Per Gessle

Per Gessle on Nordic Rox – October 2023

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Per Gessle and Sven Lindström offer a Lisa Miskovsky special on the October episode of Nordic Rox. PG thinks she is a great singer with a wonderful voice and she is a wonderful artist. She released her first album in 2001. Still going strong. Sven adds she is a great songwriter too.

Before the special starts, the guys talk about The Cardigans, a Swedish band that wasn’t from Malmö, but they moved to Malmö. Love Fool was a big hit in the States, but now the guys play a song from the Life album called Carnival. Swedish indie from 1995.

Ooh I Like It! by The Creeps is the next song. It’s produced by Clarence Öfwerman, who produced Roxette. Sven says it sounds really good. The band is from Älmhult, the town that made IKEA famous. Marit Bergman is next with her beautiful This Is The Year from 2002.

The guys are moving in the direction of Per Gessle and play the latest single, Vandrar i ett regn. It’s to celebrate the Swedish legend, Pugh Rogefeldt. Sven mentions they did a Nordic Rox special with Pugh. Per says he passed away unfortunately in May this year. Per says he was part of a tribute concert, an homage to him, and he released a single with one of Pugh’s songs from 1975. Sven says it’s from a live album and he doesn’t think there was a studio version. It was only released live and it was sort of a ’50s pastiche. Per adds he always loved that song. He was actually there at the show where it was recorded when he was 16 years old. The double album became a big hit for Pugh. When Per recorded the song himself, he removed all these ’50s influences. He made it into a little bit more like his style instead. Sven thinks it’s a great move. It became something else, a wonderful pop track with Per’s guitarist Ola’s slide guitar there as well. Per is sure a lot of people of course don’t understand the song, because it’s in Swedish, but it’s got all those typical elements of Pugh’s wonderful lyrics. He had his own style. Sven says he is called the founding father of Swedish rock music, and not only because of the music, but also the lyrics. PG says he was the first one to do rock music in Swedish. In a credible way, Sven adds. Per is very happy to be able to participate and to pay some tribute to him.

Electric by the fabulous band Melody Club is next. They are from Sven’s hometown, Växjö. Great stuff coming out of that town, Sven says. The guys are laughing.

Sven and Per move on to the Lisa Miskovsky special. Per says she is a great singer and she is from the North. Her father was from the old Czechoslovakia and her mother was from Finland. She had made a debut album in 2001, which was an instant success. Sven adds she started writing songs at an early age, but she was super talented in many other ways. She was really close to become a member of the Swedish national team in snowboard. And she played hockey, Per adds. But the songwriting and the singing eventually got the upper hand. In 2001 she made her first single Driving One Of Your Cars. Mr. G says it’s very special. It sounds exactly like how pop music sounded in 2001. Sven agrees.

Cool track coming up next, Lady Stardust from Lisa’s second album Fallingwater. Sven doesn’t know how it did internationally. He is not really sure about Lisa’s international career actually. Per thinks it went so-so. This was a really big album in Sweden. She started working with Joakim Berg from the band Kent who co-wrote songs with her and also co-produced. That made a big difference style-wise. This is a really cool album and Lady Stardust was a big, big song on the radio. Sven remembers you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it. Big radio track.

Sven says it’s starting to heat up now, because they are moving out to the international big hit scene. Per says, what was interesting was that Lisa Miskovsky had this song called Another Shape Of My Heart, which eventually turned out to be Shape Of My Heart by the Backstreet Boys. Sven explains that Lisa made a demo of this song and it got in the hands of Max Martin. PG says Max Martin was producing and writing for Backstreet Boys at the time. In the Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, Sven adds. Sven doesn’t know if you can say that he kept half of Lisa’s ideas. Per says he doesn’t know, he wasn’t there. Haha. Sven says he wasn’t there either. Max Martin added some magic to it and just to let you know what the difference is, the guys play Another Shape Of My Heart, the Lisa Miskovsky version, and then the Shape Of My Heart version by Backstreet Boys.

Sven asks Per if he has ever written something similar to a boy band tune. Per says not that he knows of. Sven is curious about how it is for Per as a songwriter what started in the boy band era that there were multiple songwriters working together. Sometimes you can see up to 5 or even 10 songwriters. PG says it’s a different thing, he comes from a different generation. He is used to working alone or with one partner. But nowadays you do everything on the computer and you send your files to each other and people add things all the time. So it’s a different ball game. New times, new methods.

