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AS: Well, streaming-wise, it was pretty good for the first month and now it’s panning out and I’ve
sold almost half of my stock of LPs. I don’t know if that’s good or not because you can’t compare it
to anything. There’s never been a pandemic before, so you don’t know what’s good and what’s not.
I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from all over the world, so that’s nice.

BiTS: Absolutely. When things ease up, are you planning to go out and specifically gig the album?
Do a set which is based on the album, or are you planning to do something which is more normal?

AS: It would probably be based on that album, and at the moment, I don’t have enough of my own
material to do a full night set, so I’ve put up a list of cover songs too, and almost all of them are by
New Orleans artists. It’s going to be pretty cohesive with the album, style-wise.

BiTS: Arne, when you’re listening to music yourself, who do you listen to? What current musicians

do you listen to?

AS: I don’t know. I like Derek Trucks a lot, The Derek Trucks Band. I try to find stuff that is in the
genre that I like but are new artists, so I pick up on stuff that I haven’t heard. There’s so much
music out there now. It’s like you’re being a
detective. You have to dig for it. That’s the hard
part of doing your own album too and trying to

market it because there’s so much out there that
it’s really hard to get through to the media and
everything if you’re not famous in the first place.
That’s really the big hurdle these days. It’s not
putting out music. Everybody can do that, but to

get the attention of the media and get published in
the media, that’s really hard if you’re not famous
from some TV show or something.

BiTS: I asked you a few moments ago about your
favourite song. What about the dozens of records
that you’ve played on, is there anything

particularly outstanding which you say to yourself
these days, thank goodness I was on that because
it’s wonderful?

AS: Yes, there is a couple. There’s a young artist in Norway called Thomas Dybdahl. He played
Britain and had an American record deal and everything and got produced by Larry Klein in recent
years. His debut album I played on. It’s called “That Great October Sound”. That album is pretty

good and there’s also the band that I used to play a lot with in the 90s named Eriksen, the first
album that I played on with them was a really big hit. We got actually a Platinum record on the
release party and that was when there were LP sales and CD sales, so you actually sold physical
objects. That album is pretty good. It’s called “The Water Is Wide” and we actually did that. You
probably know the song ‘The Water Is Wide’, we did a pretty good version of that. That was the
most played song on one of the top radio stations in Norway that year. That was in 94 and yes,
there are some records that I’m pretty proud of having participated on.

BiTS: There seems to be a terrific interest in blues in Scandinavian countries. I’m thinking
particularly of Finland and Norway. I’m not sure about Sweden. I guess they’ve got blues there, but
I don’t know very much about it. Why do you think that is?