One bar song, about 23 local acts

The experiment started with a plain question: if a song works musically, can the same idea work in other languages and markets — not as a translation, but as if it had been born there, with its own band, title, voice, artwork and cultural logic?

The first test object was "Can I Get a Whiskey?", a song from our own catalogue, already built around bars, drinking and rock attitude. It was developed into a series of roughly 23 local releases. Beyond the lyrics, the cultural context changed too: each version got a local artist identity, and the drink in the song was allowed to change where another reference felt more natural locally.

That small lever turned out to be powerful. Swapping one drink reference could make a track feel noticeably more local. It also exposed the main risk of the whole project: localisation slides quickly into tourist caricature. Germany is not only beer, France is not only wine, Poland is not only vodka, Japan is not automatically sake. A local reference only works when it is musically, semantically and socially credible.

The series became an exercise in cultural dosage. Too little and the song stays a translation. Too much and it becomes a set of postcards. The useful zone lies in between: one drink reference, one word choice, one bar setting or one idiomatic joke can be enough.

The rule we took from this phase later governed artwork and video as well: local recognition belongs in details, not costumes.