One more track is played by Lisa Miskovsky, also from the Fallingwater album. It was Lisa’s second album. A Brand New Day is Per’s favorite Lisa Miskovsky track. He thinks she sings beautifully on this one. It’s co-written by Lisa herself and Joakim Berg from Kent. A wonderful track from 2003. This wraps up the Lisa Miskovsky special. The guys mention once again that she is a great songwriter, performer, singer, hockey player and snowboarder.

The guys have an ace up their sleeves in the shape of Bob Hund. A wonderful band, according to Per. They play Tralala lilla molntuss. PG can’t translate it. Sven says if you think it’s a bit difficult to understand Thomas Öberg, the singer’s lyrics, don’t feel too depressed, because he is coming from Helsingborg in the South of Sweden, and a lot of Swedes have actually a bit trouble hearing what he says.

Mando Diao’s The Band is next and Toys And Flavors by The Hellacopters is the last song, from the album High Visibility released in 2000.

Cigarettes by Anita Lindblom closes the show, as usual.

Still is from the Bag of Trix comment videos recorded by Anders Roos.

Thanks for your support, Sven!

Per Gessle on “Halv tre med Lotta Bromé” on Mix Megapol

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Per Gessle was Lotta Bromé’s guest on radio Mix Megapol on 18th October. You can listen to the interview HERE.

Lotta welcomes Per in the studio and mentions that it was exactly a year ago when Per was on this show, October 2022. She finds it fun that PG always releases new music in October. Per laughs and says it’s a coincidence of course. He releases music all the time. Lotta knows it and says she was sitting here in the studio all Easter waiting for Per to come, because he promised to come back then when he was on the show last time. She had eggs and stuff, but PG didn’t come. Per laughs and says something came in the way. Lotta says it was Gyllene Tider. She asks how the tour was.

Per says it was fantastic. The GT tour was magical and Gyllene Tider is a wonderful little pop band. They have always been touring regularly with odd intervals. These days, it feels like there is almost no one left who makes that kind of music anymore. So all of a sudden, they kind of represent a bygone era. They felt it for the first time this year. It didn’t feel like that at all when they toured in 2019. Lotta asks if it was a farewell tour again this summer. PG says it wasn’t. He doesn’t think you should paint yourself into a corner. Only Micke thinks so. Per laughs. So Lotta is curious if another GT tour is coming. Per doesn’t know, but it’s always fun to play together with the guys.

Lotta thinks GT has a very mixed audience. PG confirms it. It’s mostly those who have been there before, but it’s a fantastic mix of all sorts and they have been lucky enough to have managed to build up a song catalogue that is still attractive to a lot of people.

Lotta says it must be fun to get to a younger audience as well and that there are people who only now discover the music that has been around for so long for us. Per confirms it’s cool. The case is that the majority of those who listen to almost all music he makes, it’s music that they have gotten married to, they have divorced, they have graduated and stuff like that. There is so much going on in their lives and the music represents so many life events. It becomes a kind of soundtrack to everything that people have been through. It’s cool to be a part of it.

Lotta asks Per if he himself should pick one GT song that meant the most to him, what song would that be. PG finds it difficult to pick one and Lotta says he can’t cheat and say a Roxette or PG Roxette or Per solo song. It has to be a GT song. So after thinking, Per says a song that was some sort of a stepping stone to something new is Det är över nu. It was the first time that they really sounded the way they always wanted to sound. They got a new producer and it was recorded in 1995. Per had been out for 7 years with Roxette and got more routine through Roxette, so that all of a sudden when GT got back together in 1995, they sounded damn good.

After they play Det är över nu on the radio, Lotta mentions that Per will be on stage tonight. PG explains that there will be a tribute concert to Pugh Rogefeldt at Cirkus. It’s Per, Tomas Ledin, First Aid Kit and other artists on stage. Lotta asks Per why Pugh meant so much to him. Mr. G says Pugh has been with him his whole life. Pugh’s first concert Per saw was when he was 14, in Halmstad’s folk park. Pugh played there with his band Rainrock. Per remembers that Pugh had a bandana on his head and a long ponytail and after a few songs he took off this scarf and then they saw he was completely bald. He looked like Kojak. The Halmstad audience had never seen anything like that before, so they were shocked. Afterwards PG and his friends went to the Esso Motor Hotel where the band lived. They waited for the band there at the reception. Lotta asks if they dared to say hi to the band. PG says they didn’t dare to talk to them. Lotta asks if Per had the chance to tell Pugh about this when they met. PG says he did.

