songwriting

Interview with Per Gessle by Sweden’s biggest F1 digital creator

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Rares Mavromati, a 17-year-old Halmstad guy, who is Sweden’s biggest F1 digital creator (F1rmav), interviewed Per Gessle about cars, songwriting and other fun stuff. You can watch the interview in two episodes here: 1 & 2. The guys met at Hotel Tylösand on September 10.

Rares Mavromati: – Per, you have a car collection that is almost as epic as your music career. What was the first moment – or the first car – that made you think, “Wow, this might be getting out of hand”?

Per Gessle: – I got hooked on cars. The first car I really fell in love with was the Ferrari Dino. There was a TV series when I was little called The Persuaders!. It starred Tony Curtis, and there was a scene where he drove a Ferrari Dino. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I thought that at some point in my life, it would be fun to own one, or at least get to drive one. And it actually became one of the cars that’s here.

RM: – So it was almost a dream car for you.

PG: – It was a dream car, yes. And from that same era. I’m very old myself, so I grew up in that period. I was born in 1959. In the ’60s, my father took me to the West Coast Race in Falkenberg. Picko Troberg was racing at the time, and Ronnie Peterson was driving in Formula 3. So it was really exciting to see motorsport like that. That also sparked some of my interest. And then, not to forget, design has always been very important to me. I’ve always been interested in design and architecture and things like that. At one point in my life, I wanted to become an architect. That was long before Gyllene Tider. So I’ve always been interested in shapes, design and things like that. And when I think back to the cars I had on the walls of my bedroom when I was growing up, they were, of course, very beautiful cars. I wasn’t particularly interested in muscle cars or power. I wanted those sensual shapes that the Dino has, for example.

RM: – Could you say it was love at first sight? Or did it take some time before you realised, “I’ll do anything to get my hands on this car”?

PG: – No, it wasn’t really like that. The first car I bought was a Volkswagen Passat. An orange one. The registration number was HJA 450. But back then, you bought what you could afford. The next car was also a Golf. So being able to buy the cars that I had on my bedroom wall was largely thanks to Roxette becoming successful, because suddenly there was the financial muscle to actually buy them. My first Ferrari was, I think, in 1995. It was a Ferrari 456. And I thought it was very expensive at the time. But compared with what cars cost today, they were absolute bargain prices back then. That was basically the last decade when these cars were still really cheap.

RM: – Yes, they really have become investments, you could say.

PG: – Yes, they have. Although I didn’t buy them for that purpose. I bought them because I like them. I don’t just buy everything. I buy things that I think are beautiful.

RM: – There must surely be a car that nobody quite understands why you own, but which you obviously consider one of your hidden gems. Is there a car in the garage that reflects that?

PG: – No, not really. I don’t actually own that many cars these days. But I’ve sold a lot of cars as well. They were cars that I didn’t feel I had any need for anymore. And perhaps I replaced them with something I thought was better-looking. Maybe a different colour or something like that. I don’t have any car that I don’t enjoy owning.

RM: – But is there a car that you regret selling? Something where, afterwards, you realised, “I’m going to think about this every night. This is something I really regret selling”?

PG: – Yes, I regret selling the first Ferrari 456. It was incredibly beautiful. And I sold it because I was going to buy something else. At the time I thought, “What am I going to do with this? I don’t even use it.” But that was a long, long, long time ago.

RM: – That’s understandable. Per, you write songs that the whole world can enjoy. Do you have a song that was born behind the wheel while you were driving – inspired by a feeling, a smell, a thought, or perhaps a person who was with you while you were driving – where you suddenly thought, “Wow, I really have to write a song about this”?

PG: – Yes, that’s actually a good question. I work quite a lot in the way you describe. I pick things up, or write songs and lyrics very much based on impressions. And those impressions sometimes come when you’re driving a car or sitting in a car. I’ve been sitting in a taxi between Stockholm and Arlanda and come up with a song there. Then you just sing it into your iPhone.

RM: – Would you say that’s the hardest part about being a songwriter – getting inspired, or coming up with things spontaneously? Or is there something specific you do? Do you sit down with someone particular and brainstorm, or is it just about automatically becoming inspired?

PG: – I’m pretty much alone whenever I write, and it’s always been that way. At that particular stage of the songwriting process, I almost always work alone. It’s only later, when I have something concrete to work with, that I need help from other people. Someone who can play a little better than I can, or who can write a beautiful string arrangement, or whatever it might be.

RM: – It’s probably hard to find anyone better than you, Per, I have to say.

PG: – Nah, it’s not at all difficult to find musicians who are better than me, that’s not my strength. Being able to play an instrument brilliantly has never really been my thing. I’m a creator, basically. That’s why I needed a great voice like Marie’s for the Roxette songs. I couldn’t have sung those songs myself. And it’s the same with all these musicians, with Gyllene Tider and with the Roxette band. They have a level of musical competence that I don’t have. So I need their help. Because they make my stuff so much better than it actually is.

RM: – Yes, that’s how you get far through collaboration. You definitely have. Per, you’ve inspired several generations through your songs, through what you’ve done and how you’ve done it. Do you have any advice for young people like us who want to follow their passions – whether it’s cars, music, or anything else? Any general advice for people who want to follow their passions?

PG: – Yes, it’s the same as it’s always been. If you have a drive, you should try to hold on to it. That’s what I tell my son. Follow your heart, follow your own path. Because I think you make a big mistake if you become completely obsessed with making lots of money. I think that if you find something inside yourself that you enjoy, that you have fun doing, then you’ll become good at it. And if you become really good at it, you’ll automatically make money from it. So somehow it takes care of itself. And it will make your life much, much, much richer and much better if you enjoy your work and enjoy your life, rather than being completely focused on buying lots of things.

RM: – I actually had a man tell me once, “Do what you love, because the money will come anyway”. It was actually my girlfriend’s father who said that. And it made me think a little more deeply about how it’s not all about quantity. It’s also about the quality of life, which ultimately outweighs quantity. That’s something that really changes the whole game for me.

PG: – I understand that, and it’s good that you say it, because I think that’s the biggest difference. I’m so old now that I’ve lived through so many decades. And that’s probably the biggest difference between our time and the time when I grew up. Everything is so much about business and money today. It wasn’t like that in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a different kind of freedom, and it was much more about simply having fun. Today, people are so obsessed with status symbols and with having to make a lot of money.

RM: – Yes, unfortunately that affects young people today, with all these social media, of course. It’s difficult to ignore the first thing you see on your screen. So I completely agree with you.

PG: – Yes, and the way companies have developed, and possibly the way big corporations themselves control our world. It’s a little frightening, actually. And it’s going to become even worse now that AI is coming in.

RM: – Do you think AI will affect the music industry in a negative way?

PG: – Absolutely, if we don’t get it under control. Because already today you can simply give your laptop a command and ask AI to write a song about summer. And with my voice, it can sound as if I’m singing a bad song about summer.

RM: – And you don’t like that. Haha.

PG: – No, I don’t like it. AI is built on other people’s knowledge. That’s how the whole thing works. AI takes a lot of information and creativity that already exists. And then it recreates it in ways that get around rights and things like that. Copyright. So I find it frightening, actually.

RM: – Yes, it can be a little frightening. I definitely agree. Hotel Tylösand is more than just a hotel. It’s almost like an entire universe of its own. What does a place like this mean to you? And how much of your personality is built into these walls?

