[Mona Wagner]

Fixed it! Sorry about that and thanks for noticing 🙂

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Howard,
I’ll try to keep this short:

How you decided on the school exchange you did?
The initial idea came about after we started working on our own songs in our early teens and very soon reached our lyric-writing limits. Our high school English lessons only went so far so we decided to pick the most exotic and friendly of all places to become more fluent 🙂
Besides, going on a student exchange at that age is a once in a lifetime opportunity for so many reasons (you learn about new cultures, people, places, being independent …) and we’re still so grateful that our parents let us do that.

Which schools were involved in the exchange?
At first Lisa was at Aberfoyle Park High School and I was at Charles Campbell College but after 3 months Lisa changed to my school.

What your favourite subjects were (apart from music of course)?
Drama, dance (though we weren’t any good!) and computer science

Where you stayed while there?
We stayed with two seperate host families and I’m still in touch with mine, they were great!

What you did on your week-ends (not music related)
Besides busking? We explored the city of Adelaide and did things like going to the beach or see concerts or go to the cinema. Weirdly, we went ice skating with friends quite a lot too – not something you’d guess when you think of the driest city in the driest state in the driest continent on the world 😉

Did you have time for any sport?
Does carrying a guitar from and to school each day count?

How you got to Uluru?
Our parents flew over to visit us between school terms and took us on a wonderful trip through the outback and to Uluru.

All in all the 6 months there were an unbelievable experience that taught us a lot. We’ve made amazing friends, had great teachers and we hope to go back one day for a visit.

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Jung!
We’re working on implementing a feature that lets you upload pictures directly to our website and post them in the forum. Hopefully that should be up and running in a day or two (dad is on the case as I type). At the moment photos need to be hosted somewhere else to be posted here like photobucket but it’s a bit of a clumsy solution so hopefully we’ll have a better way soon!

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Christopher,
I just realised we answered your question but never said a proper hello here! So here it is: a proper hello :-)!
That’s great that you’re also playing the guitar and writing songs. What a bunch of creative people we’ve got here at the Club, that’s fantastic! We’ll see you around this place 🙂

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Tim!

So great to find you here, thanks a lot for joining and for saying hi! #4 at table tennis? That’s amazing! We used to have a table back at our house in Austria but we were never any good at it.
That Michael Jordan story is one for the grandchildren’s grandchildren to tell their kids, how cool is that.

We’re so sorry you had to deal with cancer but relieved to hear that you fought it successfully!! Groovy greetings from all of us in Liverpool and thank you for all the amazing support in the past ♥

[Mona Wagner]

That’s hard to say. As much as we love playing live we decided we’ll jump straight into working on the next original album over anything else. If and how we’d fit in live performances into the next year isn’t decided yet.

With all you groovy people being spread around the globe so much we think at least for now it’s more fun for everyone if we focus on videos and new releases. Of course all of that can still change but at least for now that’s the rough plan 🙂

[Mona Wagner]

Hello, fellow guitar player! 🙂 We love how many people here play music themselves, especially Beatles stuff! Sorry that you missed us at the Cavern, it would have been great to see you at a show there.
Enjoy the Club and we hope you have fun here!

[Mona Wagner]

All the new songs on the albums are recorded from scratch at the studio. We’re still planning on doing something with the Cavern recordings at some point but that’s a different project for a different time 😉 We purposefully didn’t want to mix the two.

[Mona Wagner]

For “She’s Leaving Home” maybe? 😉 We’ve never had the chance to try a harp but if we ever came across one I’m sure we’d have a go! There are so many instruments we’d love to master a bit more before picking up new ones but it’s tempting.
As for the costumes: We love dressing up and might practise at Halloween 😉

[Mona Wagner]

It’s hard to rank them! My list would look quite similar although I’d put “In It For Love” in there somewhere.

[Mona Wagner]

All pre-orders will get the signed postcards included in their parcel but all MLT Club members will get their actual CDs signed as well. We’ll see if we can make that a bit clearer on the website 🙂 It will be time to set up the signing station soon, we’ve already got the pens ready!

[Mona Wagner]

Bear with me, complicated answer ahead:

We thought about that early on but it’s very complex and financially not feasible to release a DVD with cover songs, at least not at this point. The reason being that contrary to a cover CD release, where we simply pay royalties to the original songwriters through the standard Mechanical-Copyright Protection Societies it’s a much less straightforward process when you add the video element to the mix.

We would have to individually contact the copyright owners of all 24 songs that we played during that concert and all would have to agree that we can use our images in context with their song and sell it. The fees we would have to pay would be the same as if we were using their songs as a film score which gets charged by the minute.

So all in all we decided it’s not worth it, way too expensive and we’d rather put our energy and money on writing or covering new songs. We are fine to put them on YouTube since YouTube has their own deals with all the main music labels and publishers: the ad revenue money that gets generated through our cover songs gets passed on to the copyright holder so that’s why they don’t mind. 🙂

Long answer to a short question but you might find it interesting to know.

[Mona Wagner]

Itso … Sounds familiar, if only I could put my finger on it! 😉
HELLO and WELCOME! We’re glad you joined us here, please make yourself at home …

[Mona Wagner]

The first one that comes to mind is “Once Upon A Time”. Out of all the songs on ORANGE that one probably changed the most from the very first idea to the final song. Can you imagine that it was quite rock n’ rolly at first? We took it in several different musical directions before we settled on a certain sound, and even then, we struggled a fair bit to get that across in the recordings. We wanted it to be quite “big” without being “too much” and we scraped and re-recorded countless tracks until we were happy with the final sound.

And once we added John Sebastian’s harp playing it all came together how we envisioned it. Though the mixing process for Papa Rudi was another tough one with the countless tracks we’ve piled on top of each other.

[Mona Wagner]

Our sleeping schedule is all over the place right now as it tends to be when we’re working on big releases like this. We’ll try to get it back under control in the upcoming weeks – it doesn’t feel quite right sleeping through the few hours of sunlight each day and being up all night 😉

Rich, we’re making good and regular use of all the capos you have sent with the different engravings and colours, as they are excellent quality. We’ll put it on our to-do list to send Thalia a little message once the video is out – maybe they want to give it a little plug, that’s a great idea! 🙂
Also a big, big, BIG thank you for continuing the recurring donations! Having so many things in the pipelines right now, this comes as a great support in seeing everything through and creating new content for the MLT Club and internet in general. Much love from all of us <3

Today we celebrated the last months of work by going out for dinner. Now we’re a stuffed but happy little family. All of you have come along in our thoughts and chatter.