen in life. It’s full of strange coincidences or maybe fate.

When I disbanded my longterm project Autumnblaze in december 2005 I felt like when a good friend has gone. There was a big hole in my heart and I didn’t know how to fill it with passionate content again. So a time of terrible insecurity began. I knew that I had reached a turning point in life and that it would have been unavoidable to face that truth.

Then one day (in 2006) I had this holy word in my head - Sidewaytown. I remembered I had written a song with this title and suddenly there was a kind of awareness that my new musical project would be called Sidewaytown. With all my sounds I created over the last 10 years I felt like an outsider, a stranger on sideways. I guess that’s a feeling a lot of people know too good and I only hope that they don’t mix the mainstream with real life. It’s worth to see things apart from the big roads.

Then my heart started to feel again. I wrote down a concept for Sidewaytown because it should have been something special, not the usual rock band with all the clichés. Musically I wanted to take the best ingredients of my fav music mixing them with my own style to something really awesome and big.

Well, have you ever seen Sigur Ros live? I have and I was very impressed by their completely unique concept they built up all over the years. It’s like big town with an own language. That idea I wanted to transform with Sidewaytown. Also I was overwhelmed by the passion Elbow showed on stage. Musicians who would die for their music. Or Oceansize - they really live for music, not for the success.

Why I tell you all this? Oh, just to give you a better understanding of what I mean and I’m sure you get the point now.

Life
In 2007 I took all my energy I had to write, arrange and record the first Sidewaytown album “Years in the wall”. Originally I intended to work with a swedish producer but this idea turned out to be the worst I ever had. A mess is nothing compared to this desaster.

But most likely it was a wave from the sky because I got really angry after this and so I decided to re-record the album again with Markus Stock alias Ulf Theodor Schwadorf. He is an amazing sound engineer and a very skilled musician and so “Years in the wall” was finally recorded in the Klangschmiede Studio E between september and november 2007, which was the best idea I had since a very long time.

Yours,
Markus