Martin Molin: Inventor of the Wintergatan Marble Machine

Martin Molin is a Grammis (Swedish Grammy)-nominated composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, inventor and engineer. He is a founding member of the Swedish band Wintergatan, and the inventor/creator of the Wintergatan Marble Machine.

Episode Highlights

Have you ever wished you could create something that captured the entire world's attention? Today’s guest has certainly done that…and then some!

Molin, who has transformed from a humble garage band rocker to a jazz wizard, unveils his fascinating musical journey, discussing everything from the Swedish system of free music lessons to the modification of his instruments for portability. Listen in as he shares about his famous Marble Machine invention that has taken YouTube by storm with nearly 300 million views to date.

In this episode, we cover a lot of ground including:

• Sweden’s incredible extracurricular music programs

• “Mistreating” regular instruments to create new sounds

• The marriage of inventor, engineer, carpenter, mad scientist and musician

• The importance of redundancy and stress testing in the building process

• The challenge of transporting the Marble Machine and using it in live shows

• The historical origins of programmable/mechanical instruments from the 19th century

• The logistics of creating the Marble Machine music video

• Strategies for overcoming writer’s block and procrastination, and SO much more!

Listen

Read the Complete Transcript

Shane Hello, everyone! Welcome to the official Live2cre8 podcast, coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm your host, Shane Almgren, and I'm joined today by the multi-talented songwriter, musician, music producer, and inventor Martin Molin from the band Wintergatan in Sweden. If you don't know Martin by name yet, you definitely know him from the video of his recent creation, the Wintergatan Marble Machine, which is plastered all over Facebook and currently has over 15 million views on YouTube. Hello, Martin, welcome to the show, and let's dive right into it. You've got a little contraption that's garnered over 15 million views on YouTube, so I wanted to talk about that a little bit and how you got started doing that. So briefly, just so our listeners know, you are part of a Swedish band called Wintergatan, correct? Martin Molin Yes, that's true. Yeah, that means—it's the Milky Way in Swedish. Shane So I was researching a little bit, and you guys are described as a combination of electronica, and folk music, and folktronica. Martin Molin I guess so. I like the word instrumental music. I think it's a very proper term, but then all these descriptions are true as well. Shane So what is your background as a musician? Did you start taking lessons as something as a kid? Martin Molin Yeah, I started out as a garage band guitar player. I was always self-taught, so I didn't have much education. But then it was always from the start—we started this band playing like Offspring covers and Green Day, you know, that kind of guitar music, so that was a start. And then later, I started, like, more education, and then all the teachers were into jazz, so then they made you play jazz, which I loved. So I was like this jazz guitar player in the beginning. Shane You said the teachers, so this is something that goes on in school there? Martin Molin Yeah, yeah. We have something that is called a kommunala musikskolan. It's a system where you can get music lessons for free, so you don't have to pay for that. It's after school. You go there, and you can just pick any instrument. You search for a place, and after some months, you can start your lessons. So it's a really nice system. Everyone can get a music education, like when you're small. Shane So, how old were you when you started playing? Martin Molin I think I started playing, like, maybe I was 14 or something. Shane And you joined up—originally, you had another band before Wintergatan, correct? Martin Molin Yeah, I had a band called Detektivbyrån. Shane The Detective Agency. Martin Molin Yes, and when we decided to put that band to sleep, we started Wintergatan after that. Shane And it's several of you from the same old band, correct? Martin Molin No, I'm the only member that was in Detektivbyrån that is in Wintergatan. Yes. Shane So, in the new band, what all instruments do you play now? Martin Molin I can read to you the list. I have it right here. It's a lot. It's been a lot. When we tour—on the records, we play a lot of different instruments, but when we're touring, we try to keep the list a little shorter. So we have drums, bass, keyboard. Most of the sounds in the keyboard are sampled sounds that I sampled myself. We have vibraphone, and we have glockenspiel, and we have music box, and we have accordion, and melodion, which is a version of a melodica. And then we have the theramin, and we have harp, and we have autoharp, and we have whistling. If that counts as an instrument, I don't know. Shane Absolutely. Sure. The voice is an instrument, right? Martin Molin Yes, true. Shane So I was reading online that one of the reasons you guys had, sort of, these unusual instruments is because you were a street band, and they had to be mobile. You had to be able to take it with you. Martin Molin I don't recognize that