PG: – More and more, actually. We bought this hotel together with another family in 1995. But over the last ten or twelve years, we’ve taken over the majority of the ownership. That has meant that we’ve shaped the hotel even more, because we’re the ones making more of the decisions. So it has increasingly become something that works on our terms. So it means a great deal to me. The area down here, Tylösand and Frösakull, where the beach is, is where I grew up. I didn’t live here, but my father was a plumber. He and his father, my grandfather, installed all the water and sewage systems out here in Tylösand and Frösakull. So I was here all the time with them. We have our DNA here, in a way. It was home turf.

RM: – And of course it’s much easier to write about home turf than away turf.

PG: – Exactly. When this hotel came up for sale, I would never have gotten involved with another hotel. If it had been somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in Nässjö or wherever, I wouldn’t have been interested in the hotel business. The fact that this particular place was for sale was almost unbelievable. It was owned by a large hotel chain called Reso, which owned a lot of hotels. All the other hotels they owned were city hotels, as you might say, located in cities. And this one was left over when they sold the chain. So suddenly finding out that it was for sale was almost too good to be true.

RM: – For young people like us who aren’t particularly familiar with the music business, could you explain how the idea of becoming an artist came about? You mentioned that your father was a plumber, for example. Did you get any inspiration from him? How did he react when you said, “I’m going to start making music”? Was it something that came easily, or was it quite difficult for him to accept?

PG: – No, he wasn’t particularly positive about it. Unfortunately, he died as early as 1978, so I was 19 when he passed away. He never got to see any of my career, because I hadn’t broken through yet. But he wasn’t particularly positive about it. I was very influenced by my brother, who was seven years older than me. When I was little, six or seven years old, he was thirteen or fourteen. And that was the ’60s, right when pop music was really exploding. I would always sneak into his room and listen to his records and his record collection. So that musical style and tradition really shaped my own musicianship. That’s where I come from. So when I became a teenager myself, I was already quite advanced, because I’d been listening to music for many, many years. Then I became very influenced on my own by glam rock and David Bowie and T. Rex and things like that. Then, later in the ’70s, punk and new wave came along and that suited me very well, because the idea behind punk was that anyone could start a band, regardless of how good you were. And that suited me very well, because I wasn’t particularly good.

RM: – If the younger Per could give the older Per some advice, what advice would you have given him?

PG: – I’d actually be very curious to know that myself. That’s a good question too and I don’t have a good answer. Sometimes I think I’m doing pretty much the same thing today that I did back then, although of course it’s more sophisticated today. But sometimes I go back to songs I wrote in the early or mid-’80s and become fascinated by how sophisticated they already were. Because there are so many little tricks in them. Pop music was a little more complex then than it is today. Because everyone sits and makes their songs on a laptop, a lot of music ends up sounding very similar. It wasn’t like that back then. You had to actually play everything. Anyone who plays an instrument knows that if you and I play guitar, even if we play the same instrument, we’ll play it very differently.

RM: – We should try it sometime. Haha.

PG: – That’s how it was back then, and there was something very good about that when you were growing up. At the same time, it was much, much harder to sound good than it is today. Today there are so many tools in computers that can correct a false note in a vocal and things like that.

RM: – Do you think music has developed a lot over the years?

PG: – Yes and no. As I said, it has become more sophisticated. At the same time, I feel that I still have the same roots. I can’t change my musical taste. And of course, I’ve worked as a professional musician for 46 years, so naturally, when I sit down and get an idea for a song, it’s very easy to think, “shit, I’ve written this song before”, ten times. So I have to find a new angle. It gets harder and harder, of course.

RM: – I completely understand.

PG: – I often try to do this: if I come up with a song on an acoustic guitar, as soon as I feel it’s starting to become good, I change instruments and perhaps sit down at a synthesizer or a piano and continue the song there. Because then I leave the well-trodden path. So I’m constantly trying to trick myself into doing unexpected things.

RM: – So it’s almost like a multi-step process?

PG: – All the time. There are many processes, many steps you have to climb. And, for example, do you play an instrument?

RM: I play violin.

PG: – Okay, but you know, you have open strings and there’s the root note and so on. What I try to do is this: if I’m sitting playing guitar in G, suddenly I’ll sit down at the piano and change key, perhaps to something that’s much more complex for me – F-sharp, for example, or A-flat or something like that. Then I’ll make a lot of mistakes, and some of those mistakes can become interesting as I continue working on the composition. So I’m constantly trying to trick myself. That’s something I’ve learned over the years.

RM: – Very interesting. If you were to describe your personality now – because we’ve talked quite a bit about how your personality has developed and how it has changed over time – how would you describe your personality in terms of a car model, a car brand, or perhaps a colour? Just a quick question.

PG: – It’s difficult for me to describe myself that way, but… I actually can’t. Over the years, I’ve learned how I work, and it’s a little like we talked about earlier: I’m quite a loner, both privately and in my work. I’m pretty clear about what I want. So when I continue working and try to create something – it could be an album cover, a song, a production, or whatever – I try to surround the project with other people whom I hand-pick for each project. The project itself is always the most important thing. There are advantages to that, but there are also disadvantages. Sometimes you might disappoint people if they don’t get to be involved in a particular project. I’d rather choose someone else if I think that person will make the project better.

RM: – You mentioned earlier that you’re more of a loner. Do you find it easier to work without people or with people?

PG: – It depends on what stage the project is at. I don’t like writing songs together with other people in real time. I want to write the songs myself, and above all I want to write my own lyrics myself, because I need time. I have my own process. I need to go back and do something else and then come back to it. I’ve tried writing songs with other people over the years, but I notice that the things I’m good at never really come through. I tend to hold back and let them decide.

RM: – So there should be as much Per Gessle energy as possible.

PG: – That happens most when I work alone.

RM: – Then you get the best song.

PG: – At least it becomes the song I want it to be. Haha.

RM: – I’m a huge motorsport fan, especially when it comes to Formula 1. If you could take any Formula 1 driver from the past or present on a road trip along the West Coast, which we mentioned earlier, who would you take, and what do you think you would talk about?

PG: – I’ve met some modern racing drivers, Kimi Räikkönen, for example, who is a fantastic guy, and David Coulthard, who is also a really nice guy. I think both of them, especially Kimi Räikkönen, are among my favourite drivers from that era. There must be something missing in their brains that allows them to just get into a racing car and drive like that. Or Marcus Ericsson, also a fantastic guy. My God, driving the Indy 500. I just don’t understand how you can handle it.

RM: – No, of course it must be incredibly demanding. It puts a lot of pressure on your mentality and your mind. It’s not just a physical sport, it’s also a psychological sport. I don’t think many people see that aspect.

PG: – But of course it is. Sometimes it’s scorching hot, and you’re sitting there for an hour or more. It’s unbelievable. And the incredible speed. You simply don’t understand how fast it is. I think it was 2001, maybe 2002 when someone gave me a gift: a ride with Mika Häkkinen in a two-seater McLaren Formula 1 car.

RM: – What was it like riding with him?

PG: – I had to reschedule it several times because I was constantly on tour. The third time I was available, he wasn’t, so I got to ride with a reserve driver for McLaren called Darren Heath. He’s won Le Mans. I can’t remember exactly what year it was. Anyway, he was the one driving. He won Le Mans many years later. We did three laps around the Hockenheim circuit. I was the passenger. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had.

RM: – You could really feel the G-forces when he went through the corners.

PG: – Yes, the acceleration and everything. How fast you can go through corners. I was basically the ballast, about 85-87 kg. Haha.

