related items
It was the whistling heard ‘round the world. Peter Bjorn and John’s impossibly catchy “Young Folks,” with its trademark whistling refrain, catapulted the Swedish pop-rock trio to international stardom, becoming the iTunes Music Store’s number-one song of 2007, landing the band on “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and inspiring cover versions by everyone from Kanye West to James Blunt. To this day, admits Peter Moren, the trio’s primary vocalist, the song’s popularity remains a double-edged sword.
“To the mainstream audience, at least, I think the song is much more known than the band,” says the soft-spoken Moren. “But that’s OK. It opened a lot of doors for us—or all the doors.”
Still, you can’t really blame Moren and his bandmates—producer/multi-instrumentalist Bjorn Yttling and percussionist John Eriksson—for not whistling while they worked on their latest album, “Living Thing.” Instead, the trio adopted a darker, sparser aesthetic; the songs are still undeniably pop, but they’re couched now in heavy beats, synthesizers and spooky studio effects. No wonder they opened for Depeche Mode this summer, in between headlining their own U.S. tours.
Just before heading out to the Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif., Moren filled us in on PB&J’s creative recording techniques and his thoughts on a certain American sandwich.
When I first heard the new album, my first thought was: I think Peter Bjorn and John have made a hip-hop record. Was hip-hop an influence when you were creating the sound of this album?
Well, there was loads of different influences, but I guess we talked about doing something even more beat-oriented than in the past, so…sure, why not? [Laughs]
It sounds like most of the beats on the record are programmed—but in concert, John uses a full kit and electronic drum pads to play pretty much everything live. How did you record the drum tracks? Was it more of a combination of live and programmed?
It’s funny, because if you look at the sounds on the record, how we made them—they are actually 90 percent acoustic sounds. There’s almost no drum machines at all. There are maybe like one or two [electronic] sounds, but they are still played, just like John [does] live. And then the rest of the drum sounds are just acoustic things, like maybe tapping your fingers against the piano or banging an old film can or bottles. All the beats apart from acoustic drums are actually sounds like that. But we might put them together—like if you pop a balloon and rip a [piece of] paper, we might put that together as one sound, on the same beat. So that’s funny—because people think, like you, that it’s drum machines, but it’s not.
I read an interview with John in which he mentioned that you literally had a sign taped up in the studio that said, “No whistling.”
Yeah, I think so. I can’t remember, but he’s probably right. [Laughs]
Do you guys still enjoy playing “Young Folks”? Do you still play it at pretty much every show?
Yeah, we do, most of the time, unless it’s a really short show and we just want to play new songs. But it’s nice that you can do it [as] an encore…and we play around with it. We jam on it a bit and make it a bit more Curtis Mayfield. You have to have fun with it.
You put out an instrumental album last year called “Seaside Rock.” Was that sort of a transitional record—something to work on just to decompress from that crazy year of becoming this international touring act?
Yes and no. I know the label saw it as an in-between album, and obviously it’s not vocal pop songs—it’s instrumental and very eclectic, kind of chillout sometimes and avant-garde at other times. But for us it was a really important record to do, and I think it holds up really well. And it also paid tribute to our childhood and our home villages in Sweden, because we have one song each where we have the local dialect spoken—so I have a song called “Erik’s Fishing Trip” where my grandfather is talking in his native tongue, which is really hard for Swedish people to understand.
At what point did you guys find out that the initials for your band where also the nickname for a popular American sandwich? I’m assuming that was pure coincidence.
It was pure coincidence, because no one eats this over here, at all.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches aren’t big in Sweden?
No, I don’t think anywhere in Europe. But I heard about it—I mean, we watch American TV and read comics, so I heard about it. But I didn’t really think about it—maybe [we didn’t] realize it’s such a major sandwich. [Laughs]
Have you guys had a chance to try one? Do you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?
No, I don’t…I like to keep my sandwiches more salty.
