I am not completely sure when exactly the idea for the song «Gimme your heart» first came to me but it´s an old song that has been with me for many years. I believe that it must be at least around year 2000, if not before. However, even if I don´t have the exact time of creation before me, I can say that the track was an essential part of all the imaginary albums I was playing around with the thought of making. It was supposed to be the first single off of my «1001 Nights» album in 2011-2012 when it became clear to me that I wanted to focus on an English album instead of a Norwegian one. It was also the song that I chose to be the first test song when I had a meeting with one producer that I was hoping to work with that turned out to not becoming reality. And, it also ended up being the first test song for the Dreamwork Project, the first song we recorded with producer Inge Engelsvold. So it means that it´s definitely a song that I like and have had high hopes for.
When I approached producer Inge Engelsvold with this song I gave him my instrumental demo which you can find in the project section on my website. I told him that I wanted it to be exactly like the demo only in a much more professional way. I wanted to get all my ideas for the song that I had on my demo onto the final product. The mistake I realize I made with this song, which may be the reason I did not feel it fit the album and therefore did not make it onto the album, is this: for all of the songs we worked on during the album project the producer always asked me for one or more reference songs that he could use to listen to when creating the songs. Because this was the very first song we did together I was not aware of the importance of this. I did not really have a particular sound for the song in my head and I did not know any songs at the time that I wanted it to sound like, so I ended up telling the producer that I did not have any reference tracks – I just wanted a 80s/90s pop sound. This meant that producer Inge did not have any particular sound to work towards, which made his job more difficult. So he just did the best he could and gave me a sound that was kinda 80s and 90s like I had asked for. The result of it ended up being a song that was built up and produced with all of my ideas the way I wanted it to be – but without a real direction sound-wise. And this is all my own fault because I did not give the producer what he asked for. Although I like the song the way it turned out it lacks something when it comes to the sound and I did not feel that it fit the rest of the album, and therefore I did not want it to be part of the album after all. Which is kind of funny considering that it originally was planned to be the very first single from the album. The lesson I learned from this experience is how important it is to give the producer one or more reference tracks so he can try to approach that sound on my songs, and I did so with every single song that followed for the rest of the album project.
Producer Inge Engelsvold and I had our first meeting on Thursday 16th August 2018 where he listened to my demo of «Gimme your heart». I originally approached him with the thought of him just mixing my original demo but we decided in the meeting that he could produce a brand new version of it instead. I received my first studio demo version with vocalist Elisabeth´s sketch vocals from my original demo on mail on 24th August. Vocal recording in the studio was done Tuesday 4th September and finished version the song was received two days later on 6th September.