Up close and Persson-al

Back in 2003, when the reigning tastemakers were wetting themselves over that year’s models, The Cardigans made the finest album of their career and were rewarded with little more than benign indifference. Long Gone Before Daylight was a warm, troubled and compassionate record couched in twangy guitars and vaguely rustic textures.
Recorded when the band reformed after singer Nina Persson’s A Camp venture, it witnessed something of a departure from the icy Ingmar Spector scenarios of Gran Turismo. The result? You could now play The Cardigans between Big Star and Lucinda Williams without breaking the mood. Alas, the record was conspicuous by its absence from end of year polls.
Now comes Super Extra Gravity, which is very much the sequel. Recorded in the band’s native Malmo in Sweden straight after the campaign for that last album, it’s a cannily produced clamour of heavily strummed acoustic guitars, untreated bass and drums, tremolo effects and the odd lead break thrown to the boys in the band like scraps to a dog. Songs like ‘Good Morning Joan’ and ‘Holy Love’ are loaded with slow-release melodies that act as spiritual antidote to the poison of the listener’s choice. The Cardigans are nobody’s press darlings these days, but they’re a better band for it.
“For some reason we did this record really quickly, furiously, intense,” says Nina Persson. “It was the first time we’d started a new record after coming straight off tour. When we started the last record it had been years since we played together, but this time we were still warm. It was quite amazing. Our struggle was to not play quite as well as we could to make it interesting.”
Also, as Nina points out, with a few of the band having started families, there was less time for mucking around with inebriated after-hours overdubs.
“Yeah, you have to challenge your picture of artistry,” she observes. “Most people start to do it in their youth and you sort of romanticise artistry a little bit and think you have to be drunk and it has to be four in the morning in order to get the thing done. This time if we were going to do it at all it couldn’t happen like that because babies are going to have no dad. Or a drunk dad!”
Once again, the new album’s strongest asset is a selection of gorgeous tunes enhanced by Persson’s confident and confidential delivery, the voice of a sister lover who alternately chastises and soothes the listener.
“When I have my best moments with music, that’s exactly what they do for me too,” she says. “When it’s confirming that you’re not the only one in the world, that’s my ideal, it’s my hope that my music will do that for people. Whatever art you’re consuming, music tends to do that more often to me. It always feels… necessary. Movies are more cerebral, it’s not very often you feel like you’re being spoken to personally. And yet when I make records, I can’t listen to music, I get really emotional about it. I get really angry when I hear bad music, and I get super jealous and really primitively upset when I hear great music that I wish that I had done. I’m just out of a period like that, so I’m absolutely loving music again and buying new records.”
What’s she listening to?
“One of my best girlfriends lives in Copenhagen, which is not far from here, but we have this i-Pod pen-pal thing where she keeps e-mailing me songs. She just showed me that band Broadcast, and Blonde Redhead, who I haven’t listened to before.”
As a vocalist, Persson excels at the art of understatement, the emotional potency of the songs made all the more powerful by the sense of something being forcibly restrained.
“I never was naturally very good at singing, and I never really took the time to learn to sing like what is traditionally called a good singer, like Mariah Carey or whatever,” she admits, “I’m not a soul singer like that. So many people do that; it feels like that would be a waste of time for me. I’ve always been more subtle.”
And given that the most of the band members are married or in long term relationships, it’s hardly surprising that songs like the wonderfully tart ‘I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer’ or ‘And Then He Kissed Me’ Pts I and II (surely among the prettiest songs ever written about domestic abuse) take an unflinching look at all the tumultuous stuff that goes on between men and women.
“It’s not exactly what people would call a romantic view of love, I guess,” admits Nina, “it’s about romantic hopes but bleak realisations. There’s the feeling of, ‘So this is what I shaved my legs for!’ People are always saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re married and still writing about these things’, but that’s a relationship too. And again, my lyrics are not always totally autobiographical.”
So she harvests stories from her friends’ lives?
“Yeah, and I change the names. It hasn’t really happened yet that somebody has said, ‘Fuck you – it’s about me!’ ’cos I really make an effort to conceal it. But I talk about it a lot. My male friends say that I’m going on and on about it and my girlfriends love to go on and on about it with me.”
Mind you, The Cardigans were never quite as innocent as they sounded. Even ‘Lovefool’, their most radio-friendly moment, was a fairly distraught and desperate sentiment sugared with coy Crystals melodies. But as the singer acknowledges, the band’s TRL days seem to be over.
“Yeah, I feel like we often suffer in that aspect because we are no news anymore. We feel like we are doing good stuff all the time but we are old faces. We’ve been in the NME already.”
Never mind. Another five years and they’ll be saddled with that ridiculous ‘legendary’ tag.
“I know! I guess the turnover is so much quicker these days. You don’t get a whole lot of second chances. Which you can’t blame anyone for, I guess. But I am a very faithful listener. If I start liking an artist I will forgive them anything, knowing that they can do it again.”
Well, some of us bought Neil Young records throughout the 80s just waiting…
“… And waiting! And it came, didn’t it?!!”