The merriest Christmas!

Today is the day we celebrate Christmas in Sweden, December 24th. The birth of Jesus was the birth of the person who has changed the world more than any other person in history. No religion, politician, celebrity, drug, hype, movement, war, book or person will ever come close to making such an impact on this world.

Let Him be part of making this Christmas be your merriest Christmas ever!

Listen

Here is the iTunes-link to the Praise Unit Christmas EP. We are also available on Amazon and Spotify.
https://itunes.apple.com/se/album/christmas-ep/id586280347

Darkness

This is the last day on the bus. We are now going through Sweden, but we don't see much of our country, because it's in the middle of the night and it's all darkness around us. Some of us are watching a comedy on the bus TV right now, some are sleeping and I am writing this. I feel a little sad that the tour is over, because it has been great to travel with Praise Unit and everywhere we went we had a new but always amazing experience. I think we have more pics on our Facebook site, and we will share more in the week to come.

The little light shining in the darkness for me right now is that soon I will be with my family again!

Online again

We have been without internet for some time, so I did not have the possibility to write anything here. Two days ago we were part of a celebration in Langenberg. Roland turned 40 and his choir Rejoice impressed us all with their birthday song. The church was beautiful and Rejoice fir very well with their beautiful music.

Yesterday we heard "Heaven sings" from Dessau. A mixed repertoire with lots of accapella and old spirituals. Very nice to listen to! Plus we heard Dessau Soul Teens to a great version of "If nobody likes you"!

In a few minutes we do the last concert of the tour. It's a little sad.

Die blecktrommel

From Dessau to Düsseldorf we watched a german movie in the bus today. "Die blecktrommel" from 1979. It was, well... not so easy to understand.

PU Christmas

Kind of tired and ready to go to bed. But I need to say that I am so happy that the Christmas songs also work in Praise Unit style. We just came back from the concert in Langenberg, where we really enjoyed the beautiful church, the great choir and the Christmas snow in this little pretty town.

More fellowship

One of my first friends in Germany was Hans-Werner Scharnowski who produced the Joybells -Live in Germany CD together ith me in the 90's. Yesterday we had some fellowship with his church choir, Living Gospel, and Praise Unit did our little acoustic thing for the people who came to enjoy the evening in Lüdenscheid. We had a great time (as we seem to always have on this tour) and again we were very well taken care of and we enjoyed listening to Living Gospel, who had a very good mixture of songs for the evening.

Hansi reminded me about the days when I had long hair, which I had when I started directing Joybells. I don't know how many german gospel singers actually remember me in long hair.

Well, just a few minutes until concert in Langenberg. Better get dressed...

Whose is the little dog?

Our tenor Jakob is not only a good singer, he's also good with animals. He brought his own pet on the tour...or wait, is it really his?!

Goodnight

In Minden and now about to sleep. Tired but happy after a long day with bustravelling, unplugged fellowship night and dinner with new Mindenfriends!

See you in Ludensheid!

Goodnight!
/Josefine

Unplugged fellowship

On this tour we make two stops where we have not announced concerts, but "unplugged fellowship". Many people ask questions about what that is, and we have not really been sure about what we really mean. But the important thing for this fellowship was to have a relaxed evening with some friends, without soundchecks, without setlists, without wardrobe preparations and so on. Just plain jamming and fellowship with whoever wanted to join us.

We did the first unplugged fellowship tonight in Minden together with the choir E-fun-gelium, and my old friend Detlef, whom I also call Mr Amigo, because of the Amigo festivals he has organized very successfully.

The evening was great! We just enjoyed the music, each others company and the presence of the Lord. Afterwards we had a great meal together with E-fun-gelium. Another good thing is that tonight we can actually sleep a little longer. It's been on our wishing list!

Black bags

Forgot one thing:

Black bags!

Sofia can tell you more about that! ;)
/Kristoffer

Back on the wrong bus

Wrote this earlier today:
Back on the bus again. This time it very much feels like the wrong one, though. 

The concert in Lübeck last night was my last gig on this tour, and the bus I'm now sitting on is taking me to Hamburg Airport. I'm going back to Stockholm to lead my fifth graders in Lucia concerts on thursday. A fun thing to do, no doubt! But leaving Praise Unit after three days during a tour in Germany is like leaving a football game with Zlatan Ibrahimovic on the pitch after 20 minutes: you can be sure you're going to miss out on spectacular things.

Although this tour was a short one, I will bring a lot of memories back with me, as always after touring in Germany. Here's a few:

-The louzy start! On the morning of our depature from Stockholm, my alarm clock never went off. Instead I got a wake up call from Josefin, seven minutes before we were supposed to leave (seven o'clock in the morning). I threw myself and my bag in a cab, and arrived to the bus 20 minutes past seven. I have never overslept like that before, and - trust me - I will never again!

