Paragraph8ight - Dan Gone West (2016)

PARAGRAPH8IGHT was formed in the early eighties when we met at the P.O. Pedersen Collegium in Kgs. Lyngby near Copenhagen, Denmark. The band name comes from a certain PARAGRAPH 8 of the Collegium regulations, which gave a designated person the power to keep the peace and quiet at the collegium. We took over this job – along with beer sales in the basement - and from then on all complaints were dismissed!

The band started as an instrumental trio; Jens Gerlif, Chris Gjerulff, Jesper Stannow, but after passing the difficult audition, Hugo (Iens Simonsen) quickly joined as the lead singer – his only experience being that he was a High School musical singer when he was an exchange student in Canada. A few years later Thomas Melau joined on the harmonica. We were supposed to study to become engineers and other serious careers – but Rock n Roll prolonged the educations with about 2 additional years. It didn't matter – we had fun, wrote many of our own songs and also recorded a few at a cheap study somewhere in Copenhagen. The result was awful - but we did get a little radio airtime on the Danish radioprogram, P3.

Stannow moved to Germany and the drums have been played by Lars Lacour for the past 3 years. Iens moved to Canada for 5 years and the band changed name to Correspondance due to the distance. However we are back where we started - with the original name: PARAGRAPH8IGHT. After all these years, there was a feeling of unfulfillment of never really recording our best songs. We therefore decided to give it a shot at the finest studio in Denmark (Medley Studios) with some of Denmarks best people to produce and even play along on the album. Our friend and bass player since the beginning - Chris - sadly passed away in the summer of 2015. We decided to continue the project and the album is naturally dedicated to him and his family.

The album title ’dan gone west’ is a tribute to the producers Dan Hougesen and Henrik West - who also played along with some of their awesome professional friends.