The new solo album from Danish vocalist Ronnie Atkins (Pretty Maids) is going to be released by Frontiers Records. It will be called “One Shot” and will see the light of day on March 12, 2021.
Atkins says: “To be honest, I initially had no intention to do a solo album to begin with, but for various reasons, and in particularly my own personal health situation, I finally decided to have a crack at it. Around Easter 2020, and only some six weeks after I was told that everything seemingly looked very positive for my health, I was, unfortunately, diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and told it was incurable, which was devastating news for me. Needless to say, that was a total game changer and I went into kind of a panic situation for a while. But when the dust had settled, I realized there were two ways to approach the situation. I could sit down, accept the facts, and feel pity for myself or I could pull myself up, set some goals, pursue my dreams, and carry on living. And with fantastic backup from my family and true friends, I went for the latter”.
With the global pandemic shutting down touring for the foreseeable future, Atkins knew a tour promoting the latest Pretty Maids album, “Undress Your Madness” (2019), was not going to be in the cards anytime soon. Suddenly, the timing for working on a new solo album seemed to have presented itself. “Well, I couldn’t change the way things were, by any means,” he says. “The whole world was on a lockdown and the future prospects of concerts were very uncertain and still is to this day. Basically, that meant that if I was gonna carry out the idea of a solo album, it had to be now since I don’t necessarily have all the time in the world. I had all these ideas recorded on my iPhone that I felt were too good to never see the light of day and I was writing a lot at the time to help ease my frustrations.”
Ronnie’s next step was to hook up with good friend and Pretty Maids bandmate and producer Chris Laney to begin the work of putting these ideas together into songs. Chris is overseeing production, Jacob Hansen will mix, and musicians/singers appearing on the album include, in addition to Laney, Allan Sørensen, Morten Sandager, Pontus Egberg, Pontus Norgren, Kee Marcello, Olliver Hartmann, John Berg, Anders Ringman, Linnea Vikström Egg and Björn Strid.