description, actually. Shane It wouldn't be the first time that Wikipedia was wrong about something. Martin Molin No, no, that's interesting. That's true. I think maybe what I have said once is that I'm always trying to modify instruments to make them more portable for touring since we had—at that time, we were touring with 25 instruments, so then we need to cut down on an excess part of the instrument that you need to carry around, maybe something from that. So I did start modifying a lot of instruments for portability reasons, but later, I wanted to build them just because. Shane So that was going to be my next question. So was it the process of modifying them that you learned to—you know, how to work on them, what changes to make to still have, you know, aesthetic sounds coming out of them? When did the idea first strike you to sort of start building this Marble Machine? Martin Molin I think, if I go back—I'm a big Rage Against the Machine fan, and especially the guitar player, Tom Morello. And I think when I was young, I read an interview with Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, where he explained how he found out the sound he uses for the intro of the “Know Your Enemy” song. And it's really cool. He uses this mix-switching technique. You have full volume on one mic and zero volume on the other one, and then you just switch between with your free hand, so you have this kaka, kaka, kaka, kaka, kaka, kaka, kaka—that sound. And I think when I read that interview, I thought it was so cool that he had this music instrument, but he was using it in a way that it wasn't meant to be used. It was like a hack almost, you know, and I was like I need—I want to try an electric—that was my first, like—I went home, and I said, “I want an electric guitar just from reading this,” and I think that's how it started that I didn't have so much—I tried to not have too much respect for instruments because sometimes, you know, a guitar or a piano is considered this holy piece of furniture almost, like, untouchable, and it’s very funny when you just open the piano and you mistreat it a little bit, you will have something new and it's very interesting. Shane Bang on the insides, bang on the strings? Martin Molin Yes, but I always—but then it's easy also to fall into this, like, play on garbage can kind of field, which I am deliberately trying also to stay a little bit away from because I wanted—nothing is happening by chance. It's just not, “Oh, we just took the nearest piece and made music out of it.” Everything is very thought through. Shane So you have a very conscientious decision for all the musical choices you're making. Martin Molin Yeah, I would like to believe that I have. Shane So one question that I have is: When you started working on this Marble Machine, did you just start, and was it trial and error, just to see what things needed to go together, or did you start off with a blueprint that you were following? Martin Molin I started out with a very, very simple blueprint to just get the dimensions, to get the first measurement. So I actually made a 3D model, a very sketchy one, on the computer where I could find the base dimensions. And then I found that the base of the whole machine, the box, is 80 by 80 centimeters. And once I had that measurement, it was improvisation from there. So I did—there was total trial and error method the whole time. I rebuilt stuff six, seven, eight, nine times sometimes, and so there was no blueprint after that. Shane And so, start to finish, how long did it take you to create that whole thing? Martin Molin It took 14 months, and I was working like a maniac during the 14 months, so it was 14 months more than full-time work, but I thought it would take very much less when I started. I was, like, thinking it would be taking a couple of months, and it ended up taking 14. Shane The rule of thumb is however long you think something's going to take, you have to double that and then add 50% again. Martin Molin That's a brilliant rule, and it was not even enough then, in my case. Shane So have you actually used this in a live performance yet? Martin Molin No, and that's the next step because the machine, as it is now—when I designed it, as soon as I had something working, like, I have this part working well, I moved on to the next part, and I didn't build in safety margins. So the machine is working perfect under perfect conditions, but the conditions are never perfect. So you can say that it performs around 85% level well, and that was enough to film the music video, where you can edit and take a lot of takes. But for a live situation, I need to build in redundancy—I think it's called—and I need to stress test every part of the machine to make it work also under not-perfect conditions. So what I'm doing now is that I'm building a smaller music box that we're going to have live on stage this summer as a kind of a little substitute for the big machine, because the audience will miss the big machine when we don't have it with us. So then we have the smaller machine this summer, and during the—when I'm home from touring, I am working on the big machine and perfecting it, and probably it's going to premiere maybe in the winter 2016 or late autumn 2016. It's going to premiere live on stage, I hope. Shane So how much touring are you doing these days? Martin