A: It’s partly genetic, partly life. My Dad was all-grey by the time he was 40, but he continues to get better looking with age. I plan to suffer the same fate.

A: Listen to the new album...it’s all there.

A: My friend Magnus Börjeson invited me to Sweden for Midsummer in 2006. The midsummer party was at The Aerosol Grey Machine, Christoffer Lundquist’s studio in a converted barn in the countryside outside Malmö. I’ve been a big fan of Christoffer’s band Brainpool for years, so when he invited me to record at the studio it was too good an offer to pass up. The guy’s a musical genius, he plays almost every instrument you could imagine. Look at the “who played what” section of the sleeve notes...it’s embarrassing how good he is. Getting Jens from Brainpool to play drums and Magnus to play bass was the natural next step. They’re such good musicians it’s scary.

A: I mounted an ambitious Nick Drake tribute concert on the 30th anniversary of his death in November 2004. It was a fundraiser for a breast cancer support centre and I approached everyone involved in Nick’s career for raffle prizes. I didn’t think anyone would write back but they all did and they all sent prizes...Nick’s producer Joe Boyd, his biographer Patrick Humphreys, Cally who runs the Nick Drake estate and of course Robert Kirby. In turn I sent them all CDs of the recording of the concert. So I’d had some minor contact with Robert. After the first set of sessions in Sweden I decided to send Robert the rough mix of the song “All I Can Do” which was crying out for a string arrangement. I was living in London at the time, not far from Robert. I knew he was a busy guy and I never dreamed he’d agree to work with me, but I’m a strong believer in “if you don’t ask get”, so I licked the stamp and sent him the disc. To my amazement he loved the songs and wanted to write arrangements for half the album. Working with him was fantastic. We sat in his living room and listened through the rough mixes for the album, stopping to make notes after each track. After agreeing to which songs he was going to arrange for, I basically left him to write whatever he wanted. He came to Sweden with me in October 2007 and conducted the sessions with nine players from Malmö’s Opera Orchestra. It’s was really magical. You can see footage from the sessions in myspace video blog: www.snipr.com/lukevideoblog

A: Urban Myth is a Recording Collective of like-minded artists releasing albums under a common umbrella, and we are all connected by varying degrees to singer/songwriter Dan Bryk whose brainchild the label is. Popsicle Recordings is my own label. It started life as a webshop where I would sell CDs by obscure Scandinavian bands and then it became a label in 2007 when I released the “long lost” debut album by Swedish band Favorita which had been recorded in 1995 but never released. Popsicle had established a certain cache so I decided to make my new album a co-release between Popsicle and Urban Myth.

A: It’s not so much of an obsession. Well, maybe it is. Two happy accidents nurtured my interest in indie pop bands from Sweden. In 1992 my friend Richard (the other guitarist in my high school band) came over to my house and brought two records with him. The Cardigans’ “Life” and Beagle’s “Sound On Sound”. Those are two amazing pop albums. When I got online for the first time in 1999 I started trying to track down Beagle’s elusive second album “Within” and quite by chance wound up on the website of a young Swedish fellow named Tommy. Tommy was happy to get an email from this stranger who was so interested in Swedish pop and we did a trade...I sent him CDs he wanted and he sent me “Within” and a couple of other things. But he also sent me some compilation tapes he put together for me, exposing me to dozens of other Swedish bands...bands I would never have heard of otherwise. My head was spinning...so much good music, and I’d never heard of any of these bands. Many of them were unreleased outside Sweden, or Sweden and Japan. I started scouring Swedish online second hand stores to find albums by bands like Eggstone, Brainpool, The Mopeds, Tommy 16, Freewheel, The Merrymakers, The Trampolines, Popsicle...the list goes on.

A: One of my dearest friends is a writer and film-maker called Ethan Canter. He’s been a champion of my music since the early days and has used my music in his films before. He conceived the video for Come Tomorrow upon hearing the rough mix of the track after my first recording sessions in Sweden in January 2007. It went through a couple of changes by the time we got around to shooting it in January 2008 in Toronto. We spent five days shooting, which is unheard of for a music video...they’re normally shot in a day. We shot nine hours of footage, which is pretty insane considering it had to be edited down to four minutes! We had seven or eight locations including a full day shooting in the wilderness a few hours North of the City, and a full day shooting the concert scene at a club in Toronto called The Reverb. We did a lot of guerilla shooting on the streets of Chinatown and Little Italy, and Toronto residents will notice a few of the City’s landmarks here and there. The beautiful girl I follow around is called Kieran Seqouia...she’s a very talented actress from New Mexico...you can Google her. I had never considered the possibility of making a video before we did this, but it was a blast to do and I’d certainly love to make another one.