Roxette

Roxette – Listen To Your Heart played 6 million times on US radio

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BMI yesterday paid tribute to the top UK and European songwriters, composers and music publishers of the most-performed songs of the previous year with the 2020 BMI London Awards. Among others, honourees for Million-Air Awards were celebrated across BMI’s digital and social channels. To recognise their remarkable achievements, BMI created a special page on its website where fans can watch video messages, listen to award-winning songs and take a look back at the best award show moments throughout the years. Click HERE to reach the site.

American radios played Listen To Your Heart now more than 6 million times! That means more than 62 years if it were constantly played! Amazing, isn’t it?

Roxette reached their 2nd No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with LTYH on 4th November 1989. In 1998 they received an award from BMI for this song being played over 2 million times on American radio. Phil Graham of BMI said it was very unusual for a song to get over the 2 million mark in such a short space of time. In October 2006, helped by DHT’s cover, Roxette were awarded again by BMI for the song’s 3 millionth broadcast on American radio. Per and MP got the Million-Air Award for 4 million plays in 2008 and for 5 million plays in 2014.

Listen To Your Heart was covered by an American hard rock band, Through Fire and they put the song back on the US charts in March 2020. The cover spent 16 weeks on Mainstream Rock Billboard music chart and peaked at No. 32.

Congratulations to Per Gessle and Mats MP Persson for creating this wonderful song that never gets old and for reaching the 6 million mark! And of course, neverending love to Marie Fredriksson!

Thanks for the hint, Tina Engmann!

Roxette – Let Your Heart Dance With Me

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The long-awaited 2nd treat from Bag of Trix – Music from the Roxette Vaults album series is out this Friday.

A previously unreleased Roxette single, Let Your Heart Dance With Me is one of the last recordings Roxette ever did and is released almost a year after the tragic passing of lead singer Marie Fredriksson. It will be available on digital platforms on 2nd October and is to be released as a limited edition 7″ golden vinyl single in 1500 copies worldwide on 9th October.

Thanks to songwriter Per Gessle’s prolific flow of tunes, classic Swedish pop group Roxette always had a surplus of material to choose between for their albums. Many of these leftover songs were actually strong contenders for inclusion and their quality has made them loved among fans when they’ve popped up as bonus material on singles or compilations.

This was the case up until the release of Roxette’s final studio album, Good Karma, which in the summer of 2016 yielded a couple of songs that weren’t needed for the album. On of them was Let Your Heart Dance With Me, but it finally sees the light of day thanks to the Bag of Trix box set, Roxette’s magnifique collection of unreleased material. The first volume of Bag of Trix is planned to be released on 30th October.

Per says about Let Your Heart Dance With Me:

I wanted to write a classic and simple “clap your hands and stomp your feet” song, and “Let Your Heart Dance With Me” came out of it. I liked it already in the studio, but as usual we already had so many strong contenders that it had to wait for a second chance. And when the idea for this project came up, it was a given.

Gessle gave Let Your Heart Dance With Me to mixing maestro Ronny Lahti, who some two decades ago gave the Roxette album Room Service its characteristic pop shimmer. The result now is a song that radiates summer, sun and optimism, despite being recorded during a time when Marie was on her final days with Roxette due to increasing health problems following her cancer treatment a decade earlier.

Per Gessle says:

Just a couple of months before “Good Karma” was released, Marie’s doctors advised her to quit touring for good. We cancelled the Summer tour and all future commitments. But even a studio recording was demanding for her. She wanted so much, but really had to fight to get it out. And she did. Marie was a real trooper to the very end.

To celebrate this release, Mr. G will do an exclusive interview and answer fans’ questions LIVE on Roxette’s YouTube channel at 16.30 CEST on Friday, 2nd October. After that, premiere of the music video to Let Your Heart Dance With Me will happen at 17.00 CEST. Save the link to the Q&A and the music video premiere HERE and get ready with your questions!

