Soon after Edie Kuhnle Ottestad moved to the Southwest coast of Norway in Stavanger with her family in 2018, she reconnected with longtime collaborator singer and songwriter Thomas Dybdahl, who wanted to explore an album centered around male friendships. At the time, Ottestad’s son, who was in the eighth grade, was experiencing an episode of depression, and her father-in-law was coming to the end of his life. As she witnessed these opposite ends of emotion from the men in her life Ottestad connected to Dybdahl’s initial narrative, and helped add more depth to the stories on his tenth album Teenage Astronauts.
“Between my son’s adolescent confusion and my father-in-law reminiscing and sharing stories about his boyhood,” shared Ottestad in a statement, “I approached this project as a way to process the major male milestones that I was witnessing and experiencing alongside two people I dearly loved.”
For Dybdahl, Teenage Astronauts started with studio conversations around friendships and growing up, apart, and his relationship with his teenage son. “I’ve written my fair share of songs about breakups and relationships over the years,” said Dybdahl. “It’s usually these stories that get my creative process going, but thinking back on my youth, it dawned on me that my first heartbreak wasn’t caused by a breakup but by my best friend suddenly getting a girlfriend. I felt like I was going to die; that’s how crushed I was.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Dybdahl continued, “The people I navigated my youth with were the most important thing in the world to me. We felt like explorers, sometimes immortal, sometimes like snowflakes. Some friendships faded away, some ended in tears, and some have lasted into adulthood. This is an album about and for these friendships.”
Produced by Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Tracy Chapman) and co-written with Ottestad—who first worked with Dybdahl on his 2002 debut …That Great October Sound, along with follow-ups Stray Dogs and One Day You’ll Dance for Me, New York City—Teenage Astronauts unravels the complex relationships men often have with themselves and each another throughout their lives.
Wrapped by the symphonic tapestry imagined by Grammy-winning composer Vince Mendoza, who weaves in strings from the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and mastered by Bernie Grundman, Teenage Astronaut contacts the vulnerability, the elation, and the deflation of youth through a more dream-like aperture, from the opening title track, the revelatory “All For a Girl” and “There’s No One Else on Earth,” and its bookended instrumental reprise. It’s as much about the journey and intricacies of growing up as it reflects on growing older.
Dybdahl and Ottestad spoke to American Songwriter about the making of Teenage Astronauts, their 20-plus year collaborative journey, and writing now.
American Songwriter: When did Teenage Astronauts start piecing together for you since the release of Fever (2020)? How far back do some of these songs go for you?
Thomas Dybdahl: I started Teenage Astronauts before Fever. The first demo for the title song was from 2018, [which] was a bit shocking. I knew we had been working on it for some time, but that long… It was the sort of album that I had so clear in my mind. I knew what it was going to have to be so there was no way of rushing it. The songs and the music were written very quickly with lyricist Edie, but the whole assembly and recording of it just took ages. I knew I wanted to work with Larry [guitarist Larry Klein] and I knew I wanted Vince [Mendoza] to do the strings. I also had to find a time when the orchestra could squeeze it into their schedule.
I was writing Fever and this album at the same time, but they were so incredibly different that there was no sonic or creative osmosis if you will, that tainted the two projects.
AS: The album explores relationships between men. As you had more time with these nine songs, how did they start connecting for you?
Edie Kuhnle Ottestad: Thomas told me he wanted to write about male friendships, which I immediately latched onto because it’s such a vulnerable topic that’s rarely talked about. My teenage son was experiencing some depression at the time, so I was focused on the importance and volatility of male friendships, as well as how confusing it can be for boys to transition from childhood to adulthood. This inspired the decision to write the songs chronologically, exploring how the role of male friendships changes throughout their lives.
TD: It has dawned on me more and more that the whole reason for me wanting to go down this rabbit hole of thinking back to my teenage years stemmed from a wish to understand the transition my son was making when we started writing this album. He was entering his teens and breaking away from us a little bit for the first time. All very natural, but having been so close—he’s our only child—for so long it was surprisingly painful when it was obvious he wanted to hang with his friends more than me. We had played soccer and fished together from when he was old enough to walk almost and now suddenly he was more interested in hanging with friends and I think I just wanted to think back to understand better.
AS: What made you land on the title Teenage Astronauts?
EHO: The image of teenagers as astronauts, strange beings floating in an intoxicated dreamlike world with friends late into the night, captured that feeling of absolute freedom and invincibility for me.
TD: You really do feel like no one understands you when you’re a certain age. You might as well be a different species almost and there are some lines that just felt so good to sing on this album. Fuck everyone on Earth. It’s almost like regression therapy to sing that line.
AS: Though each of the nine songs has its space, they also seem to melt into one another. How did you capture this dreamier landscape throughout the album?
TD: All of them took on a new dimension when we added the strings. The album was written for guitar, vocals, and strings from the start, [and] we were leaving so much room for them. We didn’t want to use the strings as an expensive pad but rather write the songs with the intention of the orchestra filling a big space. This meant the songs were all very naked before we recorded the orchestra and we were trusting that Vince would understand what we wanted the strings to do. Luckily, he and Larry have worked together for many years and have a way of communicating what they want very well. They very much speak the same musical language, which really helps when you have no room for error and one day to record the strings for the whole album.
AS: A small Norwegian island, the California desert—you went to great lengths to capture the specific sound for the album.
TD: I wanted the guitars and vocals to feel like they were recorded in a small, old, wooden cabin. Dry, warm, and intimate. I then wanted the orchestra to be the starry night sky surrounding the cabin as you looked up and the roof was gone. I wanted the strings to totally engulf you. I remember writing this to Vince and feeling like he must think I’m some nut case, but at least it was specific.
Obviously, things change once a project gets underway and starts taking on a life of its own. I’m very wary of getting in the way of the creative path of a project and I don’t want any dogmas to keep a project a project from growing into what it can be, but on this, I think it helped to have that kind of specific idea for the sonic aspect.
AS: Thinking back to the first album …That Great October Sound (2002) and earlier work, are you both the songwriters now that you were then?
EHO: Thomas was one of my first co-writes and we immediately connected. My lyrics back then were often speculations on life, whereas now, my experiences inform my writing and I have a stronger sense of agency in my work.
TD: I am amazed at how little I feel like I’ve learned after so many years. A new song can still feel like the first one and even though I always think I know what I’m writing, I almost never do. Every song still needs that aha moment when it opens up to me and I finally know what it’s really about. This can take weeks and I am usually a very slow writer, but that’s mostly because writing lyrics doesn’t come as naturally to me as writing music.
Music is very intuitive and can happen almost instantly, but lyrics are a grind. This is a big part of why this album was written so fast, Edie is the exact opposite: lyrics come very naturally to her and the music is almost sometimes just in the way, she said. So it was very natural to split this project the way we did. She did the lyrics and I did the music, and because we talked for so long when she was in Norway about what we wanted the album to be and what experiences and memories to draw from they still all feel like my songs. They don’t feel like a stranger.
Photo: Larry Klein / Courtesy of Present PR
