Gerard Nowak of The Soundrops
'In my life I've loved d-moll'
John Lennon
I was born in 1976.
The first song I wrote was called 'Hej 99'. It had one verse of gibberish lyrics, but I could already hear the orchestral backing in my head. I was 6 back then.
I founded my first band when I was 11. It was called The Bagers, and the line-up consisted of me, my best friend Martin (who knew he was in) and a couple of my classmates (who didn't). The Bagers released a few albums in my head - one of them was called 'Gerard @ the Band', so much for the no ego policy - the lyrics were, well, Norwegian, but the melodies were real. I used some of them later on, they did surprisingly fine.
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In high school I and my two best friends Paf & Ad founded our first real band. It was cold The Round Triangle and out came about 100 complete songs, some of them quite rivery. We managed to contribute to one semi-official cassette ('Mariany Soundtrack' [1994]) and play a couple of hopefully unforgettable gigs. Whatever was to follow, it is here in The Round Triangle where I learned the most about songwriting, harmonising, the shifting sands of band leadership and chemistry. It was a most uplifting adventure for which I am still grateful. Love, guys!
In 1999, me and Paf created another tentative band, there was simply another concert to play and Adam was away. We asked my sister Mrll to join and called ourselves The Soundrops, after a quote from 'The Issa Valley' by Czesław Miłosz. Never planning for it to za bardzo last, much to our surprise we have managed to survive until today and even record and internetionally release some music. Well, actually LOADS of music. Ha!
Concurrently, I was honoured to be featured on some latter-day works by my favourite Polish band. It started innocently enough from translations of key Armia lyrics into English, and it finished with the unbelievable number of seven releases to which I contributed mainly as a harmony vocalist, but also as a guitarist, lyricist or simply translator. PLUS there were quite a few loose gigs, one tour and one film! That was a dream come true!
