December 6th, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 7 ’Postcard 45’ for Chris. This was a song I wrote as a letter to myself five years into the future, in december 2015, during my Postcards project. I’ve been feeling a bit weird about revisiting this time of my life which wasn’t a very happy time, but when Chris requested it I decided it was time to answer myself. It felt like a good way to end this week. Thank you to everyone who participated and requested songs. Remember to be kind to yourselves. |
December 5th, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 6 My studio is underneath a skate bowl, sometimes when the skaters have gone home I like to sit in the bowl and sing, the acoustics are pretty nice there. This was ’Kanske Är Jag Kär i Dig’ for Megan in Texas. |
December 4th, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 5 ’The World Moves On’ for two cool Belgians (lots of technical problems today so I didn’t get the whole song). Happy friday everyone! |
December 3rd, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 4 ’An Argument With Myself’ for Rebecca in Australia. Also played in Poland, Bulgaria, UK and Sweden. Also played for someone who claimed he was in Antarctica, but I don’t know… at one point I swore I heard a train passing by in the background, there’s no trains in Antarctica, right? |
December 2nd, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 3 ’Do You Remember the Riots?’ played for Muniba in Pakistan. Also played in Paraguay, Austria, Sweden and USA. World tour 2020! |
December 1st, 2020
HERE THERE JUKEBOX DAY 2 ’A Man Walks Into a Bar’ played for Bonnie in Hongkong. I love when you request songs I don’t usually play so if you’re picked for one of the upcoming sessions, please go ahead and challenge me! |
November 30th, 2020
JUKEBOX DAY 1 Today's the first day of my Jukebox Zoom concerts where I, like a human jukebox, play the songs you've requested. Sign up here! This was 'Become Someone Else's' for Julieanna in Taiwan. Also played for Italians, Detroiters, Idahoers, Amsterdammers, and New Jerseyites. |
September 3rd, 2020
The comedian Steven Wright has a joke that goes “When I was a little kid I wished the first word I’d said was the word quote so that right before I died I could say unquote”. I think about this joke a lot. I wish everything I had said had been recorded, written down, inserted between quotation marks and cataloged so I could go back and see what I was talking about on a random day in my life. I wish I’d had a black box recorder or a personal stenographer for my mouth, cataloguing my verbal output since 1981. So much meaningless gibberish has sadly been lost forever. If only the technology had been available. If only a major linguistic study had been performed on me as a child. But now the technology is available - you can download a stenographer app for two bucks - so the people who are born today won’t have to miss out on a complete manuscript of their lives like I did. Your phone is already recording everything we say so let's skip the legal nonsense and just jump right into it. Ethically it might be problematic to record and store everything a child says before they are old enough to consent but they will thank you down the line when they're in therapy trying to remember their childhood. Just imagine, being able to go back to when you were 2 or 9 or 15 or 23 or 32 and see what you were saying. To just pick a day and a time randomly and see what came out of your mouth. The guttural sounds you made before you were able to articulate words. The intricate topics discussed with an imaginary friend at kindergarten. Your insecure teenage s-s-s-stuttering. Drunk quasi philosophical discussions on a night out with your uni friends in your early twenties. The amount of information the tech companies have on us is terrifying. But when Facebook made it possible for the public to download ”everything” they knew about us I didn’t hesitate. I wanted to get a glimpse of myself in my clicks, pokes, likes and ad keywords. Most of it was meaningless information, but some exposed a little bit of who I was subconsciously (Ad keywords: sweatpants, rain season, axes, surrealism, Mariah Carey, running shoes, death). Whatsapp offered a way of downloading an entire chat. At the end of my last relationship I downloaded the entire chat history of me and my ex partner, to get a glimpse of who I was in that relationship. I read it like a novel. The story of me and her. We publish famous peoples diaries and correspondence after they die, why not expand it to ”The Complete Uttered Words by…” , ”The Entire Chat History From…” , ”The Complete Email Accounts Of…” or… once we are able to scan brains - ”The Collected (Actual) Thoughts Of…” Imagine the magnitude of something like this. If you live until 80 it’d be roughly 30.000 days. That’s 30.000 days of you talking to yourself, to friends, family, lovers, bus drivers, teachers, pets. But also imagine the final work. In a printed format it would take up at least a whole bookshelf, a whole wall, maybe a whole library (depending on how talkative you were). Imagine someone taking out a book from that bookshelf, riffling through the pages only to end up on a sensitive moment, the