Known as Finland’s blues queen, as well as queen of the slide guitar, Erja Lyytinen’s recent releases have proven that she is so much more than that. Where 2022’s ‘Waiting for the Daylight’ was a showcase for her versatile songwriting and arranging skills, ‘Smell the Roses’ focuses on the energy of a live blues rock band.

The songs on ‘Smell the Roses’ having the energy of a live band is no coincidence. “I think it was really good that we were able to play the songs through during soundchecks on our three-week European tour last year”, Lyytinen says. “We started recording right after the Finnish tour we did after that. We had been on the road all the time, so everybody was in a really good playing shape. It was very easy to go into the studio, and just start recording.

These recording sessions were really easy-going. We did the backing tracks – drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and Hammond – in three days. So it was quite fast. In a way, it’s all recorded live, except my guitar solos and vocal parts. I did those afterwards in my own studio. I played some pre-production demos for my band before we started practicing the songs on tour, so I kind of already knew how I wanted the songs to sound.

With this one, we also stripped down the production, compared to ‘Waiting for the Daylight’, which had string arrangements, violins, keyboards, and lots of backing vocals. With this one, I wanted to make a real rocky blues album. Very straightforward. It’s basic rock instrumentation, and I love it. It’s a very organic album.”

Very Direct Messaging

“Even to myself, it’s quite interesting. You don’t necessarily know what kind of album you’re going to make, even as the artist writing the songs. But I knew that I wanted this album to be more down-to-earth, and that I wanted the messaging to be very direct. So the rock instrumentation, the message and playing loud electric guitar solos. And heavy topics. Nothing extra.

When I’m looking back at my catalog, ‘Smell the Roses’ is very different compared to the other ones. But in a way, it works really well within this time period, even though it’s looking back fifty years or something. I told my sound engineer to go for the sound of sixties and seventies albums. Kind of the vibe we had on ‘Waiting for the Daylight’, but even more so.

The more experience you get at producing albums, the better you know what you want from the recordings and from the songs. Of course, you could always have more time to improve certain things, but there has to be a certain point where you say: okay, this is good, this works for this song, this works for this album, now let’s move on to another track. My responsibility is to see when it’s good enough and we can move on.”

A Bit Grotesque

“Most of the album was written last year. I remember I started writing ‘Abyss’ in 2023, so that’s kind of the oldest one. And then the other songs kind of came together last year. So it just took me a few months. The whole album has been done quite quickly, progress has been quite fast. There are some nice edgy, straightforward lyrics in there. I just felt like being honest, and say what I wanted to say.

Also, it is quite a rocky album, so the lyrics had to be punchy. They needed to kind of wake you up and make you go: what the heck? The same goes for the album cover. You have to stop and look at it, and think: what is going on there? Is she having a rose in her mouth? And why? I wanted the cover to be a bit grotesque as well. I wanted the cover to make people notice: okay, this is an unusual album. There is something else going on in the songs.

We live in a world where we have so many impulses around us all the time. A lot is going on. So why not make things simple for a change? That’s the same feeling as in the title track: we have everything and more, we have access to everything, and we probably own a lot more than humans have ever owned. But still we are not happy. So that’s why I said: stop and smell the roses.

Of course, there are different kinds of fates for all of us, and different kinds of upbringings. We don’t always get to decide what happens to us. But trying to enjoy what we have right now is important. I have to remind myself of that as well.”

An Interesting Time

Lyytinen first told me about going into the studio to record ‘Smell the Roses’ on the final date of her September and October 2024 European tour. Having it released in late March seemed ambitious. “And here we are!”, she smiles. “I did doubt myself as well at some point. Like: oh shit, I’ve made the time schedule so tight for myself, how am I going to pull this off? But once we were in the studio, I could hear the tracks taking shape so quickly, that I knew we would be able to make it.

We have managed to record the rhythm guitar parts in the studio as well, so mainly what I did in my own studio afterwards was just the vocals, the backing vocals and the guitar solos. But it was such an interesting time. In November, while I was doing the overdubs, my ‘Blue Christmas’ tour was starting, so I had to start taking care of that at the same time: practicing those songs, communicating with the artists, and boom: then we were on the ‘Blue Christmas’ tour for the whole of December.

My ambition was originally to do all the overdubs before that tour would start in December. But I just couldn’t, so we had to move some of the mixing days to 2025. After I came back from the Christmas holidays, I took one week off, and then I started working on the album really heavily, and then started the mixing process and everything.”