RM: – It must have really taken a toll on your neck, I imag ine. In those corners, you must have had no chance. You’re being thrown around, while the Formula 1 driver treats it like a drive through the park. You’ve created music that has touched the whole world, and Roxette is still an enormous part of our global culture. When you see the new generation discovering the songs today, what does that mean to you? How would you like Roxette’s legacy to live on in the future?

PG: – Of course I’m incredibly happy and proud that there’s always a new audience. I notice it at our concerts. There are always young people standing at the front, singing and knowing the songs. You see it, and I think it’s fantastic, of course. There’s something magical about music in general. We’ve travelled, basically, all over the world. And you come to countries where people don’t speak English and don’t have the same religions as we do. They don’t look the same as we do. But they all sing these songs together. There’s almost nowhere else where you have that kind of communication that music provides.

RM: – It unites us, if nothing else. It almost feels as if it transcends religion and culture. Nobody cares about any of that at that particular moment. Everyone sings together, dances together and celebrates together. That’s what’s so fascinating about music. It’s magical.

PG: – I’m glad you say that. I have a very special memory. In 1995 we were on a tour called Crash! Boom! Bang!, after the album Crash! Boom! Bang! We became the second Western band to play in China. So we played in Beijing, in a venue with perhaps 16,000-17,000 people. When we came in, there were soldiers with guns standing in the front row. We said, “We can’t play here with 200 soldiers in the venue”. They put the weapons away, but these stone-faced soldiers remained sitting in the front row, while 16,000-17,000 students were behind them, all of whom were required to remain seated. As soon as someone stood up during the concert, they turned on all the lights in the venue and everyone had to sit down again. But when we played It Must Have Been Love, everyone stood up. There was so much energy. There was simply no way to stop them. It didn’t matter what they did. Then a banner appeared. Some girls had it somewhere up in the audience. It said, “One world, one unity”. Because they longed to be part of the West. We represented the West. It was an incredibly powerful experience for us. Eventually we came off stage and the whole band was standing there crying. It was very emotional. We had become a bridge between them and the West. But that was the ’90s, and there were many experiences like that.

RM: – Would you say that was the toughest and most surreal concert you ever played?

PG: – In the ’90s we played lots of places in South America – Paraguay, Venezuela, Lima. Many countries were very closed, and as I said earlier, there was a lot of military presence. They were very tough on the audiences. The audiences just wanted to have fun and sing along. The songs we were talking about earlier have an incredible power that cuts through all of that.

RM: – Did you ever have to cancel a concert because there were too many soldiers, or because there were too many riots or protests?

PG: – No, we never cancelled because of that. But there were a lot of accidents. I remember we played in São Paulo, Brazil. There was some kind of fight. From the stage we could see a circle forming. People disappeared and then people came running out… And there were also many people fainting because they had been standing in the heat waiting for a long time. We already had problems back in 1981 at a concert in Kristianopel. Three people died at the entrance because of the crowd crush. So accidents happened. Thankfully, safety has improved over the years. It has become much better.

RM: – Do you feel a lot of pressure when you’re on stage? And if so, how do you deal with that pressure? There are so many people watching me. You’re thinking, “What if I do something wrong?” or “What if my hair doesn’t look good?” or “Maybe I have something on my nose”. Or maybe the clothes aren’t right. How do you deal with that stress?

PG: – Well, you learn. I feel very focused just when I go on stage. But then you just have fun. I mostly try to focus on remembering the lyrics. And you immediately sense the vibe in the room, or if you’re playing outdoors, you sense what’s going on. If it starts raining, the concert changes. But that’s become second nature by now. So I don’t think too much about things like that. A lot of strange things have happened over the years. I tripped over a lamp and ripped my trousers.

RM: – Oh!

PG: – Things like that happened. But it’s just fun. We belong to the generation that calls it old school. We play everything live. We don’t have anything pre-recorded or anything that corrects things. We do everything hardcore, old school. The good thing about that is that every night becomes completely unique, because I never know how long a song is going to last. It depends entirely on when the guitarist decides he wants to stop playing.

RM: – Oh, so you just have to adapt.

PG: – Yes, we adapt. That’s how it is with many songs. Sometimes the intros are a little longer. You have to listen to each other. That’s what you’re supposed to do in a band. As I said, that’s the school we come from. And I think that’s fantastic.

RM: – What was it like the first time you stepped onto a big stage?

PG: – I was incredibly nervous, of course. During that first decade, until Roxette broke through internationally, I was very nervous. The first gig we did with Gyllene Tider was here in Halmstad, in the area around Getinge, and then inside a small theatre in Halmstad. It was extremely nerve-racking, of course.

RM: – If you happen to forget lyrics to a song on stage, how do you handle that?

PG: – You make something up. Haha.

RM: – You just make something up?

PG: – Exactly. When Marie became ill, she would often forget the lyrics on stage. That meant I had to cover for her a little and help her find her way back into the song. That meant I had to find the lyrics very quickly. So I got a computer screen on stage where the lyrics scroll. I’ve kept it ever since. So now I have a prompter on stage with the lyrics scrolling. I don’t look at it very often, but it’s always running. I have a guy who operates it. He scrolls the lyrics in real time. If there’s a long solo, he has to hold the lyrics at the right point. It can’t run automatically. It has to be operated in real time. So these days I have it as a backup.

RM: – Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. It’s not easy having a bunch of young people around, but we’re passionate about what we do, and you’re a huge inspiration both to the older generation and to the generation that comes after. And if you’re interested in listening to Sweden’s national song, you should listen to Här kommer alla känslorna. The song is pure Gessle magic. My name is Rares Mavromati. Thank you for joining us at F1rmv and Hotel Tylösand. See you soon. Take care!

Stills are from the interview.

Interview with Per Gessle and Lena Philipsson by City & Archipelag News

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Tom Holmberg did an interview with Per and Lena for CA News (Finland). They talked about the tour, modern music, the art of writing immortal songs and Per’s Ferrari collection.

Tom: – Last year Roxette went on tour and since the start in Cape Town you’ve played almost 50 gigs around the world. What kind of audience reactions have you had?

Per: – The response was magical from day one, and it continued like that. At the beginning you didn’t know how it would go. As an artist it’s hard to know how people will react if you’ve been away for a long time, but we felt that the audience was with us from the beginning.

Tom: – What do you think is the reason why ’90s music is so important to the fans and right now?

Lena: – In the ’90s there was much more melody in the songs, it was a different way of writing music that made the songs have more impact than today. It wasn’t the same noise as it is today, there is an incredibly large flow of music today. A lot of people remember the songs from the ’90s; they were distinctive and instantly recognizable. I think people are longing for music with more melody again.

Tom: – What do you think Per?

Per: – I agree 100%. Everything ends up sounding the same with AI and with the constant stream of computer-generated music. When it comes to craftsmanship, I think people eventually get tired of that. In the past, you might spend half a day in the studio just trying to get exactly the right snare drum sound. It takes expertise to find the right distance and achieve the right tone. With someone as capable as Lena, she doesn’t need any plug-ins or assistance for it to sound fantastic. As soon as you rely too much on technology, you lose personality. It’s a real shame that the younger generation is growing up believing they need all these technical gadgets to create songs. It’s not that songwriting skills or musicianship have disappeared, but they are constantly being overshadowed by technology. That doesn’t mean you should reject technology altogether, of course. When we recorded “The Look” and “Dressed for Success”, we used technology to our advantage when we doubled the vocals.

