Interview With Peter Bjorn and John

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So here I am in this small music hall in NE Portland waiting for Peter Bjorn and John to come on stage. I wasn’t sure what I was about to see. I had seen them perform on TV and Youtube, but that doesn’t really mean much, and no matter how good they looked on the screen, the fact is that they’re taking a break from their national tour with Depeche Mode to play for us in the Hawthorne District on a Tuesday, not the most inspired of nights. After a while they quietly walked on stage and performed one of the greatest shows I had ever seen. It was a wake up call to what I had been used to seeing at rock concerts. It’s rare these days to be able to see a band with this much polish and talent, so close and up front. This could have been one of those shows where they could just phone it in. After all this is a pretty small market for a band that became pop culture sensations with their hit “Young Folks” and have quite a vocal fan club of A-list celebrities including Kanye West, Drew Barrymore, The Ting Tings, and so on. Well I found out that night that Peter Bjorn and John isn’t a typical band and treated this night and all of us in the room as if we were all on the A-list. It was this same generosity and kindness that I found when I was talking with the band after the show.  It was a real pleasure to photograph the band and to be able to discuss in depth with Peter Morèn about the tour, their music (that now fills up a decade), and what the future holds for Peter Bjorn and John.

Hello, I’d like to start out by asking how the tour is going? How has touring with Depeche Mode been so far?

It’s been really good and Depeche’s fans really seem to like us. They dance and cheer!

You guys have such an extensive catalogue now, how much of the lesser-known songs get exposure on tour. Does any material from Seaside Rock get played at shows?

During the opening slots for Depeche we don’t have time to play that many songs, so we focus on “Living Thing” and a couple of older ones. At our own shows obviously the set list is more extensive and eclectic. We play some songs from our first 2, not so well-known albums and quite a few from “Writers Block”, but “Seaside Rock” is hard, since the melodies are built on weird instruments like flutes, saxophones, steel drums and violins rather than vocals. We did one show in Stockholm were we only played “Seaside Rock”, but then we invited some extra musicians and a lot of kids from a local music school, to get the right naive-feel to the set, it shouldn’t be too professional or perfect since we ourselves on the album play stuff that we really can’t master. It was a night to remember! Some people said it was the best we’d ever done, some fans left angry!

Your fourth album Seaside Rock kind of went by the wayside here in the States, but I have to say it is still one of my favorite albums of the past couple years. Were you met with any resistance with releasing what is essentially an instrumental album after the huge pop success of the previous album Writer’s Block?

Thank you! That’s nice to hear. It’s definitively one of my absolute favorites of ours as well. I think a lot of people (including our labels) got confused by that album. But for us it was really important to show everyone that only knew us from “Young Folks” that we were a weird little band that you can’t really pin-point down. We like it like that! Having said that, I think the record is very accessible, listenable, and melodic. It just doesn’t have vocals (it has whistling though!) For us it was really good to get back in the studio after all the touring with “Writers Block” and do something spontaneous and experimental without a lot of expectations. Just playing around in the studio. It also was really influential on “Living Thing”, some of the more rhythmical reggae/funk things. Also we paid tribute to our hometowns by including narratives in local Swedish dialects that not even Stockholders can understand. On “Eriks Fishing Trip” my grandfather tells a fishing tale.

Living Thing really seems to showcase each individual’s tastes and influences on each track while still feeling cohesive. I read that you guys made mix tapes for each other at the beginning of production. How did that process help set the tone?

It was really helpful to create a frame around the songs and a cohesive feeling to the record. We all write separately and then get together to arrange and produce the songs, so a lot can change and happen with a song after that first draft. We make PBJ-songs rather than just a Peter-song or John-song. But as you said we have different styles and tastes. I was worried putting together these mix cds, thinking we would all clash and want to do different records, but we all put on things that fitted well together. There was a lot of 80’s music from our childhood, like some synth (Depeche was on there! OMD too!) And mainstream acts like Paul Simon and Fleetwood Mac. So we really strayed towards something more hi-fi, sparkling champangy, retro-futuristic sci-fi and those effects they used at that time that made the music sound more glamorous. But there was also a lot of African percussion music, Brazilian 70’s pop, some rockabilly, reggae and funk and new wave and early hip-hop, and I think you can hear it all in there. It’s all about the sound and arrangement. Two of the songs we wrote during “Writers Block”. “I Want You” then sounded very much like The Shins and “It Don’t Move Me” like a mid-60’s Kinks song (like “Til The End Of The Day”), since we were in a more classic guitar pop-frame of mind then I reckon. At the same time it was the less-is-more approach of “Young Folks”, “The Chills” and “Amsterdam” that kind of set the minimalist direction for this album. They are all more drum and bass-driven than the rest of “Writers Block” and almost has no guitar. So it was just a continuation of that, which makes it weird when people say that “Living Thing” must be a chock to “Young Folks” fans, when actually its much closer to “Young Folks” then most of the “Writers Block” songs or the albums that came before. There is also a lot of guitar on “Living Thing” it’s just played in a more rhythmical, less conventional way; influenced by soul, funk and African guitar playing.