Rock Guitarism

The guitar solos on most of Lyytinen’s album are so strong melodically that they suggest a less improvisational approach than is common among blues-based players. “When I do the pre-production, I already have some ideas for the solos, where I kind of know that I want to do something different”, she nogs. “Like in the song ‘Abyss’, the latter solo, I wanted to play something irregular. Something I don’t usually do. Something that makes you think: what is going on there? It’s not really basic blues playing there, though I respect the tradition.

When I was doing the overdubs, I kind of wrote the solos at the same time. Some of them are a bit more improvised. But then there is also a lot of written material as well, like in the songs ‘Dragonfly’ and ‘Going to Hell’. It’s rock guitarism, is what I would call that solo. There are a lot of challenging rhythmic ideas, and I had to practice those, so I could nail them. So I pushed myself to be able to improve myself as a guitar player.

Now I’m actually trying to learn how to play the solos, because of course, it’s already been a few months, and you forget what you did in the studio. Most of the solos are definitely pre-written, because I wanted to create certain specific ideas for the solos. But of course, when we start playing these songs live, they will probably have some new ideas anyway. Maybe the songs will be longer when we play them live, and we start coming up with neat guitar ideas. That’s what usually happens. After a while, at least.”

Developing as a Guitar Player

With that in mind, the blues queen moniker that Lyytinen is often labelled with might not be entirely appropriate anymore. “I’ve been playing guitar since I was fifteen years old”, she says. “When I picked up the guitar, I was writing songs within a week. It feels like these days, I can really express myself like I always wanted to as a guitar player. Of course, I still have a lot to learn, and I practice all the time, trying to find new things, keeping my chops up, and developing myself as a guitar player.

It took time to get to the point where I am at the moment. I gained some life experience, and during my career, I’ve worked with several band members, and that has also shaped me as a guitar player. When I was fifteen, I was listening to a lot of heavy bands from the seventies. My mother likes to listen to heavy rock music, and my brothers listened to that too, so I was listening to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and bands like that. At some point, I was really into Anthrax.

Then I started studying music, and I wanted to be as good as possible at different styles. When you go to these music schools, you need to learn to play all sorts of styles. Not just blues or rock, but you need to play a bit of jazz, Latin music, world music, and so on. I graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 2010, so I have a master’s degree in music. But I still feel that even though I learned a lot from various music schools, I really learned to play on the road, at gigs. That has brought me the most.

The same goes for my voice. I’ve been studying vocal technique throughout my adult life, but I feel I’ve really learned to use my voice on stage, being on the road and playing lots of gigs. It has strengthened during this process. So I can also shred with my voice, and it can handle it. My band is a trio when we play abroad, so it does require a lot from me as a frontperson, but I do love that format.”

Size Does Matter

“Juha Ruokangas and I started working on a guitar for me a couple of years ago. He gave me two options, and one of them is a prototype he gave me some time ago, which was my first guitar with an ebony fretboard. It is a bit like a Stratocaster type of guitar. The neck is quite slim. I usually have fatter necks, because I’m used to playing Fenders and G&L’s. But this one fit my hands perfectly, and I noticed I started playing differently with this one.

Those arpeggiated chords in the beginning of ‘Run Away’ from ‘Waiting for the Daylight’ came out with that guitar particularly. I probably never would have come up with that guitar part if I had played my Fender. So after playing guitar for over thirty years, I have to say that size does matter! At least in this case, I noticed a slimmer neck kind of gave me the possibility to come up with different kinds of guitar parts. So I think it is good to try out different instruments, and get inspiration through them.

Most things on ‘Smell the Roses’ are played with my blue Ruokangas guitar. But the latter solo for ‘Abyss’,  for instance, the one with the crazy diminished scale stuff going on, I used my Fender custom shop for that.

Of course, as a producer, I listen to the sounds a lot. And speaking of stripped-down sounds: I skipped my pedalboard for this album. I did have a wah somewhere, but I plugged my guitar straight into a Mesa Boogie F-30 head. I don’t even have reverb on some of the tracks. Just the distortion sound of a Mesa Boogie head. It cannot get any rawer than that I’d say, haha!”

Starting Point for the Next Set List

Lyytinen is about to tour with her new material, which has to find its way alongside older material. “It’s probably going to be the other way around”, she corrects. “That I’m going to take songs from the ‘Smell the Roses’ album, and then try to get the once that we’ve been playing on the previous tours, and trying to squeeze some of those into this new set.

Because it’s a new album, I’m trying to kind of take that as the starting point for the next set list. And I think we’re going to have so much fun playing these songs live. Because we already felt when we were practicing them during the soundchecks: okay, this is something we could play live. Sometimes when you record a song in the studio, you really have to figure out a way to make them work live. But I think these songs kind of work already.”