The music video showcases Per and Marie’s close friendship and long companionship that led to the worldwide success. To quote Per:

We’ve also put together a beautiful music video for the song including private footage from the glorious past. Lots of memories and plenty of joy, hopefully not only for me but also for people interested in what Roxette is all about. Can’t wait to watch it together with you – our fans – who made it all possible.

See teasers of the music video here: 1; 2; 3.

See Per announcing the Q&A session HERE.

PRE-ORDER the limited edition single at Bengans, Ginza or check the availability with your local music stores, since it’s a worldwide release. UPDATE on 1st October: the single seems to be sold out at Bengans and Ginza. It might be available again on release day, but it’s worth trying to buy it in other stores. CDON, for example.

Tracklist

A            Let Your Heart Dance With Me
B            Help! (Abbey Road Sessions)

Press release in Swedish can be found HERE.

Let Your Heart Dance With Me

It was so easy to fall in love
It got so simple to fall in love
You know what I did?
I got excited
We were united
So delighted

It was so easy to laugh with you
It was so simple to look at you
You made it possible
By being beautiful
So incredible
Truly wonderful

Dance with me
Let your heart dance with me
Dance with me
Let your heart dance with me
Let me see you smile

I might be living in my car
I might be running near and far
When stars can’t find me
You know where I’ll be
Closed in the mystery
The love of you and me

Dance with me
Let your heart dance with me
Dance with me
Let your heart dance with me
Let me see you smile again
Let me see that smile

Words + Music by Per Gessle
© Jimmy Fun Music

Watch the premiere interview with Per Gessle HERE and the video to Let Your Heart Dance With Me HERE.

500 million views of Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love video

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It was on Valentine’s Day in 2016 when It Must Have Been Love’s official video reached 100 million views on YouTube. Now 4.5 years later we are celebrating 500 million views! Half a billion! Amazing! That’s almost 1,475,695 days (4,043 years!) of playing the video constantly.

IMHBL is definitely Roxette’s biggest hit and what a history it has! Even if Roxette’s debut album became double platinum in Sweden, it wasn’t released abroad. EMI in Germany said they should write a Christmas song, then they might get airplay on the radio. Per went home and wrote It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted). It was a big song in Sweden in 1987, but it wasn’t even released in Germany. The first video to the song was made for a Swedish chart show, Listan and was later used as a semi-official clip.

One day, after Roxette broke through in the US, they were having lunch with their record company in Los Angeles. The record label said they signed a contract for a soundtrack to a movie then called 3000 Dollars. Julia Roberts was to debut in that film and it was a comeback for Richard Gere. It was said to be a low budget movie for which they wanted Per to write a song. Roxette was travelling a lot, so Mr. G didn’t have the time to write a song, but he said he has a Christmas song that Marie sings beautifully and he can re-write the text and take away the Christmas reference in it. So Christmas day became winter’s day. Then they partly re-recorded the song and sent it to Garry Marshall, director of Pretty Woman. Per and Marie were already working on the Joyride album when they got a call in the studio in Stockholm. It was Garry Marshall himself who called Per to tell him he loved the song so much he even re-edited the movie, because he didn’t want any dialogue during the song being played. He wanted the song to speak for itself. Someone once told Per he could have won an Oscar with IMHBL, but it couldn’t have happened, because the song wasn’t originally written for the movie. Anyway, it became a big hit. Big! Huge!

Of course, the song had to get a proper video and so the second clip which became the official one was shot in a warehouse. According to Marie, shooting the video was a weird experience:

The director wanted all movements in slow motion so I had to lip sync the vocals in double speed. My first lesson in how to sing an emotional ballad Mickey Mouse style. A strange way to make a living.

It Must Have Been Love became Roxette’s 3rd US No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1990 and spent 2 weeks at that position.

Per told about IMHBL in his Songs, Sketches & Reflections book:

It Must Have Been Love was written quite early on in the Roxette career, in the spring of 1987, and probably is the first example of my being about to find my style in English. But that as well contains some grammatical oddities. ”Lay a whisper on my pillow / Leave the winter on the ground / I wake up lonely, there’s air of silence”. That last line – ”there’s air of silence” – is a questionable phrase, so when English speaking artists cover the track, they often change that very line.

