Behind the scenes: Creating a setlist

During the preparations for this Farewell tour, creating the setlist was one tricky problem to solve, which demanded trial and error in the rehearsal room, endless email discussions, a minor genocide of darlings, a democratic vote, an Excel document, and ultimately post-it's and a window before we felt satisfied.

We rehearsed something like 40-45 songs, which were trimmed down to about 32 which we kept on rehearsing without having any particular order. In time an order materialized but it was obviously a way too long set for a grind show. We needed to get rid of a few more songs and had a vote in the rehearsal room where we all picked our 20 favorites. The ever so industrious Keijo did some of his Excel magic and we felt not particularly grindcore staring at a lap top with some titles and numbers. But it was electronic democracy and we got rid of a few more songs.

We kept rehearsing and got closer and closer to a final setlist, but still there were things that didn't work and I took some initiative and made a few suggestions between two rehearsal weekends. This really got the ball rolling and we got to the final setlists by going old school:



When I created my suggestions I wrote our different blocks of songs on post-it notes and stood by my window and shifted the notes. I left them up so we could do the final shifts together. And so we did. Finally we had one 45 minutes setlist and one for 60 minutes. They are basically the same with some smaller differences.

The longer one was played at the first show, and the shorter on the other gigs with some encores. But just a few shows into the US tour we started to alter the setlist, so apparently what worked so fine in the rehearsal room didn't really do it live.

Early on in this project I expressed a wish to have multiple setlists that would use songs from a buffer of 50 songs, to make each and every show a little unique and to keep things interesting for me. Well, I was the only one with this wish, but we've done some ad-libing and variations already so even though we have a "written" setlist, it's not entirely set in stone.

I've kept track of the variations so far, and after the tour is over I will post the setlists for ALL shows...

As for the content of the setlist, i.e. the songs, we've made sure that the entire career of Nasum is covered, at least when it comes to the albums. We play a few songs that have never been played before live, and although we probably disappoint some fans by not playing their favorite tracks we feel that we have a good collection of songs to play each night.