first 'I love you' of a new romance, a phone call from a doctor breaking bad news, a major shift in the life narrative. Imagine devoted followers, who take it as a challenge to scan the books to find the good bits, to explore the subconscious wisdom of a life lived. Imagine people saying things like “you can skip books 36-92, but books 93-97 are fucking gold, man”. Imagine the really devoted followers who decide to use the books as a script for their own life, playing out your life day by day, following the dialogue as if they are actors in a play with the length of an actual life. And since these books would only contain the words of one person, imagine these followers crosschecking the words with another persons life script / mouth library, to discover the other side of a delicate dialogue. Imagine these followers reading this dialogue aloud to each other. Imagine people deciding in their early 20’s whose life script they shall live by. Imagine them at 39 realizing they should’ve chosen someone else. ”I thought he had an interesting life but most of the day he just talks to himself. He mumbles lyrics to songs that he never finishes, articulates words to see if they rhyme. ”Si-mi-luh… Ca-me-ruh…”. The guy didn’t seem to be very social. He talks in his sleep too. I have to set an alarm to get up at 3am to mumble about ”getting the cat out of the oven”. |
August 28th, 2020
It’s strange to see the situation in Belarus developing at the moment. I was in Minsk about a year ago, to represent Sweden musically in a diplomatic handshake between the two countries. To establish connections, build bridges, be the butter on the toast. I remember it as a quiet and beautiful city, at least on the surface. The event took up all of Freedom Square, the same square where the protests are now. People were dressed up as mooses, young Belarusians danced in yellow and blue shirts, a Swedish choir sang the national anthem and people played Kubb, a typical Swedish outdoor game. It was a family event arranged by the Swedish Embassy and the Swedish Institute, featuring me and Eurovision winner Loreen among others. A strange situation for me to be in honestly. It was mid afternoon and the sun was high when we went on stage, usually my worst kind of show but we were welcomed by a small but enthusiastic crowd, old grandmas clapping along and at the front: excited fans who were dancing and singing. The show turned out to be really fun. Afterwards I signed T-shirts and snapped selfies with the nicest bunch of fans I’ve ever met. We got recommendations for what to do and offers to take us on guided tours. Some had traveled all the way from Ukraine. I tried to grasp Belarus. I had three days there to learn what the place and it’s people are about outside of the negative and depressing things the country has been associated with in the news. Lukashenko’s dictatorship, the dark history of being invaded and wiped out, bombed and burned down over the centuries. Before I went there I read Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s ’The Unwomanly Face of War’ and ‘Prayer for Chernobyl’ the latter being the basis for the popular TV series Chernobyl that came out around the same time. That show had apparently really made an impression on some visitors, for better or for worse. An italian man at the hotel breakfast kept asking the hotel staff if they could assure him the apples weren’t radioactive. Maybe they had a Geiger counter he could borrow? We had a Belarusian guide called Yan who was really nice. Early on he pointed out the house where Svetlana Alexievich lived. A big apartment complex in the city center, impossible to miss due to it’s size. As we spent our days walking around the city, the house became a navigation point. We found ourselves asking “is it east or west of Svetlana?”. I asked Yan if he could take us to a record store, because as a musician I find that understanding a culture is best done through it’s music history. The store was amazing, I’d never heard of a single record. I understood most of the styles - Belarusian pop, Belarusian heavy metal, Belarusian jazz etc, but it was like a parallel dimension where the same musical history had taken place but with different names and faces. Like an underground ocean where species have been isolated to evolve on their own. I bought some nice records, including the first album by Belarusian folk rock band Pesniary. Another way I like to understand a culture is by asking people I meet to tell me a joke. The first joke someone told me in Minsk I did not understand at all. It was about a man who’s lost in the woods, he calls out for help and a bear appears. The bear asks ”can I help you?” and the man says ”I’m lost”. The bear says ”so am I”. That’s not a joke?! It’s a heartbreaking, surreal scenario, almost poetic. A man and a bear, both lost in the woods, maybe finding consolation in each others company? I liked it. Maybe it represents something in Belarus, something I don’t know about. The second joke I understood, but it took a while: ”A pessimist walks down the street in Minsk Behind him walks two optimists in civilian clothes”. The Belarusian language is a complex and controversial issue. I can’t say I was able to fully understand what status