Molin As much as is going to be booked. So far we didn't book so much, but we are having some occasional—during the build of the machine, we didn't play for the whole time, so we toured a lot before I started to build the machine, and then it's been a long break, and now we're starting again. So this summer, it's just a handful of shows so far, but in the autumn, it's going to be more and more. So it's not really set yet if it's going to be out all the time or if it's just going to be 10 shows or something during the summer. Shane So one of the things that I was researching was that I did not realize that marble machines—there's actually a culture, and this is something that people all over the world create. They're not melodic, usually, like yours. It's just sort of a contraption that raises the marbles, and then they'd have different creative ways for them to fall. Martin Molin Yes. Shane And they'll hit different things to make sounds. But you took that, and you turned it into an actual playable instrument. Martin Molin Yes, when I describe the machine, it's one of the first things that I use to explain is that I didn't invent the concept of the Marble Machine. That was taken from this whole marble machine culture, and then, if you search for it, you will find all these nice pieces, you know, that people create. And they're often made to create a chaotic sound, as you have noticed. Shane Yeah, I found one. It was 12,000 marbles, and it did sound like a car crash. Martin Molin Yeah, and often they are making beautiful sounds, I think—these chaotic marble machines. But I had this idea—I went to a museum in Utrecht, in Holland, that's called Speelklok Museum, and they had all these mechanical, programmable instruments from the 19th century. And I think when I was a big fan of the marble machines and then when I saw all these programmable instruments, I wanted to make like a combination of those, so hence, the programmable Marble Machine. Shane Did you have a background in engineering, or building, or carpentry, or . . .? Martin Molin Only as a hobby. I was always building, and I was always constructing mechanisms in my head and stuff. It was always, like, something I did to relax, actually. It was really like—I think it's about problem—it's so relaxing to work with problem solving, you know? It's kind of easy when you go up in the morning and you know I have this very distinct problem to solve today, and it's a very easy one to handle. It's not emotional. It's just mechanical, you know. So that makes life easier if you occupy yourself with these simple problem-solving tasks. Shane I like that point. I want to come back to it in just a second, but I wanted to ask: In the video that you do, when you're operating the machine, you've got headphones on. Martin Molin Yes. Shane What are you listening to? What are you hearing in your ear when you're recording that? Martin Molin I have a click track in 147 beats per minute, so I'm turning the crank so the crank hits the down position of the circular movement on every click. So if you have click, click, click, click, I crank the crank leg around down, down, down, down, down. So then the song will end up playing in 147 BPM. I was, like, choosing tempo. I'm a big Ronnie O’Sullivan fan. I don't know if you know about him. He’s a snooker player. Shane I'm not familiar with the name. No. Martin Molin No, no, no. He's called the most sort of snooker, and it's so funny because it's just this stupid game that’s extremely addictive to watch because it has this slow tempo, and you have this super-dry British commentator sitting and being silent for an hour, and then they say just some little comment. It's a sport, yes, snooker. And then this guy, Ronnie—anyway, long story short, the maximum of points you can make at the snooker table is 147. When I found out that the song was almost going to be in the tempo 147, I just took that as a token for success, you know. I was like, “I'm going to go for that tempo.” Shane Interesting, very interesting. I love the idea. So one of my questions was the first time I saw the video, it sounded like there were marbles that were playing parts of it, and then there was maybe some kind of backing track or something. And then, the more I watched, it seemed like everything that we were hearing was being created from the machine. Is that correct? Martin Molin Everything you hear is created from the machine, but not while filming. We have post-produced the sound super hard. So I have edited, like, every part of the sound into oblivion. So all the sounds you hear are made by the machine. There's no backing track and stuff. But I've made the drums play much tighter than the machine could at that point, and I have made the bassline much cleaner by editing it as hard as I could, you know. I treated the machine as you would treat the normal rock band, actually. When you make a digital recording, you edit them afterwards. But I did this because I couldn't get the machine to work 100% perfect. But with a new plan now to put the machine live, I have to be able to make it work perfect. It had its moments, you know, when we were recording, that sometimes it, like, recorded 30 brilliant seconds, which was like, “Shit. That was 30 perfect seconds,” but then it could just fail. And I never made a secret about