Peter Bjorn And John - Peter Morén Interview

Peter Bjorn And John whistle their ways into your heart with “Young Folks,” the contagious single from the Swedish pop band’s latest CD, Writer’s Block. With maraca shaking, bongos, a lo-fi bass-line and a catchy whistling melody, you can’t help but join Peter Morén in his duet with guest vocalist Viktoria Bergsman of The Concretes.

“If I told you things I did before/told you how I used to be/would you go along with someone like me?” he sings in the song contemplating that time in a new relationship where you begin revealing bits about yourself. And with Bjorn Yttling (producer, bass, singing, keyboard, percussion, guitar, string arrangements), John Eriksson (drums, singing, guitar, keyboard, percussion etc.) and Morén (singing, guitars, bass, keyboard, percussion, harmonica) sharing songwriting and lead vocalist duties for the first time throughout, the rest of the record is equally catchy. Peter Morén talked to me about Writer’s Block…

“Young Folks” has everyone hooked.

“We wanted to do something a bit funky, like James Brown or E.S.G. and that’s where the bongos and everything comes from,” says Morén. “And the whistling was just an accident. It was Bjorn who didn’t have a synthesizer or something by his side and he just grabbed the microphone and tried to put down the melody with whistling. It sounded good, so we kept it. Then we tried to keep everything very sparse and not have a lot going on, which is how the whole album is…And then the lyric can be a bit of a misunderstanding because of the video with the kids and everything, but it’s not about young folks. It’s about 30-year-olds and about people having a past and having a couple of relationships. To me the song is melancholic, it’s not happy happy.”

What are major differences from PB & J’s previous records?

“We always try to do something different, moving into new things,” says Morén. “It’s maybe not always so conscious. It’s more like, ‘Let’s try this.’ And then you try things out in the studio and experiment. I think what’s different this time is that we talked it through a bit before, so we had some ideas that we wanted to try out. And one of the most important ones was that the drums were more arranged. We try to use the same drum pattern throughout the song. So it’s not so much that you play along with the song, you just kind of play. And also we didn’t use cymbals. We just used cymbals as overdub…Then we said that if you use an instrument or an overdub on one song you have to use it on at least two others to get a unity of the sound because the songs are very different. So we tried to tie it together with the sounds more than the songs. Also we wouldn’t allow any outside musicians—no brass or strings. We just wanted to keep it simple─only things that we could play ourselves.”

Will you talk about one of your favorite songs?

“I’ll pick the first one, ‘Objects of My Affection,’ because that’s one of the songs that I wrote,” says Morén. “Some of the songs we wrote together. Some of the songs we did separately. That was one that I did the whole thing. Of course a lot of the songs are very personal, but that is kind of a resume of the theme of the album. You grow older and you come to a new place and you like it. You like to mature and you feel that it’s a positive thing to move on. So it’s kind of anti-nostalgic. I think that’s how the album is. It’s about not being overtly happy in a naïve clichéd way, but just liking things as they are and taking problems as they come along and not weeping too much about them.”

Watch Peter Bjorn And John perform "Young Folks."



And "Objects of My Affection."



And "Let's Call It Off."



Interview originally published in The Aquarian Weekly.