it held. A minority of the population speak it actively, mostly outside of the cities, while Russian is the dominant language. I learned a few phrases in Belarusian to use on stage and some people I spoke to said ”why?” or ”don’t”. It worried me because in some countries language can be connected to an unpleasant kind of nationalism. It’s hard to understand the symbolism of it from the outside. At the same time, it seems to be associated with the political opposition and from what I remember from my half year of linguistic studies 20 years ago, linguistic oppression is an effective weapon. To make someone feel worthless you can start by telling them their language is worthless. I talked to a linguist friend in Melbourne who said that for a lot of indigenous people in Australia who have been completely dispossessed of their language, the records that exist (even if it's just a few poorly spelled words in some colonist's diary) can have a huge significance and offer a spiritual connection to their past. Or bring up trauma. Someone in Minsk told me about Victor Martinovich’s dystopian novel ’Mova’, in which the Belarusian language has become an illegal drug in a near future. People smuggle phrases in from Poland, written down on small pieces of paper. When you read them you get high. I hesitated before I went to Minsk. Just like I’ve hesitated every time I’ve been invited to a country with a more or less repressive government. There’s always a risk that your presence validates the rulers, that you become part of the propaganda. I’m a tiny artist but it still sucks to become a pawn. Laibach in North Korea worked because they used the same aesthetics as the regime. Their style and language made them fit in but also prevented them from being used as propaganda. If anything, the joke was on Kim Jong-un. Paul Simon’s ’Graceland’ was made in South Africa during apartheid. Other artists criticized him for it but Graceland ultimately opened doors, showcasing the work of black South African musicians. Generally I’m against cultural boycotts, it might be one thing if your music constitutes a profitable industry but music is most often the tiny drops of water that hollows out the stone. Sweden is usually at the forefront of this cultural combat but we use the softest of Soft Power to infiltrate repressive nations. Our trenches are filled with fluff. Harmless pop music, ”latte dads” and cheap furniture. An IKEA assembled Trojan Horse filled with democracy and LGBT rights. What happens if Lukashenko falls is hard to say. Russia might interfere but Putin doesn’t seem to have the same interest in Belarus as he did for parts of Ukraine in 2014, and he doesn’t seem to have much love for Lukashenko. Either way, it might not make much of a difference. What I saw in Minsk were people who despite the government bravely went their own way, finding ways to get around, like they didn’t have time for this bullshit anymore. I saw a burgeoning art scene, talked to political activists and met some great musicians and a lot of them rolled their eyes at the mentioning of the president. I stood in front of a building that had a huge Soviet style wall sculpture, underneath a KFC, and outside - a teenage girl with a guitar amp playing punk songs. A chaos of history moving in all directions. This stone was hollowed out a long time ago and only one person didn't get the message. |
August 12th, 2020
Earlier this year, before this pandemic, I spent my 39th birthday at the Swedish Grammy Awards. Despite having been nominated a few times since 2004 I’ve never set my foot there. But my therapist thought it’d be a good idea, she said that even if it is a ”horrible industry circle jerk” (my words) I need to take my profession seriously and go network. And Annika, who I was nominated with for our project Correspondence, said she usually had a fun time there. ”You just get drunk and then all of a sudden you're hanging out with Per Gessle from Roxette”. It’s weird that we were nominated. For Correspondence, this obscure project that was barely even an album, just a website that we continuously uploaded songs to. And since the other nominees were much bigger artists than us I relaxed and thought of this as a field trip. There wasn’t a risk that we would win anyway. I didn’t prepare any speech. We started at a preparty at Sony Music’s headquarter where Annika’s label, the very sweet people at Razzia, also have their office. I immediately started talking to a nice guy in a leather jacket who turned out to be the drummer in a very successful band in Sweden, one that’s been selling out arenas for decades. After the band had thrown in the towel a few years ago, he had gone back to working in a prison, like he did before he joined the band. He talked about people he worked with, sometimes heavy criminals, murderers, and how they sometimes figured out who he was and confessed that they were fans. It was humbling to hear him tell this story, to hear him say that he chose this over continuing to struggle in the music business. But it also surprised me, that someone who had played in one of the most successful bands ever, thought that continuing in music was a struggle. We got in a bus to go to the awards. I thought about how much