Froggy B-sides and besides: Stormy Girl (2006)

And here goes another one from the vault. In September 2005, shortly after releasing Allergic, we had a call from a guy who directed movies asking if we'd like to do a few numbers for his latest film, tentatively called Ludgers Fall. Hard-working lads as we are, we wrote a song almost on the spot, loosely based on the story. The song later evolved to "Off The Tide".

And ater we'd finished writing it, a week later we entered the studio to record it and another one, "Sometimes", which I had in the shelf and had never used before, not really sure if it would work for the band. But for a film it's a different story, you can throw in all kinds of tunes, they'll somehow always fit in somewhere.

Anyway, we went again in March 2006 to Soja Music's Skyline studio in Fürstenwalde, which was being built at the moment, I believe we were the very first band to record there anyway (I think the last one too, but don't quote me on that). Toying with the idea of releasing the two songs on a EP, we needed two more songs to make it complete, one of them was a cover on Britney Spears' "Toxic" and then decided to do a run through one of Timo's numbers, "Stormy Girl", which he had written for his newly born daughter. We hadn't rehearsed the song all that well, really, but gave it a try even though I'm still not so sure about the chorus melody...

Tobi did his drum parts on a Monday, and a few days later, Timo and me went in to finish it. Music Man Sting Ray into his Marshall amp, and Paulina into the new Peavey Classic 30, clean and overdrive channels, no other amp used. And then a little wah festival for the, ehem, "solo" (if you can call it that), and fast vocals and a scream that wasn't supposed to be on the finished mix, but there it is anyway. Patrick Lyhs did the knob-tweaking in the studio and the mix was done by Michael Ehninger, a good friend of Tobi and film score writer.

We never went back to the song again (we played it just twice live, I believe), instead kept on writing new material. Timo, too, and not long after he came up with "Peaches" and "Time", so we settled for those two and left "Stormy" unused.

And there you go, another piece of froggy history.