Mikko Joensuu Releases 'Pearly Gates'

Mikko Joensuu’s third solo album,Amen 3, is set to be released on Svart Records. The Finnish singer- songwriter’s new album is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Amen 1 and Amen 2,  it is the final chapter in the story begun by its predecessors. “Amen 1,2 and 3 are personal albums,” reveals Mikko, explaining his inspirations. “Personal emotions run through these albums. One main thing is depression, the darkness that people sometimes go through. The other thing is the religious aspect of my life. I was raised in a Pentecostal Christian home and surroundings.”

“I grew up to be the person I am through that and I had to ask what is the concept of God, and how we ease our pain finding places which comfort us. These were big themes. Yet I didn’t think about them when I was writing the songs and didn’t specifically want to write songs about them. Then, in 2013, I realised these were the themes: when I say goodbye to the depression, my dilemmas with the idea of God and giving up on the idea that there actually is one.”

Without knowing it then, Mikko had begun writing the songs for each of the three albums in 2009 while still in his band Joensuu 1685, who issued one album. They splintered after the release of a single in 2011. In January 2013 he realised the songs he had written for himself were not for one solo album, but three. “I know it would have been crazy to have sat down and said ‘I will make three albums’,” he laughs about when he took stock. “But I suddenly knew which songs would be on each of the albums.” In the summer of 2013, he began recording in a cottage by his lakeside home in Lappajärvi, in the south-west of Finland.

Listen to ‘Pearly Gates’ here

Catch Mikko Joensuu Live at The Great Escape Festival 

20th of May, One Church, Brighton.