things have changed since I watched it on TV as a teenager. I remember the band Popsicle in the 90’s saying in their speech that they wished the band Arvingarna would die in a bus accident. And that was because they simply disliked their music. No one gets upset over music these days. We might get upset over something an artist has said or done in an interview or in their personal life. But music itself seems to have become as explosive as a wet firecracker. I look up and realize that Arvingarna are seated two seats ahead of me. And we’re on a bus. At arrival, the dreaded red carpet looms ahead. I’ve never been on a red carpet. I stand in line to face the horror when Annika taps me on the shoulder and says ”do you actually want to go there?” while she nods towards the actual entrance where mountains of champagne and zero photographers await us. The red carpet turns out to be optional. I’m at drink # 4 when we reach our table which is filled to the brim with bottles. At the back of the seats are the names of the people we’re seated with. Fricky and Cleo, two mellow rappers from the north, Sophie Zelmani, a popular singer who’s been in the biz for decades and folk singer Sofia Karlsson. They’re all super nice. On the chair next to mine it says Daniel Ek. I feel my pulse get quicker and my fist clenches instinctively to a fork. But it’s not the CEO of Spotify, just one of Sofia Karlsson's collaborators. A common name in Sweden. As the show starts I think back on when I was nominated the first time, in 2004. I was nominated in three categories and it took me by surprise because I hadn’t realized my record label had sent in my album. The artist Mattias Alkberg was equally surprised and boycotted the award that year after finding out his label had applied without telling him. He felt that the awards represented an imperialistic industry and that he was used as an alibi. For a brief moment the importance of the Grammy Awards was questioned and in hindsight I kinda regret not boycotting it too because I was at a point then where I actually could’ve made a tiny impact. It bothers me how much this award is used to bolster an artists importance in media, both domestically and internationally, since it’s almost always the same mainstream major label artists who win. But I felt like I didn’t know all the facts and I would just look dumb. I still feel like that. As I’m writing down my thoughts here I realise how complicated all this is. Because by questioning it you’re questioning all the other artists who are involved. And you risk sounding like a snob, like someone who can afford to not whore yourself out. The whoring out has become a sign of authenticity these days. Back then things were so different, it felt like anything was possible. The major labels were on their knees. The Swedish torrent index The Pirate Bay were openly mocking any lawyer who threatened them by suggesting various objects they could insert into their rectums. The internet with all it’s possibilities and freedom was set to change everything and create a wonderful anarchic universe. I didn’t care if people downloaded my music for free, I was just happy to be part of this future where everything was available and allowed. And slowly it started to seem ridiculous that music should cost anything at all. Then things escalated quickly. The MPAA and RIAA threatened the Swedish government with sanctions who in turn brought The Pirate Bay into court. And in the meantime tech and energy drink companies saw their chance and offered a much too simple answer to a very complex question. In a way I feel responsible for creating the monster we live with now. Free was never the answer. Things have changed in many ways since then. I think of Annika’s song 'Dian Fossey' where she sings about going to the Grammy's, how she felt like Dian Fossey, the famous primatologist who studied gorillas by becoming one of their flock. She sings ”Drunk girls won prizes, ten years ago it was drunk guys”. There’s definitely more diversity now. Someone even mentions this in his speech and everyone applauds. The diversity at the awards is uplifting but within this room, within this context, when everything’s for sale, it feels a bit like a wrinkled, deflated balloon. It’s like we’ve been fighting for equal rights to be screwed over by Spotify. Time rolls by so slowly. This is a lot more boring than I thought it’d be. And I’m surprised at how everyone else around me also seem bored. When there’s half left and we’ve already lost in our category, I start checking my emails on my phone. I look around me and see I’m not the only one. The camera crews move over to other tables at the front where there’s more industry people who are still in a good mood. During a break a guy comes out and tells the crowd to please clap more when the nominees are presented and reminds us that if our speeches are too long we will be interrupted by ’Je T’aime Moi Non Plus’ played loud over the speakers, drowning out our words and then we’ll be escorted off stage. When one of the bigwigs from Spotify comes out on stage I think: We're in The Hunger Games! Every time something has threatened the status quo we’ve been made to feel like our colleagues or fans are the enemies: The fans are