During my European solo tour in 2009, I also changed the first verse to ”I wake up lonely to the silence in the bedroom, it’s all around”. But otherwise I still like most of the lyrics, and a simple line like ”it’s where the wind blows, it’s where the water flows” still sets the right feeling and temperature, I think.

I read in an English magazine that the opening line of IMHBL – ”Lay a whisper on my pillow” – was an unusually beautiful metaphor, which I of course also thought when I wrote it. But such a line is completely depending on the fact that I’m navigating in a foreign language. It would never have hit me to write a line like ”Lay a whisper on my pillow” in Swedish. But it felt completely right in English.

Per says this is Marie’s song, he wrote it for her. It was a piece of cake for Marie to sing it and she was singing it magnificently. Always. Besides the official releases in four different versions, we could hear it on so many concerts on several tours live. No one else could and no one else will ever be able to sing this song the way Marie did. This is HER ballad, one of her signature songs. When you hear it, you immediately think of Marie. And that won’t ever change.

 

Marie Fredriksson tribute on Nordic Rox #4

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A couple of days ago there was the final episode of the Marie tribute program on Nordic Rox, Sirius XM.

This time Per Gessle and Sven Lindström were back with 2 more classic tracks and Per commented on those songs. Until Mr. G joined Sven, Mr. Lindström played a Roxette beauty, A Thing About You from 2002.

The first song Per picked is from Roxette’s biggest selling album, Joyride. He chose Things Will Never Be The Same. Mr. G says it’s one of the fan favourites, it has always been very popular among the fans. Per always loved this track. It’s got that Roxette gimmick in there: Per is singing a bit and Marie is singing 80 percent of the song. It just made it sort of special and sounded like no one else. Like in Dressed For Success or Dangerous, it’s that little trick they used. TWNBTS has a Spanish guitar intro and outro. It sounded different. It has a beautiful melody and of course, amazing vocals by Marie. Sven asks Per if he remembers any special tricks in the songwriting regarding this song. Mr. G says if there are 2 singers, you can use the strengths or hide the weaknesses. They laugh. Per tells he basically wrote most of the songs for Marie’s voice, but then sometimes in the lyrics you can ask a question like ”Whatcha gonna tell your brother?” in DFS and she can answer. You can just use that you are two people, a female and a male having a dialogue in the lyric. It’s an old country trick. It makes sense in TWNBTS lyrically and it’s just a beautiful song. Sven asks Per if he remembers how he presented TWNBTS for Marie, if he played it live on an acoustic guitar or if he made a demo and sent it to her. Per thinks he made a demo in the studio. For Joyride he started making pretty advanced demos. Lots of the arrangements on that album were already there when he made the demos. Joyride for instance sounds almost the same as his demo. Songs which are sung by Marie become totally different when you record them, because you change the keys and as soon as you change the key, it sounds different. In TWNBTS they brought in the Spanish guitar part and producer Clarence Öfwerman’s trademark synthesizers are all over the place. A little drum machine is also in there. Per thinks it’s a cool track, a typical production for its era. You can hear its early ’90s sound to it. It’s very Roxette for Per. Sven says the title is perfect for the feelings we all had when Marie left us before Christmas last year.

After the song, Sven tells they are sitting in the ABBA room at Live Nation in Stockholm. Per asks him if he feels like a dancing queen. Sven replies ”not exactly” and asks Per if he feels like it. Per answers ”always”. Haha. He mentions he is looking at an old ABBA picture in the room, an old poster from the Voulez-Vous Tour when they played Gothenburg in the ’70s.