The first time Per and Pugh met was when Gyllene Tider recorded their second LP. It came out in 1981 and Pugh came to the studio to read the stanza “mina damer och herrar, det är gyllene tider för rock’n’roll”, the intro to the song Gyllene Tider för rock’n’roll. It’s unbelievably big for the guys in GT that he did it. Then he went on tour with Gyllene Tider in 2004, on the biggest GT tour. Pugh was a special guest.

Lotta says people always talk about Pugh as the father of Swedish rock. His first album was Ja, dä ä dä! and he wrote lyrics in Swedish. PG says not only that he wrote in Swedish, but he actually created his own language. The second record was called Pughish and there he sings in his own language. Per has always been interested in lyrics and he thinks there are similarities between Pugh’s lyrics and John Lennon’s lyrics. There are these nonsense, odd lyrics, e.g. I Am The Walrus. That’s very attractive to Per. Especially Pugh’s early records, which are a little more fuzzy and a little more unstructured are incredibly attractive to PG.

He chose to cover Vandrar i ett regn. It came out on a live record called Ett steg till in 1975. That was recorded at Halmstad Theatre – among other places – where Per saw Pugh and Rainrock and Janne Lucas and Ola Magnell.

Lotta says Pugh was truly an idol. Per says he had great vibes and he looked cool. Mr. G says he made a video for Vandrar i ett regn and Ebba, who directed this video, has managed to find a lot of cool pictures of Pugh from the past. He looked damn cool.

Lotta says Per doesn’t wear a bandana. Per laughs and says he doesn’t have any. Too much hair to put under, Lotta says. Per laughs and then they play Vandrar i ett regn.

Lotta asks when was the last time Per met Pugh. Mr. G says he met Pugh in person at his last concert. He performed at Cirkus in Stockholm in 2019. Per was there with Clarence Öfwerman, Roxette’s producer. They were sitting in the first row of the gallery and at one song Pugh went out into the audience and sang the song. He caught sight of Per, walked up to him and then he hugged Mr. G. It made Per so happy, because they never had that kind of a relationship, but he just hugged PG. He was happy to see Per.

When Mr. G had recorded Vandrar i ett regn, it ended up with Pugh, so he listened to it and thought it was great that Per recorded it. It was only a couple of days before he passed away, so it also feels great that he got to hear it and Per got a response to it.

Lotta is curious how often Per makes covers. It’s not that often. However, PG likes covers as an artist, because you can use them to tell a little about where you are coming from. They did that with Gyllene Tider early on. They played, for example, ABBA’s S.O.S., Mott The Hoople, The Beatles, a bit of everything by Tom Petty. Roxette played a bit of Blondie and a bit of The Birds. One of Per’s favourite records is David Bowie’s Pin-Ups album, which is a fantastic collection of Bowie’s ’60s favourites. Lotta adds that Bryan Ferry has done some great covers too. Per agrees.

So, Per thinks covers are fun, but he doesn’t make covers that often. You have to prioritize your own songs.

Lotta wants to know how many times Per was asked to be on Så mycket bättre. [It’s a Swedish TV reality show in which participating musicians perform their own version of well-known songs by other artists. /PP] Many times, Per replies. Lotta is curious why Per doesn’t take part in it. Per says from what he understands, you have to go away for 6 weeks and live with other artists. It sounds like a nightmare. They are laughing. Lotta says that Per is touring a lot and asks if it is OK to live with the guys in GT then. PG says it’s true he is away on tour a lot, but there are no cameras all the time.

Lotta says the last time they also talked about getting older and people passing away. Then Per also talked about the importance of nurturing relationships. PG says you have to make the most of what you have. He says you start to become like your parents, throwing out clichés like this about how you should behave when you get old. Per laughs. Lotta says she is very happy that Per came here today and nurtures their relationship. Haha.

Last time Per was on the show he had many things coming up. There was the PG Roxette album, the Gyllene Tider record, then a tour. PG says there will be a lot of stuff happening next year as well that he can’t really reveal yet, but he thinks he will have to do it before Easter. Haha.

What he can tell is that a Gyllene Tider movie will premiere next summer. The shootings end this week. Then next autumn the Roxette musical will premiere in Malmö.

