The grand ould soap opery

Nina Persson, the voice of The Cardigans is currently fronting a new more ‘mature’ project called A Camp. Nina has just finished her first quarter century on this earth. Yet she sounds like a lady who has grasped many of the lessons that it takes the rest of us a lot longer to learn.

Her new single ‘I Can Buy You’ heralds a more sober melancholic balladeer taking the listener into her confidence, sharing secrets of loves lost and opportunities missed. Just like good old country music. A Camp is the vehicle for Nina’s more personal songs.

“When you’re writing for a group, you keep it broader and less personal,” she explains. “You must represent the whole band, with A Camp there is a lot more of me.”

The single opens with a harmonica that perfectly encompasses the sadness that Nina articulates in this new set of songs. She is quick to point out that this is not the end of The Cardigans, “merely a break.

“In fact we are just going back into the studio to begin recording some new Cardigans’ material.” Yet in conversation it is impossible to remove the story of the Cardigans’ success from the birth of A Camp. Having come from hip alternative Swedish college band to being skyrocketed to world wide fame with their appearance on the Romeo And Juliet soundtrack. Only now has she had time to reflect on her journey. Her new album is a testament to the old adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

Nina has done financially well from her music career. “I have homes here and in New York.” Yet many of her new songs are obsessed with money. On the current single ‘I Can Buy You’ for example “What’s the use of being a millionaire when I can’t have you… I can buy you but I can’t make you love me”. And on the song ‘Charlie Charlie’ she tells us “Charlie Charlie, he’s got my credit card and hasn’t been seen. He stole my heart… I don’t want the money I just want him”.

The success of The Cardigans was to cause a near implosion among the members of the group. Nina’s now taking her career and her life at a more measured pace, for example when she discusses an American release of the album she says “Horrible American record companies demand you to tour for like six months, endlessly promoting. I don’t feel I have the time to do that. I’ll see what the conditions are. It’s very draining but it’s always nice not to feel like a victim.” She will however be touring Europe. “I am going to tour with a band made up of my friends, we always come to Ireland… I am learning the harmonica parts as I don’t play them on the album.”

On the album Nina is helped out by lo-fi production supremo Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse). Nina refers to Sparklehorse as “The best she has ever heard”. The album was recorded in Woodstock, New York. “A Playground” is how Nina describes the studio as herself, Linkous and bass player Nathan Larson searched for a sound that was both gritty and emotionally raw, to which they could add an array of samples and sound effects. However on this album it was from country music that Nina suggests her biggest influence came. “I love country music,” she enthuses. “I am really inspired by it, although I never wanted the album to be intensely country. I listen to an awful lot of country music and I hope it shines through. I like a lot of the traditional older country music like Hank Williams.”

For Nina, American country music is not out of place in a Swedish record collection. She has come to expect people to assume that Abba represent a typical Swedish group. Abba were for her “Just another boy band, never typical of the music scene in Sweden”. I ask Nina to name her top five country songs of all time.

“OK, alright, I will try to think off the top of my head. There’s one Hank Williams song, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’. That’s beautiful. And I love a country artist called Melba Montgomery, she has a wonderful song called ‘No Charge’. Tammy Wynette I should say, maybe ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. Is that three? Let me see, em, em, em (silence), em, em, I don’t know. There has to be like an Emmylou Harris song (Any particular one?). There are so many I can not think. Can we leave it at three?”

And we did.

A Camp is out August 24 on Stockholm Records preceeded by the single ‘I Can Buy You’, out now