Queen Of Rain is the other song the guys are discussing. It was a single from Tourism in 1992. It was actually recorded for the Joyride album in 1990 and it was supposed to be the final track on Joyride, but then Per wrote a song called Perfect Day, which included an accordion. They thought it was fitting because it had a different sound to it, totally different to the other tracks on the album. So they used Perfect Day as the last song instead. They had a backing vocalist called Vicki Benckert who was also a great accordion player. Tourism was the tour album from the Joyride tour. Per says the album was recorded basically on the road. They booked studios in São Paulo, Copenhagen, Los Angeles. Some songs they recorded in hotel rooms. It was like a tour album, including a couple of live tracks as well, but most of it was studio recordings. The live recording of Joyride seamlessly goes over to QOR on the album. They did a video to QOR in Northern France. Per thinks it’s a beautiful song and it fits Marie perfectly. She is just a great singer and QOR sums up Marie really well for Per. Sven says they talked about her rock ’n’ roll side, but she also had this melancholy in her personality. Mr. G says Marie loved to sing songs like Queen Of Rain, Crash! Boom! Bang! or Spending My Time, telling stories. You can hear it in her voice that she becomes the song and that’s how she communicated so well to everyone who listened to her. Per thinks it’s one of his best songs if he may say so himself, but it’s Marie’s voice that brings it home. Amazing!

Waving goodbye in Kalmar 2015. Pic by Patrícia Peres

 

Thanx for the technical support to János Tóth.

Marie Fredriksson tribute on Nordic Rox #3

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A few days ago there was the 3rd episode of the Marie tribute program on Nordic Rox, Sirius XM.

Before the guys are talking about 2 classic Roxette hits, Sven plays the first track from Bag of Trix, the upcoming archives collection of unreleased recordings by Roxette. The acoustic cover of The Beatles classic, Help! was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in 1995.

Then comes a discussion about a song from 1988, from Look Sharp! album. Per says he picked this song, because for him it sums up where Roxette was standing at the time productionwise. This is a very sparse production. Clarence is just an amazing producer and he relied on and had so much belief in Marie’s vocals, so he just scrapped everything and let Marie sing. This has got a great groove to it, a great guitar hook by Jonas Isacsson and it’s just about Marie’s voice. The demo Per is singing sounds crap, but when Marie delivers the song is just amazing. It’s Sleeping Single.

Per says when they were recording Look Sharp! they felt they were doing something very different. They had great songs and every song they recorded sounded better than the other one. Paint, Dangerous, Dressed For Success, The Look, Listen To Your Heart. Every song was so cool. They went to England to record 3 songs with a different producer which they didn’t like that much, but they wound up on the album anyway. Mr. G is very grateful to Clarence, because he trusted Per’s songs and he really trusted Marie’s voice, so he just focused on making the songs as good as possible.

Sven asks Per if Sleeping Single was an obvious single candidate. Mr. G says all songs on Look Sharp! were created to become singles. Eventually, they released 4 songs off the album and Sleeping Single wasn’t one of them, because they had The Look, Dressed For Success, Dangerous and Listen To Your Heart. Sven laughs and says ”heavy competition”. Paint was a huge song in South America. It wasn’t released as a single, but got heavy airplay as an album track, so it became a big song for Roxette. Dance Away was a big song for them live. Per could have also picked that one for the program, because Marie sings so beautifully in that one as well.

In Sleeping Single they used saxophone which they never did before. It sounded really cool. Saxophone and shoulder pads. Where did the 80’s go…, Per asks.

The third song they play is from Room Service. Per thinks it’s a good album, different from the other albums. It was the last album they recorded before Marie got ill, so it also has a very special place in Mr. G’s heart. It’s got a great sound, it’s not a heavy album at all. There aren’t big ballads on it. When they do the ballads they try to keep the production low. The song Per picked is My World, My Love, My Life, the closing track of the album. Mr. G loves the guitar riff that Jonas is playing and of course loves Marie’s voice on this one. It’s a typical Roxette song, but at the same time it’s not. He thought it was maybe the best song on the album when they recorded it. It’s a great track and Marie is just shining on this one.

Sven thinks Marie sings equally as good on Room Service as she did on the bigger Roxette albums 10 years earlier. Per agrees and says if you listen to the live recordings from the Room Service tour, you can hear she was singing so well. Maybe also because of her experience as they were in their 12th year of being international artists, so of course they learned a trick or two.

Stills are from this video.

Thanx for the technical support to János Tóth.