Tom: – Technology has taken the lead role.

Per: – Roxette has chosen to always play live, we don’t have any backing tracks at all. When you choose to play 100% organically, you also get a unique experience that feels different for the audience. We have a drum machine mostly to be able to play at the same tempo, but otherwise it’s live. It becomes a special event to go and see Roxette. It’s in line with the tradition that both Lena and I come from.

Tom: – For you, Lena, what has been the most inspiring or surprising thing about touring with Roxette?

Lena: – Well, I dont know if I’d call it surprising – I’m pretty used to things by now – but it has been a lot of fun to sing a completely different repertoire, songs that aren’t my own. I’ve been performing those songs I sing in Sweden for such a long time that it’s refreshing to be in a different musical environment and not carry my usual baggage with me, but instead be completely free and sing a totally different kind of songs. To really let loose and sing in a different way than I normally would. Around the world, people are really the same everywhere – there is such an incredible sense of community, and everyone is happy and positive.

Tom: – Which country has the best Roxette fans?

Per: – In Latin America, people show their feelings in a different way. But it’s wonderful of course in Scandinavia. We did a gig in the Royal Arena in Copenhagen before Christmas, it was fantastic. But people behave a little differently.

Tom: – What’s the strangest place you’ve played?

Per: – It would probably have to be the ’95 tour when we played in Beijing for the first time. It was us and Wham! – they were there before us – and I remember watching MTV when Mick Jagger was asked whether the Rolling Stones had played in China. He replied: “No, we didn’t play China, only Roxette played China”.

Tom: – It has been 40 years since Roxette’s first album. How would you sum up this time?

Per: – The other day I was sitting and talking with my old business manager, who started managing me in 1980. He is 84 years old now, and I’m completely amazed that I’ve actually been able to make a living from making pop music. When I was 8-10 years old, I was caught up in this pop bubble – this thing with boys having slightly longer hair – and I’d stand in front of the mirror lip-syncing. Then, all of a sudden, after starting out writing poems and lyrics, I began writing my own songs. That’s not unusual in itself, but the fact that it has worked out so well is absolutely incredible.

Tom: – What is the hardest thing about writing songs?

Per: – For me, it’s not especially difficult. The hardest part is that I write so much, so I always have a lot of songs on the go, and I feel like I’m repeating myself. It gets harder and harder to find those variations that I haven’t written before. If I want to write about loneliness, or isolation, or something positive, I have to find an angle that I haven’t already used. I can touch on the same subject, but I have to approach it from somewhere different, and that takes time and is quite complicated. Writing becomes harder and harder. You end up writing fewer and fewer songs.

Tom: – Is there any thought of writing new Roxette songs?

Per: – Not really. We have basically decided that what we’re doing with Lena is about the catalogue.

Tom: – The song catalogue consists of a whole bunch of major hit songs.

Per: – Yes, and it’s also the case that we haven’t created a new band – we have stepped into this existing thing. There are many reasons for that, and one of them is that if we go out and play, for example, in South America or Spain or anywhere else, the audience primarily wants to hear the old Roxette hits.

Tom: – If a young pop enthusiast is interested in writing songs, what advice would you give?

Per: – Well, Lena, you write so much – you write more songs than I do – so what would you say?

Lena: – My method is project-based songwriting. I can ignore it for a long time and then sit down and write when I need a song. Everyone works differently, but I suppose you could say that persistence pays off. There is also so much noise out there when it comes to music. So many new songs are released every week, which makes it harder to stand out in the stream.

Tom: – You’ll be playing in Stallörsparken in Ekenäs in August. What will the audience experience?

Per: – I guess we’ll be on our toes and deliver our songs as well as we can. Our catalogue of songs. There will be hit songs that people recognize. And a fantastic singer out front.

Tom: – What influence do you think Roxette has on a new generation of artists?

Per: – I’m thinking about the question you asked earlier about songwriting. I think what Roxette can offer a young person is the idea of following your own taste. I didn’t invent pop music. All the music I loved when I was growing up, I still love today: The Beatles, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell. All of them have influenced my own way of writing. Then, of course, I became successful, and I suppose that’s the legacy one can hope to pass on to a younger generation: to dare to trust yourself. It’s harder than ever to do that today, because most bands – R.E.M., for example – didn’t break through until their fifth or sixth album. Nobody was financing that.

Tom: – Of all the guitars you own, which one means the most to you?

Per: – Oh, that’s a difficult one. I have different guitars at home, in the studio, and on stage. My most important one on stage is my black Gibson ES-335 with three pickups. It’s unbelievably good on stage. But this one is my favourite (picks up an acoustic guitar), a Martin from 1938. It weighs almost nothing. It’s so easy to play and sounds absolutely fantastic. I’ve had it serviced every year to keep it in top condition. It’s always here in Stockholm.

Tom: – You’re known for being interested in beautiful cars, tell me a little about your collection.

Per: – I’m not really a collector by nature, even though you might not believe that considering how many records and pop-music memorabilia items I have. But I’ve always been interested in certain cars, and I bought my first Ferrari in the 1990s. Then I performed at Ferrari’s 30th anniversary celebration in 1997 and became good friends with them. That was before all the hype, so I got into the inner circle and was offered the chance to buy some of those limited-edition cars. Then the collection grew, and five or six years ago my wife suggested that we build a car showroom at Hotel Tylösand and put them on display. They are fantastic cars, after all. So now there are twelve cars there, and people can come and see them.

Tom: – My rule of thumb is that you recognize a good song by the fact that you immediately want to hear it again. Do you agree?

Per: – Yes, although sometimes a song reveals itself slowly. When you were talking about cars just now, it’s the same with cars – some cars you learn to appreciate over time. At first you might think, what a strange-looking car. Then a year goes by and suddenly you realize it’s actually not bad at all.

Tom: – What does the near future look like for Roxette?

Per: – We’re carrying on this summer, and we’re currently discussing whether we should come up with something for the autumn as well. Roxette turns 40 this year, so there are quite a few things we’ll be releasing – some old stuff that’s been in the closet. I think this will be a big Roxette year.

All interview text is written by Tom Holmberg for CA News in Swedish. Here it is a translation by RoxBlog.

Photo by Fredrik Etoall

Per Gessle about the magic of songwriting and musical nerdiness – interview by David Myhr for Studio.se

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David Myhr did a wonderful interview with Per Gessle about songwriting. The interview appeared on Studio.se in Swedish.

In the intro, David mentions that after ABBA, Roxette is Scandinavia’s biggest music export ever with their 75 million albums sold. Per Gessle’s success as a songwriter is monumental. He is one of only eighteen songwriters who as a sole songwriter had more than two No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 list.

The guys met in Stockholm, in Per’s office on Strandvägen and talked about songwriting. Per thinks it’s always fun. Songwriting is an inexhaustible, hugely complex subject. At the same time, it’s also quite private in a way.

David says it has struck him that for all the incredible success, Per has often emphasized his musical limitations.

Per says:

I’ve always hid a little behind the fact that I was always the worst in the band, musically. Göran and I were always the worst in Gyllene! Because I wanted to write, I learned early on that I always have to work with people who are much, much better than I am. Even in Roxette, I handpicked everyone around me. And everyone was on a completely different musical level than I am. But… they can’t write my songs. I have used the fact that I can’t do many things to find other stuff.

David adds that Per believes that people who become too sophisticated and too good, easily lose the melodies, because they are looking for something else.