post-producing the sound a lot. I'm also talking about that in my “How It Works” videos—that I've edited the sound a lot afterwards. Shane The song—the actual full song—that’s available? Is it for download? Martin Molin Yeah. At first, I wasn't even sure I was going to release it as an audio track because I felt I'd created this song for this video. I felt this song was meant to be listened to, seeing the machine playing it, you know, at the same time. But then I realized that it's just stupid. It's just my own little perfectionistic idea that the song wouldn't be interesting also as an audio track. And then everybody was asking, “Where can we download the audio?” And then I actually—so a week later, I just put it up. Shane Yeah, I thought the audio was super catchy. I would listen to it in my car, and that's, of course, one of the things that I want to find out now that you're here: Let the listeners know where they can go and find the audio for download. Martin Molin Ah, but that's perfect. On our website, there's links to—it’s, of course, on all the major—like iTunes and Spotify and all this stuff. But I'm also having the audio on the site called Bandcamp, and I think Bandcamp is quite a cool place. You can listen how many times you want, and if you choose to download it, you can choose what to pay. I think their site is quite—I don't know, I'm a little impressed with this smaller in the organizations. Probably they're owned by a big multinational company anyway, and you never know. But so it's everywhere, basically—the audio. Shane Your website is Wintergatan, that's W-I-N-T-E-R-G-A-T-A-N dot net. Martin Molin Correct. Shane Is there an active Facebook page that you guys manage? Martin Molin Yes, it's also facebook.com/Wintergatan, I believe. Shane Did this particular project give you ideas for future innovations and more projects to work on, not specifically as a musician, but what did this do for you as an inventor? Martin Molin I think what it did for me is that I've never taken my building so seriously, and for myself, in my heart, and the joy I felt for it was very serious, but I was never thinking that it could have as an important impact on my work, you know, my day job, which is that it could turn into my work. So I think the biggest impact it has done is that I'm actually knowing now that I should build a lot of stuff because I think it's so fun, and then I can take it a little bit more seriously from now on. And I am building this music box right now that is going to be done before the 12th of May that I was talking about, and I realize now how much I've learned during these 14 months. So now, when I go building something, I'm much more methodical around it. I’m much more technical, and I'm also very inspired by—there's so many fantastic woodworkers on YouTube. They have so much educational content on their channel, so you, like, watch their videos, and actually, after 10 hours YouTube watching, you are a better carpenter than before, you know. You learn so much from watching these people building on their YouTube videos. Shane Absolutely. You can get a college-level education. I don't recommend surgery, but you can learn a lot of good stuff on YouTube there. Martin Molin It's fantastic. I mean, you have to be—sometimes you can be a little bit worried what technology is doing, but you have to also be so thankful for the situation we're in that you can get the highest level expertise education in any area after searching one word. It is fantastic. I'm so happy for that. Shane Yeah, I definitely think it's the greatest tool or learning resource that we've ever come up with for learning just anything you want from the comfort of your own home. Martin Molin Yeah, same here. Shane What has been the public feedback for this? Like, what kind of response have you gotten? What has this done for your visibility? When you put this out, I mean, obviously there's 15 million+ views on YouTube, but what do your fans think? What do people who weren't fans that just discovered you through this—what are their thoughts about this? Martin Molin It has been overwhelming, and to be honest, I can't say, like, straight out that I was expecting this, but a friend who emailed me the other day—he used the word that it's “unsurprising” that these reactions are coming now because it's a great piece of art. And I loved how he described that because during the process, sometimes I had these days when I was really psyched about the results, and I was like, “Shit, this is going to explode.” And I said to my colleagues, “This is going to explode,” but now I think it has. When I call around—because I call around to a lot of companies, and I try to buy electrical motors, and I try to rent rehearsal rooms, and I’m always doing all this administration as well. And now I can just like, “By the way, did you see the video of the machine?” I'm asking in the phone call. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I built that, so that's me from the video,” and that's me who's calling. Then they know. Everyone knows. So then they already have a face, and then, of course, they—so I realized that it's almost in the—here, in Sweden, it feels a little bit like it's in the mind of the public, you know, and that has made a very big change, of course, and all the encouragement. But that's also very strange with criticism—that it's not always positive. Criticism is not always—that's not why you're doing it also a little bit, but in terms of these abilities, made this such, of course, big, big change. Shane So I think something like that, where people are seeing the process, where they're putting it together, and you're a public person, and people are witnessing this public assembly of this thing, I would think there would be lots of opportunities for people to offer what they think is constructive criticism on how—what they would improve, or what you could add. Is that frustrating to you when you've spent 14 months working on stuff and everybody's got an opinion on what you should do, or do you welcome feedback? Martin Molin No, that's wonderful. I love feedback, but you have to organize it in a conceivable way, almost because you can't read the YouTube comments. They're just too many, you know, so it's impossible. But I'm actually planning now—because I told you earlier—I'm going to redesign the machine so it works on stage. I'm planning a video where I'm going through, like, five problem areas and where I'm asking publicly if someone else has—and then I’m also going to tell—in that video, I'm also going to tell my imagined solution that I already have, but I'm also going to ask if someone else has a better one. There is one German engineer living in Canada that I've been following a lot, who is a mechanical engineer, and his YouTube channel is fantastic. And I'm sure, actually, that if he just takes a piece of paper and writes down his five solutions, they would be so much better than mine. So I have had this video planned to ask publicly for feedback, but then the feedback must come in in an organized way, you know. Maybe they can make their own videos, or they can email me and send them to me. That will be super cool, like in the true open-source culture. Shane Yeah, that's brilliant, and that was one of the questions that I was going to ask you was: How do you feel about open-sourcing some of this? Martin Molin I mean, I've learned to build because these people with their woodworking channels on YouTube have to have this big open-source philosophy. They find out a, like, simpler, easier way to do something, and then they just show it immediately, and there's no secret keeping or anything. It’s just you share your ideas, and I love that culture. You don't protect your ideas; you share them. It's so much smarter. Shane I've got some questions about more general creativity. You are an artist, you're an inventor, you're a musician, and I wanted to talk about some of the specific habits that you have in daily life because you're a professional at this. You are what a lot of people try to do. So I remember a long time ago, Stephen King had famously advocated to write 2,500 words a day if you're an aspiring author. So are there daily habits or daily standards that you have that you hold yourself—in order to improve as a musician or as a builder, just anything that's a daily habit for you? Martin Molin I have thought so much about this that you're asking now, and I have—the answer is no. I don't have the daily habits, and I have thought so much about trying to start some daily habits because of productivity. You would think, maybe, that that I have a high productivity, but I would say that I've done one thing in 14 months. It's not actually—it's not, like, the ultimate level of productivity. Shane I'm very busy, and you have one more marble machine than I do. Martin Molin That's true. That's true. Shane In fact, one more than most of us. Martin Molin No, but what I'm interested in doing is to challenge my own perfectionism. I'm a perfectionist, and my colleague says that am going into becoming a sober perfectionist, which would imply that I was—to be a perfectionist has a good ring to it, but it's very bad for your creativity because when you try to take something to 100%, you never stop working on it, so you never let go of it. And the idea now—I read up on this—is there's a method called 80-20. You take a project until you feel that you're 80% done, and that's when you let go of it because it's the final 20% that kills the creativity. And I believe in this, actually. I think it's because of shyness and that you underestimate yourself, that you actually want to protect yourself, so that's why you can't let go of something at 80% because then you feel like it's your child, and the world is going to kill it, you know, if you let it out there. So, I think, when you're talking about daily habits, this is what I've been thinking about for two years—that I would say, “You know, I start my work week on Monday. On Friday, I'm going to release a song no matter what.” I'm going to put it out on Friday, no matter what the result is, and then I'm going to do that for a whole year, and then I'm going to have released 52 songs that year, and 35 are going to be mediocre, and the rest is going to maybe be fantastic. Shane Yeah, the 80-20 rule. That's called the Pareto principle, and it is essential learning for any entrepreneur businessperson that we get 20% of our results from 80% of our efforts, and vice versa. When you understand that, it's just a terrific way to streamline your whole productivity and eliminate the time wasters. One of the people who advocates that quite a