downloading our music illegally! Our colleagues are badmouthing us for trying to make a living! When a debate about Red Bull’s influence over the music scene lit up a few years ago, in the light of their CEO’s support of Trump and anti immigration politics, we were made to feel like we were shaming each other when the criticism really was aimed at those who capitalize on our art. The music industry very much resembles the world at large in this sense and the way workers are turned against each other rather than against the people in power. The Spotify top shot is right there. We could pick up our beetroot tartar that we’ve been served and throw it at him. And yet we continue this meaningless battle between our respective districts. There’s a brilliant BBC documentary by Jeremy Deller called ’Everybody In The Place’ which documents the UK acid house culture in the late 80’s / early 90’s and how that scene reflected the changing society. One part of this documentary that spoke to me was about how the ravers ditched not only major labels and distributors but also conventional venues and found their own spaces (woods, fields etc), even bringing their own sound systems. Essentially they took over the entire means of production. It made me think about how liberating and exciting it was, when I started making music, to find a direct channel between my song and the listener's ear. Having my own studio - my dad’s old PC, my own platform - my website, selling my own records and distributing my own mp3’s. It felt meaningful. Jeremy brings up Marx’s thoughts on alienation, that originally concerned factory workers and how making things they had no connection with made them alienated from their work and ultimately from society and other human beings. Everyone now has the possibility to record music and release it, but in order to reach out and make money from it you need to pay a toll to Spotify, our almighty gatekeeper. Or ask for money from Red Bull, our rich racist uncle. We make ”content”, for corporations so they can sell ads or fizzy battery acid drinks to teenagers. That’s where the alienation comes from. That’s why music feels like a wet firecracker right now. Ironically, when I look up ’Everybody In The Place’ to quote it, I find that it’s now presented by Gucci. It’s hard to see a way out of this, it makes me think of what the late Mark Fisher called ’capitalist realism’. We’ve lost the ability to imagine something different. Spotify and the other streaming giants with their near monopoly make it seem impossible. How can anything compete with a service that offers EVERYTHING for the cost of two cappuccinos? Now that we have this, why would anyone want anything different? What would that even be? Maybe we simply need to make music completely worthless. To the point that even venture capitalists and corporations lose interest and leave the sinking ship. A sort of "scorched earth policy" for music distribution, like the Russians throughout history burned down their own villages to prevent the invading enemy from using their resources. Note that I'm not saying free here, music has essentially been free for over a decade. I'm saying worthless. Something you can't even give away. And then we could start over. Maybe then we could make an artist owned streaming service. Or make music part of our cultural commons, like a public library. Either way, once we've destroyed and resurrected music we need to start paying for it one way or another. That's how music stops being "content". That's how we, ourselves, stop being "content". At the end of the night me and Annika went to the afterparty but I turned around in the door. I was tired and I just wanted to go buy some chips and eat them in my hotel bed. But before I went I confessed to Annika that I did have a short short speech, just in case there would be a glitch in the machinery and we’d win. This is what I would’ve said: Thank you Annika for making this strange album with me on our own premises, on our own platform. Thank you for staying true with me. May the odds be ever in our favour. |
April 17th, 2020
This pandemic evolved faster than I could write. I’ve been trying to write something here over the last weeks but every time I wrote something the world turned around like an elephant in an antique store and I had to start over. I started worrying as soon as I heard the first reports back in january because I remember when I caught the swineflue on tour 2009 and I remember every flue, cold and chest infection that’s passed through this body on the road. Touring is like playing virus bingo with your immune system. And you can never call in sick because there are never any margins. So when the tour was canceled it was almost a relief, in the weeks leading up to the decision things were looking so dark. I’m glad I’m not in a tour bus right now, pouring hand sanitizer over myself and worrying about every little sniffle. And it could be worse for me. I feel like I’ve been setting myself up for a crisis like this for the last five years, working up a personal buffer, cutting down my expenses, prepping internally and externally. Now I’m a TARDIGRADE in space, curled up into a little ball. I will survive radiation, extreme cold, the vacuum of