Throughout the years Maria Guttesen has played with several bands and worked with many musicians but she has always kept the dream alive of making an album all by herself on which she could express her inner image of music and share it with the world. After many experiences with other music projects, music teaching and music coaching for other musicians, the time had come to delve into herself and compose an album where she could build up The Sound of Maria instrumentally as well as vocally. “It wasn’t until now that I was ready to face the challenge and do what I felt I had to do”, says Maria Guttesen. Maria describes the experience of beginning the process of arranging, singing and playing everything for an album as a feeling of: ”becoming a child again”. Her toys have for instance been a guitar scavenged at a recycle station, “the Egyptian drum” – a hand drum bought as a souvenir on a holiday trip to Sharm El-Sheik, a Høfner bass found at a local landfill in the Faroe Islands. “That bass has accompanied me since I talked the inspector of the landfill into letting me take it home at age 14”, says Maria who also plays a bass on Wide Open which Per Chr. Frost used on many large stages in the 80s when he played with the Danish band Gnags.

Wide Open was recorded, mixed and produced in exactly Per Chr. Frost’s studio in Risskov, Aarhus. Yet neither Frost nor Morten Eriksen (who co-owns the studio and acted as sound technician on Maria Guttesen’s solo album) have been involved with the recordings or the production. Sometimes during recordings when Maria took time for a cup of coffee Morten Eriksen would say that he never would have done things that way. “But I see and hear that it works, he then exclaimed with astonishment” says Maria Guttesen.