bit is the author, Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, and I'm a big fan of his, and one of the things that he likes to ask his audience that I'm going to ask you now is: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail at it? Martin Molin Yeah, that’s a good question, because I probably wouldn't do it. Or was it a trick question? Shane No, no. Does the fear of failure, like, sort of motivate you? Or if you knew you couldn't fail, does it just seem uninteresting? Martin Molin I never thought about it in this wording, but I think, of course, it's the learning process that is interesting, and there isn't this expression. I used to snowboard a lot before, and when you start going riding snowboard, you spend your first days sitting on the ground, you know? You can't even stand the first days, and somehow, it's so fun anyway. I can't really get to that. No one starts snowboarding without ever falling, you know? And also, if you want to make, like, nice tricks and high jumps, you have to learn to—you have to fall, like, 10 times. This is so cliche, but it's also very, very true. If you know when you enter something that you come out with 100% chance of success, it's not going to be interesting at all. Shane I've never gotten that answer, and I think it is my favorite answer so far. That’s awesome. Martin Molin [Laughs]. But it’s, of course—it's maybe different if you say I'm going to cook a meal. I know I'm going to make this lasagna perfect. Maybe then still this doesn't apply. Maybe then still it's interesting to make this perfect meal. I don't know. Maybe it's just some parts in life that this applies to. Shane Who have been your biggest influences? Martin Molin I have to say—I mentioned Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. But when I grew up, I was listening to the Swedish band Roxette every day for 10 years—all the records. So it was—of course, I was marinated in these pop songs. Shane That’s a good descriptive word, too. I like that “marinated.” Martin Molin Yeah, but that was how it was. And then lately, if you—that was the musical background. And Yann Tiersen, who made the soundtrack for the Amelie From Montmartre movie—the French composer. And also, he is inspired by Erik Satie, also a French composer, which I love. But then with the building, I have to mention this German engineer living in Canada, Matthias Wandel, because his YouTube channel opened up a whole new world for me with this educational content, and he was so focused on the problem solving. So if there is a 10-minute-long video on his channel, 7 minutes of that video will cover all the mistakes he made in the build, and out comes this fantastic machine he has just built. There’s an awe of this machine. You're in awe of this machine, and you have seen all the mistakes he made and how he worked around them. It's just so fascinating. So that will be my list. Shane Yeah, I've always found that fascinating: How do other people solve problems, not just what did they create in the end? Martin Molin I emailed with him about this, and he said, “That's what gets the viewer’s brain going—the dramatic effect, like, ‘Shit, how will he solve this? Now he's in the shit here. How will he go around this?’” And then you start thinking as if you were like, “How would I solve it?” And then you get engaged, instead of just seeing someone succeeding. And I think in my building videos that I put out, I made a big mistake because I was so deep in all the problems that I couldn't really document that part of the process. So I mostly documented the success, and I think from now on I will make a video series of me trying to redesign the machine for live use. Then I'm going to take the inspiration from Matthias and document the mistakes much more than the successes. Shane I would tune in and pay good money to see that. Martin Molin Brilliant. Shane I got a couple more questions for you—a couple easy ones and then a few hard ones. So what time of day are you the most creative? Martin Molin In the morning, easily. Shane Are you an early riser? Martin Molin Yes, yes, I pop out of bed with no alarm bell or nothing. And then in the evening, I'm like a child—a tired child. After 11, I can't function. Shane That's unusual for musicians, as you're usually out late, gigging and partying afterwards. Martin Molin Yeah. I can switch into that mood as a relaxing time, but when I'm creating—as building and composing—it's early, and coffee, and straight at it in the morning. Shane How much time in the day do you typically dedicate to just the writing and composing, recording, editing—the creation-of-music process? Martin Molin Far too little because when you're doing this as, like, a full day job, it's the emailing and the administration part of it all that just take over immediately. So that's the big thing now that I'm trying to free up space to actually sit down and just play, you know, but with the building, that was easier because then I spent 14 hours every day building. And before, I used to spend 14 hours composing. But I have to go back to doing that again now to stay with all the creative side, because otherwise I'm just sitting and answering emails the whole day, actually. Shane So, when you begin composition on a brand new song, until the song is ready to be released, there's a bunch of