PG says a couple of his idols, e.g. Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, are good examples of people who have overcomplicated their music. He thinks that knowing a little doesn’t have to be a disadvantage when it comes to songwriting. For those old songs that he wrote, “Billy” and “När alla vännerna gått hem”, from 1977-78, he didn’t know what keys and such things were. There he copied his role models without reinventing the wheel.

David says he has noticed that there is sometimes a superstition among some younger songwriters that they should invent something entirely their own, while everyone is in some form of tradition. That even The Beatles listened to Elvis, Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry.

Per says:

Everyone listens to everyone, sort of. You hear Woodie Guthrie when you listen to Bob Dylan… Of course you want to be unique and be yourself. But I wanted to belong to pop, the whole romanticism surrounding the pop world. Long hair on guys. The album covers. To enter another world in the headphones and listen to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon”. There was an amazing romanticism about pop that wasn’t there in anything else.

Per talks nostalgically about his older brother, Bengt, who made Per as a six-seven-eight-year-old grow up with The Beatles, The Hollies, The Kinks, Lovin’ Spoonful, The Yardbirds and The Spencer Davis Group. To then find his own stuff like The Monkees. He also got into the singer/songwriter genre early on.

PG says:

I was very much a loner when I was growing up and lived a lot in this parallel universe called pop music. For myself. So I could kind of never see myself as a musician or an artist or singing or playing in front of people. It was absolutely not important. However, I was into writing and expressing myself very early on. I wrote lyrics long before I wrote music. I think it came from my mother. She always wrote her own fairy tales for us when we were small and illustrated them. Just for us.

David tells that Per got a Spanish guitar from his mother in 1976 and started playing Leonard Cohen songs fingerstyle. Then he also developed his understanding of both text and chords.

Per tried to translate Bowie’s “Cygnet Committee”. The long, really weird song on “Space Oddity”. And “Memory Of A Free Festival”. He loved that record, but he still doesn’t understand those lyrics. He bought a sheet music and learned the songs because the chords were written in it. He learned C, G7 and so on. But he also remembers his sister sitting and playing “Für Elise” on the piano. PG somehow never connected that (Per hums “Für Elise”) it’s an A minor! He realized it only many years later. Per learned to play the piano from some old lady in Halmstad and thought it was the most boring thing he had ever done in his entire life. Because she never connected that music to what PG was interested in. Had she told Per, “Look at this! Beethoven. A minor, E major, and so on. It’s exactly the same key as “House Of The Rising Sun”, it would have been a little easier. But Per gave up on that. He wasn’t interested in it. He thinks what saved him and made him really take a step forward was when he got to know Mats in Gyllene Tider. But it was also when the punk era came. The new wave. Then it was okay to be lousy and that appealed to Per enormously.

Per about song lyrics

Per talks about inspiration to understand what a song text can look like.

Mr. G says:

Take, for example, “Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen. It’s a letter. It even ends with “sincerely L Cohen” in the text itself. And it’s fascinating that a letter becomes a song text, but it’s not really that strange. If you write a short and concise message to someone, you can repeat the most important thing in the message and it becomes a chorus. It’s not far-fetched. So I mostly think that I hadn’t really found or understood this thing about form, and that it becomes easier if you stay within a form. If you look at, for example, “Billy”, the verses are of different lengths. They kind of stop when MP took over with the guitar and started cranking with his solo.

Song titles as a starting point

David thinks Per is a master of titles and he imagines a song idea often starts with the title. PG says it can start with the title. Titles are important. The title is like the face of the song, what makes one curious. He tells he has an archive of titles or more stanzas than titles that trigger his curiosity.

David says a common songwriting tip is “write down ideas from TV shows or book titles”. He is curious how it works for Per.

PG says:

I do exactly as you say. I have learned – not only because of age – but also for other reasons, that if you come up with something that you think is interesting, you have to write it down or record it. My phone is jam-packed with messages, tunes and stuff. It could be a title or a stanza or something like that. Or a rhythm. You hear something. It could even be that I’m inside a store where they play music in the room. And then I think “damn this sounds good”. But why don’t they do this instead? And then I can record myself humming it. Although changed, in my way. And then time passes. So when I come home and listen to it after three days, I don’t understand anything. I learned that you have to count in first so you understand later where the one is. It can be very exciting. Because there will be something that triggers something in me. Then something else is created from it and it becomes a third thing in the end.

David understands that Per doesn’t like to work as hard on songwriting as many people say you should. Like Benny Andersson who goes to his grand piano every day and sits there week after week.

Per says:

No, I don’t get that. I love to write but I do it as little as possible. Because it must be fun! The most difficult thing for me is if, for example, you write a song in English. And then I realize that it would have been great if it was in Swedish. And then I have to start over. Because I almost always write music and lyrics in symbiosis – roughly at the same time – which means that melodies and consonants and vowels and everything kind of fit together. So when I need to translate, I get so locked into how it really was from the beginning. It takes an immense amount of time and very rarely turns out well. So I try to avoid it, actually.

David says it’s kind of an editor’s job to sit down and sift through all the hundreds of voice memos. He is curious about how Per is doing that. PG explains that as soon as he records an idea, he transfers it to the computer where he has a folder called “workshop”. Beneath that, there is a folder called iPhone and there are hundreds of recordings. Text fragments are in another folder.

When Per is in town or sitting in a taxi, then it’s his iPhone that applies:

If you hear a strange person at Bromma airport singing in the toilet, it’s probably me. I usually call this part of the process “antennas out” and it goes on 24/7.

David says he has read that Per thought Gyllene Tider sounded the way he wanted at first around “Kung av sand” and “Juni, juli, augusti”. According to David, there is kind of a late Tom Petty vibe to that thing that the guys got together with Michael Ilbert.

PG says:

It was something I had felt all along. It’s hard to talk about Gyllene, because we finished so early. Lasse Lindbom, who produced us at the time, also didn’t understand what we wanted to aim at. When I tried to explain something, I couldn’t. But Ilbert understood it immediately.

David wants to know if Per works on a project-by-project basis, so that he didn’t happen to write a GT song in the middle of the Roxette circus.

Per says:

When I wrote Roxette songs, I wrote almost all the songs for Marie. Then there were songs that she didn’t want to sing for one reason or another. It could be that she thought it was a little too pop. But it was difficult to put a finger on where that line was. “The Big L” and “How Do You Do!” it gets a little bubblegum. But it kind of depended on what mood she was in. She loved it when I came up with this “Queen Of Rain” and the bigger songs. And when I tried to do something a bit R’n’B like “Soul Deep” or “Cry”, then she got to stretch that style a bit.

David is curious how Per works with demos.

PG says:

I often do several demo versions of the songs. It also goes in waves. Sometimes I just do acoustic demos. But if I’m going to involve other people, I often do it on synths. Maybe just a little loop or something, so that’s easy to change key then. So I don’t do five hours of work organically and then have to redo everything. I’m trying to find as much of the identity as possible for the song to go to the production level as soon as possible.

Key changes are an effective tool

The guys start talking about key changes or modulations as they are called. There is a variation David has noted in several songs that he tends to refer to as the “Per Gessle trick”. The verse in G and the chorus in A. Then back. He thinks it’s damn effective. “Jo-Anna Says”, “Kung av sand”, “June Afternoon” are just a few examples of Gessle songs where the choruses go a whole key above the verses.