space, corona viruses and financial instability. Just bring it on. It also makes it easier that we’re all in the same boat. That all tours have been canceled, that I’m not the only one who’s lost my income. I read something the other week about an incel guy who had stopped being an incel because he had found a girlfriend. The interviewer asked: ”So how long have you been together?” and he said ”actually she dumped me after two months”. But it was being dumped that made him stop being an incel, because he understood that he was going through something universal, that even though he was hurting it was also somehow beautiful, he was now part of a universal suffering, he was part of humanity. The social distancing is tough however. I thought I was an introvert but turns out I’m an extreme extrovert? I didn’t know how much I needed my friends and family until I couldn’t see them anymore. And I heard this story over and over when I did the Skype gigs three weeks ago, people who at first had posted about how they had always done ”social distancing” but after just a week felt completely socially starved. I think that says something about how subtle socialising can be. How much that awkward small talk by the microwave in the lunch room can mean. We need each other, apparently. Speaking of isolation and social distancing, I am thankful I wasn’t on a cargo ship on the Atlantic Ocean back in march when this erupted. I was supposed to be. When I started planning the US tour I had a vision of making it an experiment in touring more sustainably. The original idea of playing with local youth orchestras fitted in with this concept, I wouldn’t need to bring a big band and that would give us a much smaller carbon footprint. I also wanted to travel to the US by cargo ship, consider that a writing retreat, arrive without jetlag, ten new songs and a fresh soul. I imagined me and my touring partner Eddy Kwon travelling by train, like Greta Thunberg disciples, spreading the gospel. Instead I realised quickly that the US train system wouldn’t take us far, that we needed a van to transport the equipment and that the few electric vans out there aren’t suitable for the long distances of touring. Naive of me perhaps, but dreams need to be dreamed. I kept researching cargo ships at least until I found a ship that seemed ok and would get me to the east coast in time. Cargo ships are much worse than airplanes but they don’t rely on me as a passenger and so I thought of it as piggybackriding on the problem. But just when I was going to book the ticket I found out that they didn’t accept my visa type. The visa I have to apply for as an artist, the O1 ”Alien with extraordinary abilities”, was no good to board a cargo ship with. That was almost a year of research. And this wasn’t the first time it happened, the same thing happened last year when I had spent weeks trying to find a way of getting to Belarus without flying. In the end it turned out different rules applied to arriving by air or by ground and this meant I had to fly. We’ve arranged our world around airports, getting around them is more or less impossible. It made me depressed. Who am I kidding anyway? Going on tour will always leave a footprint, the only way to not leave a footprint would be to stay at home and maybe play acoustic shows in the woods. These are the questions that I end up asking myself: Do I need to tour? Do I even need to make music? Shouldn’t I be devoting my time to something more useful, something that would benefit humanity in the climate crisis? Ironically the choice was made for me and here I am now. An alien with extraordinary abilities in a crashed spaceship. Sometimes I feel like when I’m writing about the climate crisis it’s like writing the saddest love song. That song that usually goes something like ”Baby, I can change, we can make this work, just give me one more chance”. It’s a sad song because that song is always about how we can’t change, we can’t make it work and we won’t be given one more chance. It’s that kinda sad love song it feels like we’ve been living in. Until now. Covid-19 comes across as some kind of unexpected interlude. An instrumental, atonal cacophony. A drummer who plays the wrong time signature bringing the song to a sudden halt. Suddenly it feels like this song isn’t finished yet. We’re in the midst of writing it. Yes, it could go either way, the depression we’re likely headed into might not in itself be a good soil for hope, but Covid-19 passes through the world like barium liquid, outlining and illuminating how we’re connected and where we’re broken. The first thing that was banned, when being connected became a bad thing, was concerts. It made me proud and hopeful to be a musician. It reminded me of how meaningful music actually is, how it unites us. I clean up my computer desktop which is a mess after the tour, filled with itineraries, song ideas and music sheets for the players, and I watch the rehearsal clips from the youth orchestras that I was going to play with. Today I would’ve played in Brooklyn, NY. It sucks to think of that. But watching this clip from Orchestrating Dreams in NYC makes me hopeful. Just listen to that sound, that’s the future right there. That’s how this song should go. |