Lotta asks Per about contemporary music. She is curious if Per heard anything lately that he liked. There aren’t too many new songs that Per gets hooked on, but there are occasional artists who are exciting. Weyes Blood, for example. He says now he is like his parents again and laughs. Mr. G says when he really needs to listen to music, he often goes back to the music he grew up with. He doesn’t need a new Joni Mitchell, because he has Joni Mitchell and he doesn’t need a new Tom Petty, because he has Tom Petty. He knows so much music and he has such a huge music collection that it’s enough for him. So it’s not that easy to knock on his door and get in with a new song.

Lotta asks Per to pick an old song they should play then. PG chooses American Girl by Tom Petty.

Lotta says it’s always a pleasure to see Per and a warm welcome back at Easter or even earlier. Per thanks for it and says he’ll be glad to come back.

Stills are from THIS video.

Per Gessle on Nyhetsmorgon on TV4 talking about Pugh Rogefeldt

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Per Gessle was a guest on TV4’s morning show, Nyhetsmorgon on 13th October, release day of his new single, a cover of Pugh Rogefeldt’s Vandrar i ett regn. Program leaders Sofia Geite and Steffo Törnquist interviewed him.

The interview starts with premiering the song’s video and after they play a short part of it, Steffo says it’s such a good song choice, because one could think it could have been written by Per. It fits Per very well. PG agrees that it’s a fantastic song. Steffo says Pugh was great and Per discovered him early. Mr. G says the first time he saw Pugh must have been 1974 in Halmstad’s folk park. He played there with his band, Rainrock. He had a scarf on his head and a long ponytail and after a few songs he took off the bandana and everyone saw he had shaved his hair and was bald, just had the ponytail left. The whole audience was shocked. Per says you had never seen anything like that before. Pugh took a bet with his brother, but when his brother saw how Pugh looked, he withdrew himself from the bet. Haha.

The following year Pugh was on tour and played at Halmstad Theatre. There they played, among other songs, Vandrar i ett regn, Per says. Steffo says it’s a song that makes you happy and it’s lovely. PG thinks it has fantastic lyrics and it’s a wonderful song. Pugh was a great songwriter. Steffo mentions a word Pugh uses, “gamman” for happy. “Glad och gamman” in the lyrics, Per thinks it’s a nice expression. He had to check what that meant.

Steffo says Pugh was purely musical too and very innovative. Per agrees. He says Pugh actually created his own language, Pughish. That was even the title of his second album, Pughish. He simply wrote lyrics in his own language. It’s very unique. So there was a musical madness in all this fantastic melodic work he did. Per likes his songs a lot. He thinks there are similarities between Pugh’s lyrics and for example John Lennon’s lyrics. Sometimes there are these kind of nonsense lyrics that you can make your own and you can interpret them as you want. A bit like how Per tried to write The Look. That song isn’t about anything, but you can make it your own. That’s the cool thing about pop music and PG thinks Pugh was a master of it.

Sofia mentions that there will be a tribute concert for Pugh at Cirkus in Stockholm. That place has been chosen for a reason, also because it was where Pugh had his last concert. Per was there in the audience then. He says it was a great concert, but it was a bit strange, because Pugh behaved a bit odd. Per doesn’t know why. He says he was there with his producer, sitting in the first row of the gallery and at one song Pugh went out into the audience and sang the song. He caught sight of Per, walked up to him and then he hugged Per. PG doesn’t really understand why. It was a long hug and a bit magical in a way. In retrospect now it feels super wonderful.

Steffo says Gyllene Tider and Pugh toured together. Per smiles and says Pugh wasn’t a support act, because he was too good for that, he was a special guest for Gyllene Tider in 2004. It was a huge tour. They of course met during the tour, but they didn’t travel together. On a tour it’s when they play, you are in the dressing room, changing clothes, you are getting ready for your part, putting on your make-up and stuff, Per says, so you often miss out on each other.

Sofia says that the big hug Pugh gave Per must have been a surprise for PG, because he and Pugh didn’t have a very tight relationship. Per confirms he was surprised. Pugh was 5-6 metres away from him when he caught sight of PG, so he doesn’t know why he got the feeling. Sofia says probably this relationship meant a lot to Pugh.

Per tells Sofia and Steffo that Pugh asked him to help put together the setlist of what he would play as the special guest on the GT tour. He knew Per was a big fan. Mr. G made a list based on the early records that he loved, Pughish and Hollywood. Pugh always wondered why Per chose these weird songs that he had basically forgotten about. But those songs were so good.