PG says:

It is almost never sought. Or… I don’t think much. Everything is about efficiency in a song. If the melody is cool but ends up wrong, then there are different paths. If there are different singers – for example a boy and a girl – then you can use different octaves. Then it is solved by just the speed. But otherwise, if you want to keep the melodies as they are, you might need a modulation to make it “kick”.

It’s damn neat and that’s lovely. But people skip it! No one dares to change the key. It is such a simple trick that is only in your favor. Because once you’ve learned the song, you can’t hear the song without it. The melody gets better. It becomes a hook just from the speed!

David is curious whether it was usually Per’s experiments that led to these modulations or it was something that Clarence threw in as a hint sometimes.

Per says:

It certainly has happened. But usually they were written that way. There are so many songs that there were no rules! Clarence has probably done a lot of that too. But the songs for Marie that I demo sang on, when I wrote them, I might not have thought that I would sing the lead. Because I sang everything back then. If it was her song, her verse, her chorus and I’m going to sing it, then I have a problem that I have to solve. Both Clarence and Christoffer Lundquist have always been damn nice to help out. Magnus Börjeson too, for that matter.

David asks Per if he is talking in terms of tonic, dominant and subdominant parallel, but Per doesn’t really know what David means by that. Now David sounds like Clarence and Christoffer when they talk. When they sit and analyze something Per has done, they can sit and talk among themselves. PG sits next to them and doesn’t understand anything.

PG says:

I’ve gotten old enough that I’ve learned what I like. That’s also why I’ve always surrounded myself with like-minded people. But when you are in it for a long time, you have to leave your little house sometimes and test yourself and do things. It was probably a little bit of that too, which I think made us have such a relatively long, great career anyway. Because Marie knew her jazz, she knew her blues and Clarence knew his prog rock and Jonas knew his stuff, Jeff Beck tricks. And I knew a little of everything, but not very much.

The beginning of a song

David asks Per to take us into a typical scenario when a song is created.

Per says:

I usually never start writing a song with a title. First comes a musical idea that you think “this is damn hooky” or “this feels great”. Or “I would like to write something in six-eighths”. I’d like to have a certain feel, trying to play around with chords and stuff. And then comes something vague. When you have found a little temperature in what you are doing, you can start looking in your small archive if you want. Or maybe you already have it. While you sit and look for these chords, you might start singing something. Which might be exciting or trigger your imagination in some way. What takes time – much, much longer – is writing lyrics. Because when you get to writing the lyrics, you have quite a lot of music already written. Because otherwise you won’t get to the text anyway. The only time I’ve written music for a finished text is when that text has had another music that I didn’t think was good enough. Then the text remains.

David wants to know more about the process: „You have felt the mood of the musical idea and you may be browsing through your notes for phrases or alternatively start singing along to something. And then you enthusiastically finish writing the melody. Then comes the tough work of finishing the text?”

PG says:

But it can also be the case that the melody is ready, but it changes because I get into a text flow that requires a different melody. Everything works in symbiosis with each other. So it’s not set in stone. It is never set in stone. I also think that you should take that into account when it comes to songwriting, that songs are never ready. When you then play them with another band or with other people, they sound completely different. They are a creature in a way. After all, it can happen that you record a song, and then when you sit and listen to it during the mixing, you think “damn how long this is… we’ll cut out half the verse”. And then you get a completely different text.

David is curious about how Per finishes the lyrics.

Per says:

I have a hard time staying focused so I try to write a text in maybe an afternoon. Or… it’s different depending on how complicated the text is. Some texts are very strong for one’s self and sometimes I feel that I have something on my mind that I want to get down. I’m 90% there, but something is missing. And I don’t know what it is. Then it must take time and at least one night must have passed. And then maybe for breakfast… and then I might not even remember how the song goes. I haven’t worn it out. But then I just read the text straight up and down. That’s how I feel: “Damn it! It’s damn good. ” or “That’s clumsy. That’s not good!” And then I go to my office or to the studio and then I sit down again. I red-mark what I need to redo. So I’m constantly trying to trick myself into being focused somehow. Because I don’t get better from kneading. The song doesn’t get better from knowing it better. On the contrary. I trust 100 percent in my gut feeling, in my spontaneity.

I notice that when I work in the studio with other people as well. What I’m good at is capturing their spontaneity. Because they are not good at it themselves. Because they don’t know what they are doing. Most of them are very good singers and musicians, they just play damn well all the time. But they have a very hard time understanding when they are extremely good. But it suits me just fine. It’s a subjective thing. I remember Marie saying that she always thought she sang best when I was in the studio directing her. Because she didn’t hear it herself. She always sang well, but that stuff that was exceptionally good, she couldn’t pick them herself. And so it is for sure with my stuff. I cannot judge the quality. It means a lot to me. But if it is commercial…? I’m the worst in the world at picking singles. What is a hit? How to write a hit? I have no idea! I’m interested in pop music and it’s in the nature of pop music to be catchy. But I’m not too fond of modern pop music, because I don’t think it’s particularly catchy.

About choosing not to move forward with a song

David asks Per if he is good at killing his darlings.

PG says:

I usually “kill my darlings” earlier than that. It’s very rare that I go so far as to record it, even as an acoustic demo. The reason I do an acoustic demo is because, for example, Clarence or Christoffer say: “We don’t want your bloody demos! Record the songs acoustically and we’ll do the rest. So we’re open-minded”.

David is curious whether Per ever speaks on the subject or gives any type of workshops, teaching songwriting.

PG says:

No, I talk about so many other things all the time. When I release stuff, I don’t really need to talk about it anymore. Then I don’t want to talk too much about being creative. Because it takes away a bit of the mystery, the creativity. I think it’s my thing.

To David’s surprise that he could come and talk to Per about songwriting PG reacts:

I think it’s fun to talk. It’s a little different these days too. Because I do so very little. When I sit in Nyhetsmorgon and talk or do TikTok stuff, I just talk about the new songs and talk about how they came about and I try to remember. Nonsense. But what we’re talking about now is fun!

What makes a good melody

David asks Per what a good melody is.

Per says:

I’m always looking for something that gets me hooked. It’s a kind of rush when you hit it right. I remember sitting in that room writing (points to the office) “The Loneliest Girl In The World” as it came to be called. I was just sitting there plinking and then I started singing this (humming) and thought “how cool is that”. I just felt – like all of me – cool chorus! And then it was like putting together a puzzle. How do I maximize the chorus? And then I wrote the verses that didn’t get in the way of the chorus. And “what’s it going to be called?”. Then this idea “the loneliest girl in the world” came up. And then I thought maybe it’s too depressing. But, no, because sometimes it’s really exciting if you have something dark in a text, although the music maybe is bright. And vice versa. A good example is “Every Breath You Take” by The Police, which everyone thinks is such a super pop song. But there is a hell of a lot of “doom” in that text. There are lots of such examples and I’m not particularly afraid of such things, but it is mostly that it should feel good to sing and that you should be able to write a story around it in some way. And how do you write a story? It’s fact and fiction. You pick things up. For some texts you write maybe three stanzas when you feel a certain way. And those texts might be very powerful for yourself. And you live with them. And then, all of a sudden, when you write something that goes at the same temperature musically, maybe those stanzas fit very well. And then you develop them. It may start with something that is sad. Or something that you think is unfair. Something you think is questionable in your life.

Especially during the Roxette era, I almost always did a so-called “middle-eight”, a bridge. And they were usually super hooky. I’ve always thought that a bridge should always be so good it could be a chorus. Like a B chorus sort of thing. “Listen To Your Heart”, for example, has a very good bridge.