different processes that you go through, from the writing, the arranging, the recording, the editing, and so on. What is your—what part of that process comes most naturally? What's the easiest part of that for you? Martin Molin The easiest part is often when you have all the chords and the melody, because that's always, like, the most important, and that's where you can get writer's block totally. But when you have the chords, and you have the melody, and you really believe in them—you really think this is a good song—then to lay out the instruments, and to arrange it, and produce it, and record it is easy. That's like a craftsmanship, then. But to find out the melody, it just takes some strange inspiration. I know Paul McCartney said that he still doesn't know how he writes songs, and I actually understand what he means because when a good melody comes, you actually don't know, really, how you found it out. Shane You just kind of stumbled over it, then. Oh, there it was all along. Martin Molin A little bit like that, but it also helps if you sit and grind for three weeks. It helps, I think, also. But to answer the question, after the melody and the chords are done, then comes the easiest part. Shane And so how do you work through that writer's block if you've got your chord progression and you can't find the melody to sit on top of it? Martin Molin I embark on a 14-month-long building project instead. [Laughs]. Shane So I would think that is the most constructive form of procrastination I've ever heard of. Martin Molin You know that this is—totally, a project comes totally from procrastination—this whole machine. I'm very, very serious, and not only the whole project comes as a way to procrastinate writing songs, it's also included in the project. It was like a feast of procrastination, and I've read so much. I love the word procrastination, and I'm a big victim for it, so it is very fun, actually. That's why I'm really—you know, I talked about this setting a deadline—like Monday, you start to write a song, and you release it on Friday. That's, like, a strategy. I want to try to not procrastinate, to make it impossible to procrastinate. Shane I'm actually going to try that myself, I think. I'm going to take your advice and just see what happens. Martin Molin Yeah, and don't be afraid, you know, and this is so easy to say, and still, I had this plan for two years, and still, I haven't dared to try it yet. Shane I'll make a bet with you, then. Martin Molin Cool. Shane We'll start off next Monday, then. Martin Molin [Laughs]. Okay, or the Monday after that, maybe. Shane Or the Monday after that. Yeah, if I'm not building a machine or something, that'll take a year and a half. Martin Molin Yes. Shane So I will challenge you to that competition to write a song and release it on Friday. Martin Molin Cool, I can take your depth from September. Shane Okay, perfect. [Laughs]. Final questions coming up here. Are you ready? Martin Molin Yes. Shane If your job only paid the bills and nothing more, would you still continue to do it? Martin Molin Absolutely, it was never about—I have no deep relationship to money like that, which is, of course, something you can only answer if you've never been poor, I think. So you have to be a little humble about that, but I've never had a big love for money also, so it was never about that. Shane What talent or skill do you not have that you wish you did? Martin Molin It's to let go of things. What I talked about earlier—to leave things at 80% when they're great is enough. The ability to go with “great” is enough. That I really miss. Shane Martin, what is the single best piece of advice somebody gave you that you followed to get where you are today? Martin Molin Actually, it comes back to what we talked about with how I started. I was playing jazz guitar, and I was kind of—I was not needed anywhere. I was, like, an unnecessary musician playing jazz guitar. All my friends, they wanted saxophone, a vocalist, a piano, bass, and drums. There was no need for this stupid, mediocre jazz guitar player. And I was kind of young, and it was hurtful. I felt I wanted to play music so badly, but I didn't make it. And then, actually, my mom—at that time, she heard of a musical education in the north of Sweden where you learn to produce and write commercial songs like, “Okay, Britney Spears is going to make a new record. She needs songs. Can you write three songs for Britney Spears' next album?” So very, like, in the vein of our famous music exports like Max Martin. Shane Yeah, one of my favorites. Martin Molin Yeah, yeah, he's fantastic. This big Stockholm, they write everything for Lady Gaga, and they write all the charts. So it was in the vein of that. So I entered that school, and all of a sudden, from not being needed, it turned out I could produce music very well, and I could also imitate. On the charts, it's a competition to imitate, and actually, I think all music is. I remember, from being this unneeded jazz guitar player, I had my role as a music producer. I found myself. So I think following the advice from my mother at that point, to try to go for that education, changed a lot. Shane And the follow-up to that question is: What piece of advice are you glad you ignored that helped you get to where you are today? Martin Molin Exactly, and that's an