Ah, the life of a rockstar: traversing the globe; playing music for a living; partying with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of your fans every night you set foot on stage; building lifelong friendships with fellow musicians—and getting paid to do it again and again. Such is the case for alt-rockers turned synth-poppers Carolina Liar.

The band’s front man, Chad Wolf, spoke with us in the midst of a promotional radio tour—in between celebratory drinks: “Johan (Carlsson, keyboard player) and I just realized that today is our four year anniversary of playing together. We first gigged in 2007 in Stockholm today.”

The first part of this interview can be found at http://giuliana.cliqmagazine.com. Below, in the second half, Chad reveals all sorts of evolution: band member changes, the writing and recording process, and the different sound on the new record.

Cliq Magazine: You’ve had some band member changes. Is that for better or worse? Can you speak to that?

Carolina Liar: Yeah. Everything ended OK with everybody. Our drummer (Max Grahn), his mom got a really rare form of cancer, and he just wanted to be home. We were travelling so much at the time, and he was really worried because we were always about 48 hours away from his mom, and they’re really, really close. He just wanted to be home with her.

Jim (Almgren Gandara) and Eric (Hääger) ended up getting their own record deal. The band kind of helped them catapult their own career, and now they’re doing their own thing. Everybody’s been really cool; I still talk to all of them.

CM: Band member changes are never easy.

CL: Yeah, you usually get some kind of death threat over it. (Laughs.)

CM: When you’re that close to other people and you go through touring and everything that comes along with being a musician and music in general, it can be a very emotional thing that creates a connection that goes a lot deeper than just a casual acquaintance.

CL: I was talking to someone yesterday, and something came up, and it was an emotional subject, and I felt like I was holding something back. They were like, “No, no, it’s your music it’s your art. How can you not get emotional about that because it’s really coming from your soul?” And it get’s shared, especially those first couple of tours with everybody. We were all seeing the country and sharing that experience for the first time together; that’s something that can never be replaced. And a lot of that energy went into this record.

CM: Tell me a little bit about the writing and recording process of this album.  Was it different than your first one?

CL: Similar and different. We worked with the same producers, but all that time that we spent together touring had an effect on this. Everybody has really contributed and written songs for this album. The last one was pretty much me overriding most of the tracks, but this one has got Johan and Peter (Carlsson) and Rickard (Göransson) written all over it from start to finish. It’s really allowed us to grow as a band into another phase of our development, and that was a big plus. The other thing is the guys that produced this, Max Martin and Shellback, they produced a lot of Pink and Britney Spears, and they were more influential in writing some pop formulas that we weren’t used to. It was a brand new world for us there.

CM: There’s a big sonic change between Coming to Terms and Wild Blessed Freedom. Your new record has a very electronic, dancy kind of thing. Was that a conscious effort, or did it just happen as you were writing?

CL: It was a real conscious effort, because there were gaps in our live show; we wanted to create something more for our fans. There were these voids in our show that kind of lacked in energy, and we wanted to keep the same songs we were writing and stories we were telling but find a way to funnel more energy into what we were doing. In these larger venues we wanted to give somebody a show, and get people on their feet a little faster, and supply a little bit more of a good time. It was totally a conscious effort.

Now that we’re trying the songs out it’s starting to work, and we’re seeing that it was a good idea to do that, and just go for broke, and see what happens. And that became the theme for everything we were doing. Just try something new, experiment a little bit, and put it all on the line and see if it works.

CM: Are you concerned at all that this may alienate some of the original fans you gained that were more into your rock sound?

CL: Actually I am. We’ve been really working, live wise, on bridging that gap between that more guitar driven stuff and what we’ve recently written. Right now we don’t have a bassist, so we have Johan playing the bass lines on a Moog with his left hand. Kind of a Doors set up right now. Rickard and I have worked on these great, big guitar tones to really give it that rock vibe, and we’ve got that balance now live wise, but it’s always tricky to get something to communicate on an album with someone so that’s something we’re going to have to wait and see. Hopefully the fans will see that the songwriting is still kind of the same [and that] we just changed up our production techniques.

CM: When I first listened to this album I did notice that it’s still the same band, but there’s this whole other shine . . .

CL: A different world right? (Laughs.) I agree 100%. We took a chance, and it was a little scary for everyone involved. But when your heart is telling you to do something and artistically that’s what you’re feeling, you gotta try it.  Even if you fail, at least you tried.

For more on Carolina Liar, please visit www.carolinaliar.com.