David says „where the key goes up a notch! Nice modulation!” PG says you notice that at a concert. Everyone loves to sing that bridge. There are plenty of such examples. David asks Per if he no longer tries to do such bridges.

PG says:

No, I don’t anymore. Because I tend to keep up with my time. I make the songs shorter and shorter. And then there is almost no room for a bridge. It feels like the time of bridges is over.

David wants to know whether you get better and better the more you write or you get worse and worse.

Per says:

You don’t get better and you don’t get worse. You become different, develop. I will not say “against your will”. But you develop because time goes by. What we talked about at the beginning, it’s good not to know very much. The hardest thing when you are my age is writing uptempo songs. That’s kind of why I wanted to make the new Gyllene Tider album (“Hux Flux”). I know a little too much, I’m a little too sophisticated and usually choose a different means of expression, other types of instruments and other types of tempos. So that’s why it’s been a challenge and you like that sometimes. You can’t write young music when you’re old, but you can write music based on the music you liked when you were young. Although you do it in a different way.

10 things to learn from Per Gessle

1. Listen a lot and let yourself be inspired

– You have listened so damn much. And then you like a certain style. Or multiple styles. And then you make something of it your own.

2. Save ideas

– If you come up with something that you think is interesting, you have to write it down or record it. My phone is jam-packed with messages, tunes and other stuff. It could be a title or a stanza or something like that. Or a rhythm.

3. Always have your “antennas out”

– It’s 24/7. It can happen now as we sit and talk. You might say something that I think “shit, I could use that for something”. Although you don’t notice that I noticed it.

4. Don’t get lost in technology if you’re not interested

– I’m not technically interested at all. So setting up a mixing desk and start working… it takes too much focus for me, so I lose sight of what I’m actually supposed to be doing.

5. Dare to change keys in the songs

– I’m writing Swedish songs right now and I’m currently working on a song where, after the chorus, I don’t want a theme. So then I did a solo that is exactly the same chord as the chorus. Just lowered. If the chorus goes in G, the solo goes exactly the same way just in F. Which then means that when I go back to the original key, you get a lift. You experience it as a key rise to the chorus. And that’s it! But you haven’t raised as all the choruses are in G. You’re tricking the ear all the time like this.

6. Learn what you like

– I don’t like three-part singing. It’s mostly just that when I listen to it, I don’t like it when it gets too thick. When it comes to vocal parts, I prefer fifth harmony. Perfect! Fifth is always the best. And then you might find a major 7th or a sixth that colors in a special way. I like that!

7. Find and keep your essence

– We created the typical Roxette sound from all these ingredients that we come from. I don’t think people realized this until after time has passed. Today, when I hear a Roxette song on the radio, I can think “damn, that sounds special!”. But I didn’t think so at the time. I just thought it sounded like us. At the same time, when we broke through, EMI wanted us to move to Los Angeles or New York. Or at least London to be closer to the industry. But we said we don’t want to do that because then we lose our whole essence. If we remove Jonas and Pelle and Clarence and all of them, we would have played Richard Marx!

8. Dare to play around!

– You can play around and you shouldn’t lock yourself up. At the same time, you have to respect what makes the song strong. It could be that a melody is very strong. So if you want to change anything, you have to do it wisely and with respect. If you now want to max out your song, which everyone wants to, then you have to know what you’re doing.

9. Pick up the feeling and temperature from other songs

– It’s not like now I’m going to write a song like this and it will be the same. But it is the temperature in the songs that you can take with you. That temperature opens like a door in yourself in some way. If I listen to “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” and I get into it, I can’t write music like that, but I can write a song with the same feeling, in my own way.

10. Everything leads to the next thing

– My songs are very much me and I live to write songs. That’s what I am. My wife and son and friends will probably sign it. But it also means that everything I do leads to the next thing. Every riff that doesn’t lead to anything allows me to get it out of my system, so I can move on to something else. You learn. It’s a long, long process.

About David Myhr

Besides being a writer, David Myhr is also a songwriter and artist and wants to know more about the phenomenon of songwriting. As a university lecturer, he both teaches and conducts research in the subject. He has discovered that trying to put into words what actually happens in the creative process of writing songs is extremely difficult. But he has just as fully given it to trying to get some of the biggest songwriters to do just that.

For the original article in Swedish and more photos click HERE!

SvD’s interview with Per Gessle about aging and pop music

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Andres Lokko from Svenska Dagbladet did an excellent interview with Per Gessle and it was published together with Staffan Löwstedt’s wonderful photos in SvD last Sunday. It’s the first time Per let journalists inside his apartment on Strandvägen, Stockholm, so the article also gives you a sneak peak at where family Gessle live when they are in the Swedish capital.

The title of the article is ”Per Gessle, how is it to be so old?” and it predicts they were talking about aging. But once you have access to the whole article (which was published in paper on Sunday and available for subscribers online), you realize it’s about much more than that.

Andres writes Åsa, Per’s wife proudly shows one of Per’s 60th birthday present when they enter, a Playboy pinball game from the ’70s with a kitschy cartoon Hugh Hefner in a bathrobe and with a pipe, of course, flanked by blondes in bikini. The 2-storey apartment is a virtual Fort Knox. Where the guys could enter is the airy office with a grand piano in the room and shelves along the walls with CDs and art books on them. Wherever they look they can see framed pop-historical photos. In the toilet there is a black and white Iggy Pop, for example.

Åsa serves coffee and tons of cookies. Andres writes no one touched the bakery but a bowl of English liquorice disappeared very quickly.

Andres asks Per how it feels to be so old and Mr. G replies with a little self-ironic resignation that it’s cool and totally OK. Andres (born in 1967) says when he started writing about music 30 years ago, Mauro Scocco, Orup or even Per himself seemed to be old. Now they seem to be the same age. Per reacts that you don’t even notice when it occurs, you just all become adults. Then the older you get, the least important the age is.

Talking about aging, Andres says it’s strange, but suddenly he has a new role as a music journalist. It can happen that one calls him when Little Richard dies and he can also be waken up in the middle of the night to keep a knowledgeable eulogy of any pop legend. Per says aging with pop music is what both he and Andres do in a way. When Tom Petty died, it was as if a close family member had passed away. He felt things would never be the same again. When your idols die while you have the chance to get older and you have experienced how, for example, Marie got sick and others close to you have passed away, it becomes even more difficult to accept that David Bowie or Pete Shelley from Buzzcocks dies.

Andres asks Per if it is stranger to turn 60 himself than to see his idols turning 60. Per says it’s surreal to think of himself as a 60-year-old. 50 was one thing, 40 was also weird. There are periods when there is nothing happening in the music industry or in your life, but then suddenly you wake up in the morning and realize so many things have happened. Not only with music, but social media exploded, streaming services took over and you suddenly find yourself in a whole new world. And that makes you feel even older. Per says he even notices it on his son. Gabriel is 21 now and he is dealing with his own music while he is studying at KTH. He asks Per a lot of things and Per tries to answer, but they come from 2 radically different planets. Gabbe listens to music as much as Per does or did in his age, but he doesn’t care at all about artists, producers, album covers – all that Mr. G thought was vital. When Gabriel and his friends are listening to Post Malone and suddenly Dylan’s ”Subterranean Homesick Blues” pops up, they don’t even raise their eyebrows. Music has become something that just flows forward. Per tells Andres when he grew up he always listened to P3 and ”Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck was followed by The Zombies ”She’s Not There”, ”Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” by The Beatles and then an Evert Taube tune. On the same channel. According to Per, it’s the diversity that makes music much fun and interesting. He bought ”Delilah” by Tom Jones at the same time as ”Last Train To Clarksville” by The Monkees and his brother had records by MC5. During those times wanting to let hair grow over the ears was super-important, almost revolutionary.

