Land of Broken Hearts: Story. Continues…

….So everything´s in place: the audio master for the album, artwork/cover and promo pictures… what now? Well, a record company to put the actual CD out in the world would be nice – so that´s what we started working on.
I´m not sure how many promo packages we mailed out… I´d say close to a hundred; every record label in the world (which we could think of) received a copy – and none were interested. Replies were few but the message was the same: no thanks!

Remember that it was 1991: for the “80´s” we were “not commercial enough” for the “90´s” – “too much music”… some labels were still into “fluff, glam and lipstick” some were already into flannel shirts and suicidal lyrics accompanied by a couple of guitar accords played badly.

But we still had a steady flow of gigs so on a next – quite heated – band meeting we decided to print the album ourselves and sell it at the shows; we could also send copies to the press for reviews and to radios in order to gain some interest. One of these days we run into a guy who just started his own little label – Extreme Records – and made a quick deal: we´d print 500 copies, mail some to radio/press, take some to the gigs to sell and he would distribute the rest to record shops (yes, there were plenty of record shops around in ´91).

And from that point – the day we finally hold our first album/CD in our hands – things started to unfold in an interesting way: the reviews were bland at best, only a few local radio stations played our songs and yet… in a few weeks we sold every single copy! We rushed to order another, similar bunch – same thing: in a couple of weeks they´re gone.

Needless to say – we partied hard… who wouldn´t? We paid our bills, we had some change left and it seemed like we could keep printing our own CD´s and sell them out pretty fast – cheers!
Until the day the pre-order for 3000 copies came in from a Swedish distribution company (we´ll take it from there in our next update).