easy one to answer because everyone around you is quite worried all the time, and they want you to—they think you're going to succeed if you try to please the crowd. And so everyone around you tells you all the time, “Oh, but people want this. People want short songs, or people want that. You should try to market yourself this way. Or people want this, and people want that.” And in some strange way, I was never so interested in making what I thought people wanted, and you already lose yourself. It's like the Howard Roark figure in The Fountainhead, if you know him, that everybody gets so inspired by. He's an architect in this book, and he just draws his own modern houses the way he wants them, and he doesn't put any Greek pillars on the facades. [Laughs]. And I think that was the advice that I've never listened to, like, “Give people what they want.” That's the advice that I ignored. Shane Martin, fill in the blank for me. I am a success if I _____. Martin Molin If I spend my day doing what I want and saving the world while doing it. Shane Saving the world is a noble cause. Okay, conversely, fill in the blank. I am a failure if I _____. Martin Molin Yeah, maybe that would be the opposite, then. Spending the days with doing what I think other people want me to do and destroying the world while doing it, maybe. That's the megalomaniacal answer there. Shane Okay, I have two questions about, I think, saving the world. They sort of pertain to that. So fill in the blank. I believe every child should have the opportunity to _____. Martin Molin To make up their own minds about beliefs and not be indoctrinated into any belief system. I think it's important. Shane If you could suggest one piece of self-improvement that everyone on earth would adopt, what would it be? Martin Molin Then it would go out to people in cities, and that would be to take the bike instead of the car because you will get so happy from it. It will have other great effects on the society as well. So bike instead of car, I would say. Shane A hospitable nearby planet has just been discovered, and you've been recruited to help colonize it. You may take any three items with you that you wish. What are they? Martin Molin My stupid first thoughts would be like soil, water, and seeds, but maybe someone else already covered that. Shane Yeah, yeah, any three personal items. All your food and those things will be taken care of, so three things, basically, that you can't live without. Martin Molin Nice, then it would be. Oh, it's a hard one. This is hard. My pet dog, my screwdriver with batteries, and my bike. Shane Okay, very last question. You've just won a lifetime achievement award in your field. Give us your acceptance speech. There isn't going to be a music cue to rush you off the stage, so you can get to all of the “thank yous” that you need. Or if you have a personal cause to champion, this is your soapbox, so let her rip. Give it to us. Martin Molin Oh, that's also hard. I think I would maybe thank my parents for always letting me—even though they were trying to nudge me a little bit in a different, more mathematical direction when I chose to start to play music and stuff. They always drove me to every rehearsal, and I would thank them for letting me make my own decisions about the choice of career. And then I would probably give a very patronizing speech about biking instead of going by car. [Laughs]. Shane Yeah, I'm getting the vibe that you're very passionate about the bike riding. Martin Molin It's actually this idea that I would like to become a kind of ambassador for that because I've seen it in our city—in Gothenburg—how smart it is. It's so brilliant, and it's just a very feasible solution. And now you also have the electrical bikes, which means you can put your business suit on, and you can go in headwind uphill, and you come to the business meeting in time, and you're not sweating. So I dream about a secret double career—as being an ambassador for inner-city transportation by bike, actually. So that's why I always sneak that in into any interview, actually, and it takes away focus from this machine also, which is a little good for the change of it, you know. [Laughs]. Shane Martin, you made it to the end. You are officially off the hot seat, and I just want to say, “Thank you for joining me here today.” Martin Molin Yeah, it was super nice talking to you. Shane This was great. I thought you had some really, really insightful things to say. I didn't see some of those answers coming, and I sure appreciate your take on the whole creative process. I wish you the best of luck with everything, and I will be watching for the “how to,” and the “what to avoid,” and “how to fix the problems” on the Marble Machine. Martin Molin Oh, that makes me happy to hear. I'm really going to focus on that. That's going to make more interesting videos, I think. Shane Martin, it was a pleasure talking to you. Best of luck to you, sir. Martin Molin Yes, same to you. All the best. Shane All the best. Take care. Once again, that was Martin Molin with Wintergatan. You can learn more about him and his amazing Marble Machine at www.wintergatan.net. I'd like to thank everyone for joining me today. You are listening to the Live2cre8 podcast, and this is Shane Almgren reminding you to dream big, be inspired, and live creatively.