After all the years you guys have been together, the way you all communicate and collaborate between each other has to have gone through some changes. What are some of those changes and how have they changed the way you guys create?

The biggest change was when John started to write songs during “Writers Block”. That’s when the band became totally democratic. Before that, me and Bjorn wrote the songs, Bjorn produced, I sang, and John drummed. Now we all write, all sing (even though I still sing 80 %), and all produce and play all kinds of stuff. It makes for really unique music, but it can also be stressful and hard on relationships. That’s why we need our solo projects and that’s why we will hire an outside producer for our next album. But it’s great that we are not locked into a classic rock-band format. We are on stage, which is great, but in the studio it’s better to be playful and swap around instruments and ideas.

From listening to the very clever song, “Blue Period Picasso” I wondered what other mediums influenced the band’s music?

I’m glad you like it! Based on a true experience, (wink). Anything inspires us really, mostly relationships and everyday life’s pros and cons. But we all like a good art museum now and then. Movies. I used to study film earlier. Reading. Anything attached with words inspires me and makes me want to write. Walking in new places and cities. Checking out architecture. As you see, anything and everything!

Could you give us some idea of what the next couple of years hold in store for Peter Bjorn and John? Whether it is solo or group projects?

In the near future, at least 4 more shorter tours for “Living Thing” in the fall and spring, in Europe, the States and maybe Australia. Next year we will hopefully put out an ep with some great songs we started during “Living Thing” but didn’t finish, and we are talking about the next album as well. As I said, outside producer for the first time. It’s gonna be more punky, back to the power-pop roots, that’s the idea anyway, we’ll see what happens. I have a new project with some Swedish friends called Tutankamon. We will put out an album in October, but just in Scandinavia for now. I’m also working on my second solo album. It will be in Swedish, so it’s a very different project from everything else I’ve done so far, but I’m very excited by it. It sounds sometimes a bit folky, sometimes like vintage soul, Stax/Motown, very groovy! But in Swedish! I also have started to write some songs for and with other artists but nothing is released yet. Bjorn also writes for others and continues producing for other artists, like the next Lykke Li record. John has his solo project Hortlax Cobra and also plays with the very good band Holiday For Strings that have a new record coming soon I think.

Very quickly I wanted to ask you about the music videos for Living Thing. They are very unique and definitely fit the sense of humor that’s on the album. Could you give us some background on the thought process or early ideas that became these great videos?

We didn’t want to participate in the videos ourselves, and we wanted to incorporate weird dancing in all of them. “Lay It Down” is directed by our friend Sandra Fröberg and we wanted it to look like a high school disco in a basement in the 80’s, with a VHS-look to it. The creepy part is all the dancers are wearing masks of our faces with different make up and hair. That makes it both very creepy and funny. “Nothing To Worry About” was directed by Andreas Nilsson while on a trip to Tokyo. He saw these greaser-biker-gangs dancing to rockabilly in the parks during the weekend and thought it was a great idea to make a mini-documentary about them. “It Don’t Move Me” was also done by Andreas and follows Markus who is a 16-year-old Michael Jackson fan from Gothenburg, who dances like his idol. When we did the video we had no idea Michael would pass away so soon, so that’s a bit creepy. We brought Markus on stage with us for a Swedish festival and the crowd loved him.

(Peter Bjorn and John are a rock band from Stockholm Sweden. You can find out more about the band by checking out their website or Myspace)

Listen:

Peter Bjorn and John – It Don’t Move Me

Peter Bjorn and John – School of Kraut

Peter Bjorn and John – Young Folks