Peter Bjorn and John —Morén, Yttling, and Eriksson, respectively— are a trio from Stockholm best known for their worldwide hit single "Young Folks." With their members having worked with acts like The Concretes, Taken By Trees, Lykke Li, and the Shout Out Louds, PB&J are lynchpins of the Swedish pop scene. John Eriksson answered questions on the release of their fifth LP, Living Thing.
Interview: 3 April 2009
From the beginning of the band, what's been the PB&J MO?
“From day one, we’ve just wanted to create classic pop-songs that we hope can live forever. Our style has changed, though, and that’s a good thing. We listen to a lot of music, and we don’t want to be frightened to discover new things. That makes you can the way you want things to sound. That’s the good thing about albums. It’s like when you start a new job, or meet a new person, you can start fresh, almost be someone else. I think it’s nice to change from album to album: the way you work, the way you’re sounding, you’re thinking, feeling.”
Did you feel a weight of expectation after the success of Writer's Block?
“Yeah, it was a big step. Writer's Block was the first time people really cared about us at all. Before that, we’d only ever played in Sweden and Norway; after that, we toured all over the world, didn’t stop for one-and-a-half years. We wanted to do something totally different after that, so we did an instrumental album, Seaside Rock. That was really necessary, really important step.”
Really? Lots of people don’t regard Seaside Rock as a ‘real’ PB&J album.
“Absolutely it is. Maybe it’s the most important for us in the band. Because it brought us more together than ever. With that album, we worked as close as humanly possible, like we slammed our heads together and fused our brains. But, record companies didn’t care about it, and it was only released on vinyl, and we didn’t do many interviews about it, so, I know that that makes it an ‘in-between’ record. But not for us.”
Why make an instrumental album?
“Maybe we were tired of singing. We’d talked about it for many years, but were waiting for the right time to do it. We thought of it as going back to our roots; it’s like Swedish folk-music meets some kind of f**ked-up Beach Boys music. It’s sort of a tribute to our old hometowns, where we grew up, and the way we played music in grade-school. You know, when you started learning recorder, or clarinet, or saxophone, and you sounded like a pig getting killed. We wanted to explore that period of our lives.”
Did you always want to be a musician?
“Absolutely. Me and Bjorn did the same things as kid: making our own songs on home cassette recorders. It was like it was only possible that we'd end up making music for a living. But, it took us a while to get to the point where we made any money at all. That only happened with Writer’s Block.”
Did you grow tired of playing those same Writer’s Block songs over and over?
“No, actually not. Maybe that time will come. It’s interesting: when you play a song 200 times, it goes in waves. Suddenly, it can be a nauseating thing to play a song, or just a total bore. But, then, 20 gigs later, suddenly it's this exciting thing; you get so lost in the song that you’re not even thinking when you’re playing it. We looked at it like this: plenty of other bands never get the opportunity to play this many gigs, so how can we complain about it?”
Was it ever frustrating being treated as a one-hit wonder?
“No, because if people hadn’t heard that song, we wouldn’t be known by them at all. We thought of it as our business card. Or like a lucky star in a computer game: it gave us an extra life, and it was up to us to do something with it. We never started to resent "Young Folks," because we love that song. It’s a great business card to have.”
How do you feel about Living Thing?
“I think we’ve managed to create a spooky, strange atmosphere. I think maybe we drank something strange, or ate some old cheese, but something happened along the way. I think we surprised ourselves with how dark it sounds.”
How did you think it would sound?
“We definitely wanted it be minimalistic. We burnt a reference CD of songs that could fill us with possibilities, and most of it was kind of sparse. The CD goes: Nina Simone, "Sea Lion Woman." That’s like hi-hat, handclaps, flute, vocals. Alexander Robotnick, "Dark Side of the Spoon." That’s one chord progression for an entire song. Young Marble Giants, we love them, their sense of minimalism. Suicide, "Dream Baby Dream," that’s just one repeating motif, this mix of electronic and acoustic sound that just makes the music vibrate. There was also some old-school hip-hop, African folk-music, tropicalia, house music. Anything where there’s a sense of simplicity. It’s good to recreate this idea of what a song can be. You can make a song out of just one beat, a bassline, and some lyrics. We tried really hard to have the songs contain less information.”
Did you have a similar kind of ‘framework’ in place when you were starting, things you wanted to use as models?
“No, when we were beginning we were far too scared to ever use anybody else’s music as a reference. We wanted to go into the studio and find our own identity, our own sound, discover what happens when the three of us get together. We didn’t think about other bands, just about us guys.”
Frida Hyvönen has an amazing song called “Scandinavian Blonde,” about how the rest of the world, especially Americans, can reduce you to a Swedish cliché. Did you experience any of that?
“We got asked about Sweden in every single interview, but there was none of that Ikea and ABBA stuff. It was more like we were treated as ambassadors of the Swedish music scene, talking about all these bands coming out of Sweden. I can see why people are curious: we have so much amazing pop-music coming out of such a small country. I think, in interviews, you can talk about whatever you want. If you have a bad interview, you only have yourself to blame. You have to try and surprise yourself, try to find a better answer for each question each time it’s asked. We did so many interviews, we had to work really hard at that. We should be given a Nobel prize for interview answers.”
