The Swedish indie-pop sensations’ frontman, Peter Morén, talks touring, hip-hop and the perils of having a hit song.
1. They don’t hate “Young Folks” anymore.
Indisputably, Peter Bjorn and John are best known for the whistling song. The once ubiquitous “Young Folks” made 2006’s Writer’s Block their breakthrough album and, naturally, there was a time when the band lived entirely under its shadow. While touring follow-up album Living Thing in 2009, frontman Peter Morén (above, far right) says they didn’t enjoy playing it because they “wanted to get on with it and play the new stuff.” However, the real difficulty lies in the mechanics of the song. “The [whistling] is kind of hard to do if you have a bad monitor or whatever. We did a TV show recently in Sweden where we did a medley of ‘Young Folks’ and (recent single) ‘Second Chance,’ and in the beginning, I couldn’t get the proper pitch. So that’s the problem with ‘Young Folks’—it’s hard to perform.” But the hit song has opened many doors. “It’s better to have one hit than no hits,” he says.
2. They’re trying to make the road feel like home.
Peter Bjorn and John have been a band for 12 years now, and while life on the road can lend itself to less-than-stellar lifestyle choices (fast food, daily hangovers), these Swedes choose to seek out fine dining and physical activity while travelling. On this tour, the band is playing several shows in smaller venues in each city, giving them the chance to switch up the set list, and to feel sort of settled as they spend months away from home. “It’s nice when you stay in a city for a couple of days, and if you’ve been in the city before, you start to know it,” says Morén. “You start to feel a bit at home.”
3. Keeping it simple requires outside assistance.
The band wanted their sixth album, Gimme Some, to reflect their live setup as a robust, stripped-down three-piece. To achieve it, they brought in an outside producer for the first time. “It’s kind of easy when you’ve been together so long to argue about the same things and get stuck in your position in the band,” Morén says. “When you have a fourth person in the room, that kind of lightens the mood, and you want to be nice to that person.” Working with the band’s longtime idol, Per Sunding, a member of Swedish indie trio Eggstone, Peter Bjorn and John combed their record collections for inspiration. “There’s some R.E.M., some punk, like the Buzzcocks and the Damned, and even some older rockabilly influences and later shoegaze,” Morén enthuses. “It’s all over the place but it’s basically guitar music. It’s the history of rock ’n’ roll.”
4. They’re hip-hop’s favourite indie-rock band.
Before Kanye West threw Bon Iver into another stratosphere of fame by choosing him as his right-hand man on his last album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he sampled Peter Bjorn and John’s monster hit “Young Folks” on his Can’t Tell Me Nothing mixtape. West’s endorsement led to a sort of hip-hop invasion by Peter Bjorn and John. “It kind of started with the Kanye thing. All the other rappers listen to Kanye,” says Morén. “The other stuff came after that.” Then-burgeoning rapper Drake reworked their song “Let’s Call It Off” on his landmark 2009 mixtape So Far Gone, and producer Mick Boogie spearheaded the Re-Living Thing project, re-imagining the band’s album Living Thing by having rappers like Bun B, Talib Kweli, Kardinal Offishall and GZA take turns updating the tracks. “It’s very flattering when they take a hook or beat and make something completely different from it,” says Morén. “It feels good. It feels like you’re a soul legend. Peter Bjorn and John and James Brown and Curtis Mayfield.”