-The snow! Snow storm in northern Germany. Snow in Vellmar. Constant snowing in Lübeck. Is this how winters in Germany usually turns out, I'm going to spend my winters here from now on!

-The incredible warmth and hospitality that meets us in every place we sing. I have no doubt that it will continue in the same way for the rest of the gang throughout the tour.

-Batman vs Bane. During our tours in Germany, I have been responssible for bringing movies to watch in the bus. This time I brought Christopher Nolan's Batman-trilogy. We had a lot of fun trying to imitate the voices of Batman and Bane (the bad guy from The Dark Knight Rises). Closest to the originals was clearly Jacob A, even if Joakim had a different opinion on the matter.

I now feel confident that Jacob W and Kristian will do nothing else but a great job picking out the movies to watch for the rest of the tour! 

It feels sad leaving the group already, when the fun just had begun, but on the other hand I'm glad it worked out so I could come along at all.

Auf wiedersehen, Deutschland! Frohe Weinatchten und eines gutes neues Jahr!

And good luck, Joakim, witch the percussion playing. ;)

/Kristoffer 

aka Backslick Praise

The world and the cafe

We have a peaceful walk through the Christmas market of Lübeck. The others are taking pictures and shopping bratwurst, but I needed to make bank business so I stopped at a cafe with wifi. It's good that you can reach the whole world from a little phone while you are drinking a cup of coffee and watching the snow fall outside.

Power

Today we were in Lübeck, a city we also visited on our last tour. We knew we would have a great time and we did! But the concert started with a problem that made us nervous. Tobias computer did not work and we thought there was no electric power for it. The whole concert starts with an intro from his computer, so we were nervous of course. But eventually the problem was fixed and the concert could begin. At the end of the concert we sang together with "Spirit of joy" from Lübeck . They are great singers and very nice to share the stage with.

Kring of the day

Somebody came up with the idea to crown one PU-person king or queen of the day. That person gets to wear a paper crown on the head while we are on the tour bus. The king of yesterday was out fantastic bus driver and tenor Thomas. He looked really good in the crown. The king of today was Jacob, our short tenor. There was more drama around his nomination, but he definitely earned the crown. We already have a few people nominated for tomorrow, but there is no obvious winner.

Angels we have heard on high

We ended the concert today together with some great choirs from this area, Open Arms, Get up and Soul Teens. For me and my Praise Unit friends the whole evening was wonderful, but it was something extra when all choirs came together to sing. Now it's time for me to sleep, but I have to stop singing  before I can sleep.

Snow storm

We tried speaking danish last night as we met some new friends north of Copenhagen. Nobody in our tour bus had internet access since the concert, and could write about the concert because we went to sleep very late last night and today we were driving for twelve hours through the snow storm of northern Germany. But being on the road for so long was not a problem for us, because were still happy from the atmosphere in the concert hall in Hillerod last night, and we were also excited about coming back to Niedervellmar, near Kassel, where we know we have good friends and we know we will hear good music!

Late night at the hotel

Hey,
just got to our nice hotel in right outside Vellmar. Vellmar...what a nice place! Thank you so much for having us again and for making this time around just as good as the last one!

Now I look forward to some sleep. We've slept maximum 4 or 5 hours the last couple of nights due to early starts in the morning, so we're all a bit tired. I share rooms with Josefine and it's brilliant! It's so nice to have some girl talk right before you go to bed and laugh at all the funny things that has happened during the day. Cause believe me, when you're on tour with Praise Unit you're having a blast!

Sleep tight and God bless,
Felicia

Tour!

We are on our way! Cruising down to Hillerod, Denmark, we are really excited that it all is finally here. All the practicing and arranging, the e-mails and the phone calls have lead to this moment; our Christmas Tour 2012. But it all actually started yesterday when we gave a concert at home in Stockholm and the jazz club Fasching. We had a great time and we are thankful for our friends, family and all the other people that decided to come and see us. It was a really nice feeling to play in Stockholm because most of us live there now and knowing that it was the start of a whole week together didn't make it worse :)

We will try to keep you updated on what's going on on our tour. And make sure you follow us on both Facebook, Instagram and now also, here.

See you soon!

Christmas 2012

Hello again! A year has passed and we have not been using this blog to share what we are doing. But this December we are on tour together again and again we will be blogging.

Our Christmas CD which we announced to be released this year turns out to be an EP with four songs. Next year the full CD is available. Again it was circumstances with the record company that forced us to move slowly with the christmas recordings, but in one aspect we will have a three year long Praise Unit christmas, and we can't go wrong with that, right?

We started our tour yesterday at the legendary jazz club Fasching in Stockholm. It was the first time we performed our christmas repertoire and it felt great to premiere at Fasching with lots of friends and family in the audience. Now we are heading for Denmark. More about that later!