It’s common to hear people proclaim that technology has made the world smaller, but even before the World Wide Web was spun around the planet, we had Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica, National Geographic and the beloved TV to introduce us to our relatively close neighbors. Five miles from my home in Buena Park, Calif., you can pay $92 for the privilege to travel in a slow-moving boat while 437 representatives from around the world proclaim this truth in song, their audience mostly bored teenagers sending self-destructing photos to the opposite coast from the palm of their hand.
Yet, in 2013, trying to have a phone conversation with Markus Svensson in Stockholm, Sweden, a little more than 4,800 nautical miles away, Earth has never felt so large. Our interview is similar to what one imagines ground control suffers through when conversing with an astronaut on a space walk. We struggle through delays of 10 seconds or more, and I try to speak in long, continuous stretches, hoping my messages find their destination in the cold, loneliness of space where Svensson seems to call home.
After all, that outer space comparison might not be such a stretch when you hear Svensson, who has recorded under the name The Tarantula Waltz since 2007, describe his home. His third album, the yet-to-be-released Tinderstick Neck, finds Svensson looking close to home for inspiration.
“‘This is the first album that is actually about Scandinavia and Sweden and my surroundings,” Svensson says, “I actually only realized this when I was in New York, but a lot of my lyrics are about Scandinavian themes and what’s going on here. “
The New York trip happened just the previous week. The trip marked his first time in the United States and featured performance at the Mercury Lounge and Glasslands. The Tarantula Waltz already has two LPs released, and though he has been signed since he was 18 in his home country, the trip is an attempt to stir up interest from American labels in hopes that Tinderstick Neck will be his first album to have an American presence. Svensson thinks the material is finally good enough to make this leap, and a sample of four songs from the collection supports this.
“The album has two major themes,” Svensson says. “One is death and the fear of dying. I wanted to make something creative of these negative feelings and it became this album. Growing up my father was a priest, so I grew up with a God figure in my life, but now I have abandoned that in favor of science and facts. I am not a believer anymore, and that makes it hard to cope with the fact that I am going to die someday. My father died when I was 16, and my grandfather killed himself when I was 14. I think that is why I developed my hypochondria. I think a lot about it and have a constant fear, and I wanted to get that out there on this album.”
Svensson is 27 now and is able to speak of these past traumas without much sentimentality, and on “17,” a standout from the early sampling of Tinderstick Neck, it becomes clear that the emotion might be saved for his music. “I know that I will die, it scares me but sometimes it gives me peace,” he sings before a chorus finds him reaching as far, or even farther, than his voice is capable. There is a thrill to listening to a song that isn’t a slam dunk, where the singer’s failure and success are even bets. And its difficulty makes “17” all the more affecting.
“That’s what I had in mind when I wrote that song,” he says about the grasping vocals. “In Sweden we have an artist called Håkan Hellström, he’s probably the biggest pop star here that sings in Swedish. He’s a brilliant songwriter and lyricist and he always gets a lot of shit for not hitting the right notes. He often writes about teenage love but without being corny or cliché’. ’17’ was an attempt to try and write a Håkan Hellström song in English.”
The second theme The Tarantula Waltz explores on LP3 is the concept of light and dark, something fellow Swedes Shout Out Louds notably worked in thematically earlier this year on Optica, and to hear Svensson describe life there, it is no wonder that this concept keeps creeping into art.