Andres asks Per if he feels stuck there. Per says, a little. At least with the hair. It’s not just about age. As an artist you have a requirement to always rush forward. If he thinks of David Bowie, he changed his look all the time, but sometime in the mid-1980s he finished with it and was just David Bowie and it was alright.

Andres asks if it is something Per strives for. Mr. G says change for the sake of change is not necessarily ideal. As an artist, the change must come because you have a need for it. For example, the reason he searched for Marie Fredriksson was that he felt limited by his voice. He has a strange love-hate relationship to it and felt that he could write better songs than how he could sing them. So he needed a change to be able to maximize it. That was the main reason for him to start Roxette. THAT was a natural change for him. Andres says that in such cases the bonus is that after a while it’s fun to hear your own voice again. Per agrees. The more he works acoustically, the more he is longing to play power pop with Gyllene Tider and the more time he spends in an electronic world with Mono Mind, the more he suddenly wants to play acoustically. He thinks these cycles he has invented himself to keep the whole spectrum alive.

Andres says when he hears Per’s voice he often thinks of British singer-songwriter Al Stewart. He had a huge hit ”Year Of The Cat” in the early 1970s. Per asks Andres if he knows that Al Stewart recorded one of his songs once. It has never been released though. It was ”Call Of The Wild” from the first Roxette album. Per has it somewhere on a cassette. Andres asks if Al’s version sounds exactly like Per’s original recording. Mr. G says, not really. But he has a bunch of Al Stewart songs on a playlist he listens to quite often and then he actually thinks it sounds a little like Per himself.

Andres tells the fact that Paul McCartney has stopped coloring his hair was bigger news than his latest album. It was the same with Tom Jones. Andres thinks they went into a new, perhaps their last phases. He asks Per if he sees his paths this way. Per says it’s not far from him to think this way, but he hasn’t got there yet. The last few years he has done so many different things that he didn’t have the time to take that step where he would try to see himself from outside. He says he still doesn’t know what he’ll be when he grows up. The GT reunion this year is not news to him, because he has known since quite a long time that he would devote this year to it and has started writing songs for the last GT album.

Andres remarks that GT for Per is like a band on stand by. Per says it’s nice to have it like that. GT always comes back on a project basis and after a short intensive period it’s over again. Andres says Per constantly wants to move forward, but GT is a pure nostalgia machine. PG says it’s true, but everytime the band came back, one of his conditions was that they release a new album too. It’s not that they need new hits, because people want to hear the old ones anyway, but to get together in the studio and do a creative work. They have extremely good relationships within the band, but they hardly ever spend time together. Per works with Mats MP Persson in the studio in Halmstad from time to time, Anders Herrlin was there with him in Nashville when they recorded his solo albums ”En vacker natt” and ”En vacker dag”, but the others he follows basically only on Facebook. But during an album recording, they immediately find their original roles. Per thinks they really need to find that chemistry to be able to go on a tour together. Should they not do it this way, there is a risk that five strangers will suddenly play pop music in front of 150,000 people. Instead of partying together in Mallorca for 2 weeks, it’s more efficient to record some new songs, Per tells Andres.

It’s 100% right that Gyllene Tider is a nostalgia machine, but Per sees the band in a more serious way. He thinks GT is a very good pop band in the same way as Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Now that they are 60, he wants to try to make pop music that is worthy and adult in the right way. They can’t do any ”När vi två blir en” songs anymore.

The guys are coming back to the aging topic again. Andres mentions that they are the first to experience that such things as the death of David Bowie can happen, that pop artists die of old age. He asks Per how he deals with it. PG says Keith Richards is 75. He saw ”Under The Influence”, a documentary about him on Netflix the other day and he just said “I’m no pop star anymore and I don’t want to be that”. He has been there since he was 17-18 and now he is a groomed old uncle and feels relatively good in his existence. He can’t be compared to anyone else.

To Andres, Carole King is an excellent example of how she in 1960 wrote ”Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for the teenage girls in The Shirelles, but when she 10 years later sang it herself, as a ballad at the piano, she transformed the text author Gerry Goffin’s words into a sad and grown love triangle. Per says a good pop song works like this. Also some of Per’s songs work like that. For example, when Lars Winnerbäck sang ”Honung och guld” with Per on tour, the song got a completely different meaning.

Per tells SvD that as time goes by, he tries to understand how he was thinking when he was writing nearly 40 years ago. To find out what he was looking for. He was also thinking about it when he wrote the new songs for GT. He dreams to find a tone of adult dignity, but in their chosen form of pop.

According to Per, the school of composing that he works in doesn’t exist anymore. Definitely not in modern electronic dance or pop music. It’s a bit like when Paul McCartney sits down and plays ”Martha My Dear”. No one writes music like that today, but he has it in his DNA. When Per started playing, the first thing he learned was Swedish songs. He and his friend Peter Nilsson were Sweden’s first troubadours employed by the city council. Swedish social democracy at its best, Andres reacts. That music school mixed with Simon & Garfunkel and artists like Bernt Staf and John Holm meant a lot to Per. That song tradition is in his DNA.

Cover photo and all photos in the original interview article are by Staffan Löwstedt.

© Svenska Dagbladet, Andres Lokko, Staffan Löwstedt

Charla K to compete with a song co-written with Per Gessle

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Charla K’s name probably sounds familiar to Per Gessle’s fans, because she was signed by Per’s record label, Space Station 12 and together with Alex Shield she also performed as support act to Per Gessle on Mr. G’s summer tour last year.

Now she is among the ten finalists competing in the Norwegian national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest. Charlotte Kjær (29) is from Tønsberg and currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2009, she participated in X Factor Norway as part of the group Shackles. In 2013 the group participated in Melodi Grand Prix as a duo. Charla K’s first single was “Should’a Let Me Go“, written together with Alex Shield and Sharon Vaughn. This year, she co-wrote Stamina for Anastacia’s new album.

In 2018, Charla K competes with a song written together with Alex Shield and none other than Per Gessle. “Charlotte is a natural talent who has that unique skill that you listen to her whatever she is singing!” says Per in today’s press release. “Charla K writes songs as well, Stop The Music is a fantastic creation she composed together with Alex Shield. I’m both proud and happy to have written the text. And suddenly we all ended up in Norway. And on Melodifestivalen. Life is full of surprises! Incredibly fun,” says Per.

Charla K is excited to stand on the scene of Oslo Spektrum and perform the song “Stop The Music” on March 10, 2018. “It’s great for me to be one of ten selected artists who get the chance to participate in one of the year’s greatest , most important and most influential music contests – MGP,” she says.

“Stop The Music” was chosen out of almost 1200 songs and that is a record for the competition in Norway.

In the 1980’s, Per Gessle already took part in Melodifestivalen as a songwriter. First in 1980, when Lasse Lindbom performed “För dina bruna ögons skull”, the song ended up at the 10th position. In 1986 Lena Philipsson competed with “Kärleken är evig” (lyrics written by PG) and ended up at the second place.

Fingers crossed for Charla K that she wins the contest in Norway, so we can all support her on the ESC later! Listen to the song HERE!

Photos by Karin Törnblom taken at Space Station 12’s anniversary party 2017