March 29th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 7. For Paloma in Berlin |
March 28th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 6. For Maeve in Seattle |
March 27th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 5 For Luke and his friends in Darwin, Australia Quarantine Songs Day 5. For Kiki in Wellington, NZ. |
March 26th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 4. For Eduardo and Alex in Spain. |
March 25th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 3. For Bria, in Victoria BC, Canada. |
March 24th, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 2. For Joanna (and her mom), in Birmingham, UK. |
March 23rd, 2020
Quarantine Songs Day 1. For Andrea, in Santiago, Chile. |
March 18th, 2020
 QUARANTINE SONGS Hello everyone, hope you're ok. Since my tour got cancelled and since we're all more or less isolated right now during this pandemic I will be offering personal shows over Skype during the week of march 23-29. For one hour each day I will randomly be calling those who have signed up and play one song of my own choice, then move on to the next. Sign up here! Stay strong, world! |
March 13th, 2020
 It is with a heavy heart that I have to inform you that my upcoming tour featuring Eddy Kwon and youth orchestras across the USA is cancelled due to the current pandemic. This was a very tough decision to make, we’ve been monitoring the Covid-19 situation since it started but now it’s reached a point where the only reasonable and responsible decision is to cancel. We want to protect fans, reduce social density, and work together to slow this pandemic down enough to allow healthcare infrastructure to handle needs within its capacity. Me and Eddy Kwon have been working on this tour full time for a whole year together with the orchestras and we’re hoping to do this another time. It’s not an easy tour to postpone with so many people involved, but I’m confident that we can make it happen, if not this year then hopefully next. All tickets can be refunded where you bought them. Please remember that your local venues, musicians and artists will be hit hard by this crisis, support them in any way you can. And if you are able, please consider supporting your local youth orchestra organization, as the cancellation of this tour impacts them as well. We’ve compiled a link for you here. Much love and many elbow bumps. Jens |
February 11th, 2020
 I’m coming to the USA this spring to perform my songs with YOUTH ORCHESTRAS across the country! Between mid april and late may I will be on the road playing with young local string players (and a few wind players) from roughly nine cities, as well as doing a string of extra shows (without orchestras) inbetween. Here are the dates (more to be added soon). April 14 - Providence, RI - Fete Lounge (with Community MusicWorks) April 15 - New Haven, CT - Space Ballroom April 17 - Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg (with Orchestrating Dreams: American Youth Orchestra) April 19 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer April 22 - Washington, DC - Lincoln Theatre (with DC Youth Orchestra Program) April 24 - Raleigh, NC - Kings (with Kidznotes) April 26 - Cincinnati, OH - This Time Tomorrow Festival at Contemporary Arts Center (with MYCincinnati) April 28 - Chicago, IL - Thalia Hall (with Chicago Metamorphosis Orchestra) April 29 - Milwaukee, WI - The Backroom @ Colectivo April 30 - Minneapolis, MN - The Cedar Cultural Center May 4 - Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater (with Bravo Youth Orchestras) May 5 - Seattle, WA - Neumos May 7 - San Francisco, CA - Great American Music Hall May 9 - Los Angeles, CA - Aratani Theater (with YOLA) May 11 - Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom May 14 - Austin, TX - Antone's Nightclub (with Austin Soundwaves) May 15 - Dallas, TX - Blue Light May 17 - Nashville, TN - The Basement East May 18 - Columbus, OH - The Basement Tickets are released this friday at 10am, your local venue’s timezone. The idea for this started in 2015 when I was invited to Cincinnati to perform a show with a group of young string players from the organisation MYCincinnati. The show ended up being one of the most memorable moments of my whole career. I’ve always been drawn to the energy and playfulness that is present when a young person is still exploring and mastering music. Wether that energy and playfulness results in punk, hiphop or classical music doesn’t matter, it’s always there. As someone who’s been playing more or less professionally for over 15 years I often have to go back to this youthful source to remember and learn. To let the students become my teachers. I kept dreaming of playing with MYCincinnati again and after talking to their teacher Eddy Kwon we came up with the idea of expanding it to a US tour, playing with local El Sistema inspired youth orchestras in every corner of the USA. From New York to California, Illinois to Texas. After a whole year of planning, me and Eddy are finally ready to announce this tour. I’m not sure what I can say apart from that you really don’t want to miss this. Actually, just watch this video from 2015, it explains everything much better than I can ever do with words: |
Old Talk 2013