Sofia aks Per what it was like to meet his idol when he was young. Because she knows PG had the chance to meet Pugh in some hotel foyer. Per says when Pugh played the folk park in Halmstad, he and his friends knew that they would be staying at a hotel in Vallås, outside Halmstad. They went there to the hotel and waited for the band to come. The band came and then they walked half a metre past. The guys sat there and were too shy to say anything at the age of 14. They just wanted to be close to the pop gods. Haha.

Regarding the Gyllene Tider movie, Per says the shooting lasts until next week and the movie is out next summer. Steffo asks how it feels. Per says it’s scary, but it’s cool. He has seen a bit of it and it’s amazing. The script is awesome, so he hopes the film will be as good as the script is. It’s a movie about 5 crazy guys in a small town who start a band. But in the end, it’s not like a documentary about Gyllene Tider. It ends with Sommartider released in 1982, so it’s kind of about how the band got there. Sofia asks Per if he recognizes himself or he sees new sides of him in the movie. [Here they show the group picture of Gyllene Tider and the cast.] Per points at the picture and says he recognizes himself there. Haha. PG says the actors interpreted the film well and they are incredibly talented. The director is also wonderful. The program leaders say it’s fun and they look forward to it. They also wish Per to have a good time at the Pugh gala.

Stills are from the morning show.

Per Gessle covers Pugh Rogefeldt’s “Vandrar i ett regn”

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Swedish artist and songwriter Pugh Rogefeldt passed away on 1st May 2023. The day the sad news came out, Per remembered him like this:

He was a magnificent artist, songwriter, singer. My early teenage life was coloured in the most unlikely shades by Pugh’s magical songs, lyrics and imagination. The “Pughish” album was my favourite. I sat in the eighth row at Halmstad Theatre when the “Ett steg till” tour came to town and was completely mesmerized. One of the greatest moments in my career is when Pugh read the stanza “Mina damer och herrar, det är gyllene tider för rock’n’roll” so that we at Gyllene Tider could use his voice in the intro to the song “Gyllene Tider för rock’n’roll” in 1981. Many years later, in 2004, we had the honour of having him as a support act on GT’s 25th anniversary tour. He wanted me to help him put together his setlist for the tour. I was happy to do that. Amazing, when you think about it.

As a tribute, Per releases a single, Vandrar i ett regn, a cover of Pugh’s song. Mr. G recorded it in April 2023. He says:

“Vandrar i ett regn” was released on Pugh Rogefeldt’s live album “Ett steg till” in 1975. An album that – besides other places – was recorded at Halmstad Theatre in December 1974. I was then fifteen years old and there, of course. Since then I have always loved this song and now that I had the honor to be at a tribute gala for dear Pugh, it felt natural to record and release my own version.

I worked together with pure Halmstad musicians; MP from Gyllene Tider on mandolin, Gicken Johansson on bass and lap steel, Magnus Helgesson on drums and Linnea Olsson on vocals. As icing on the cake, Ola Gustafsson from Norrland has added his fine guitar loops here and there.

I know Pugh heard my version before he passed away and of course it feels fantastic and big. He was a unique artist with exciting and high ambitions where he did not always take the easiest path. Thanks Pugh.

In the June episode of Nordic Rox, the Pugh Rogefeldt special, PG mentioned that the backing vocals on the live recording of Vandrar i ett regn from the double LP, Ett steg till are half crazy. It’s typically Pugh as well. Mr. G says it’s an homage to the Doo Wop ’50s style of music.

The B side of the single is a so far unreleased version of “If I Knew Then (What I Know Now)”. Per says:

It’s basically the same backing track as “Om jag vetat då” from “En händig man”, but with new vocals and no girls around this time. Forgot about it, but found it in my files.

Mr. G will perform at the tribute concert for Pugh Rogefeldt at Cirkus in Stockholm on 18th October.

I’m very proud and grateful to be involved. Pugh has meant a lot to me and my generation. I understand that everyone wants to join. He was unique, a forerunner. I learned so much about how you can stretch languages. That’s what Pugh did. I learned that there are no rules and norms to follow. He was an amazing man. It will be wonderful to pay tribute to him.

Listen to the single on any streaming site (Spotify, Deezer, YouTube)! Pre-order the 7″ vinyl edition at Bengans, Ginza or some other Scandinavian webshop! The vinyl is out on 10th November.

A video to Vandrar i ett regn is also out soon!

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!