On their sixth album, burdened by an unfair charge of Swedish melancholy and coping with the highs and lows of everyday life, Nina Persson tells Tony Clayton-Lea why it hasn't all unravelled yet for The Cardigans
"THE very first thing we aspired to was that we thought it would be amazing to make a record, which we did. We never dreamt about being so successful, which is another odd thing, and that is perhaps why we're so cool about it all. None of us are closet rock stars, so to make records was a bonus for us. As is everything that came after. We're a spoiled band in that way. We've been able to do all we've ever wanted to do, without having had to fight too hard to do it."
The way Nina Persson tells it, you'd think being a member of a successful pop/rock group was easy-peasy. Where's all the sweat, tears, hard graft, record company shafting, internecine bloodletting? What about that old "musical differences" clause that virtually everyone uses when they want an out? And while we're at it, what in the name of Ozzy happened to the supposedly difficult second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth album syndrome?
"That's so hard to say," ponders Persson, a petite, reclusive sort who only ventures out into the big bad world whenever there's a record to promote - in this instance the new Cardigans album, Super Extra Gravity. She goes on to explain why the band hasn't yet imploded. "Everything we know about music we learned together, and it's been a lot of work for a long time. Confidence grows, we get braver, we become more self-obsessed in a healthy way. Ultimately, we're aiming to please only ourselves, which is an attitude that gets stronger with each passing year. I'm aware that some people make music with their thumb stuck out of the window in order to see which way the wind is blowing. That's fine, too, but it's something else for us. We are a band, a unit, and we don't need any help to write songs."
It was always so. Formed in Malmö, Sweden, in the early '90s, The Cardigans graduated from being heavily influenced by English pop culture (their 1994 debut album, Emmerdale, referenced the introspective, acoustic leanings of UK acts such as Young Marble Giants and Everything But The Girl) to pilfering the sound files of US rock bands (check out 1998's Gran Turismo). They were also the only band tough/silly/brave enough to cover Black Sabbath songs before it became fashionable or profitable.
But then something came along that all bands suffer from, something that not even the all-friendly, all-businesslike Cardigans could avoid - an interruption of continuity that left a five-year gap between Gran Turismo and 2003's Long Gone Before Daylight. While the male contingent of the band - the resolutely Swedish-sounding Bengt Lagerberg, Peter Svensson, Magnus Sveningsson, and Lars-Olof Johansson - went off to live normal, everyday lives as husbands and fathers, Nina Persson went off on a creative bender.
The result was the interim period solo album, A Camp, a collection of languorous ambient pop/folk that dripped with Persson's not inconsiderable strain of softly trickling sadness. Everything is 100 per cent personal, says Persson, but not everything is autobiographical.
"How do I differentiate one from the other? Everything I write about are things I think are extremely important, things that certainly occupy my mind all the time, so it's personal in that way - they are my issues. But what I write about is not always lived by me; a lot of it is lived by people around me, or things I make up. It's a bit like a good work of fiction - you ask an author and they would say it's a mixture of real life and thought-up stuff. So yes, it's made up - it's not my diary, for sure. Yet people tell me it reads like a diary, which is why I like to call it personal."
The Cardigans's official follow-up to Gran Turismo was something else altogether; fans expecting a return to the rather chirpy rock/pop version of the band were sorely aggrieved with Long Gone Before Daylight. Here was a different album from a very different band - and it was quite obvious that Persson was the person in control. In relative terms, the record died a slow, painful death in the charts (it barely cracked the UK Top 50; the sole single 'hit', You're the Storm, limped into the UK Top 75).
"I know for a fact that some people thought the album was the most boring they had ever heard," says Persson in a typically off-kilter, offhand way, "and they wondered where the '60s pop stuff was. But that's something we feel we have left behind a long time ago; we have developed. The biggest experience with the previous album is that, while it might not have sold as many as Gran Turismo, we gained a lot more fans than we lost. It was a shift for sure, but a good one."
Super Extra Gravity continues the filigree thread of Long Gone Before Daylight and Persson's own A Camp persona; it seems that a sense of melancholy will always be with the band - or at least as long as Persson writes the lyrics. On Super Extra Gravity, she co-wrote them with her producer husband and non-Cardigans member, Nathan Larson. Did it matter to the rest of the band that she and Nathan wrote all the words? "Not at all. That was a solution, to be honest. We did this album in a very efficient manner. We had working hours within limited time, which was great for creativity. I'm quite slow as a lyricist, so I needed help. In panic, I called for my husband and he assisted me; otherwise things wouldn't have been finished."
The basis behind such efficiency, she explains, lay in what some people might call the over romanticisation of the creative process. Or, as Persson succinctly says, "we thought we had to stay up all night and get drunk in order to get anything done. But this time around, there are three guys in the band that have babies - and who live in different cities - and that was a big reason why the time factor and structure was so important. It was amazing how inspiration came to us on demand - a studio at 9am, a cup of coffee, and we were there."
Efficiency or no, the sense of melancholy, Persson says, will never alter, because it's the one thing that all members of The Cardigans want. "Music doesn't really give you goosebumps unless it has that sense of loss. I couldn't give you a list of 10 songs I love that are extremely happy. I think everybody wants to be happy all the time, but it's not necessarily going to happen. Reading cartoons doesn't necessarily make me a happier person. Reading books that I understand, that tell me something about my situation in the world or myself - that makes me happy, that gives me a purpose. You don't watch Little Britain to get happy - you watch it to laugh, but it's not the same thing as being happy."
Do people have a void within themselves that needs filling up by listening to sad songs? Persson says people tend not to recognise the emotional hole within, yet it's possibly the most efficient thing to sort out problems. "Music is a very direct art form, more direct than movies sometimes. For me it's the ultimate, because it doesn't demand a lot from you, yet it can be so important. It is still primitive in a way, and probably always will be, because very little music requires previous knowledge. Visual art requires some training, as does film. But music not so much - anyone can feel a rhythm and a chord."
It's not right, says Persson, to pin a particular state of emotion onto someone just because they're from a specific country or region. If someone tells her even once again that being from Sweden can surely only make her miserable, she says, she'll get very depressed.
"It's a cliché that we'll always have to live with in this part of the world, but it's not really true, is it? I'm not depressed - I just have a dark mind. I'm aware that the common perception of me is that I'm too serious - but I know I'm not. I have to add, also, that when I meet Finnish people, look at Finnish movies and read Finnish books, I think that they are the cliché that people think of Swedes. Finnishpeople and art are super bleak! Being a Swede? I have loads of fun in my life!"
