- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Love Has Left The Room
- Stronger Than Jesus
- Chinatown
- I Signed The Line
When we all heard The Cardigans’ “Lovefool,” back in 1996, many a fellow and many a lady, had unspoken relationships with lead singer Nina Persson, the former ice skater, with porcelain skin, whom we’d come to find out is the spitting image of what we think Veronica Mars’ Kristen Bell’s older Swedish sister would look like, if she had one. We were all immediately smitten with the beautiful blonde and of her sexy beyond belief purring about her heartbreak. It’s a song that makes you feel like a teenager all over again, but that feeling of being burned by love is nothing that anyone ever grows out of and her singing, “Dear, I fear we’re facing a problem/You love me no longer, I know/And maybe there is nothing/That I can do to make you do/Mama tells me I shouldn’t bother/That I ought to stick to another man/A man that surely deserves me/But I think you do!/So I cry, I pray and I beg/Love me love me/Say that you love me/Fool me fool me/Go on and fool me…I don’t care bout anything but you,” reinforces the sense of desperation that comes with making oneself foolishly vulnerable. It’s not a feeling or a mood that is the sole property of teenagers, but that one that gets branded into our hides and carried around with us, to reflect and chew on as our loves get more complicated and diverse.
With A Camp, Persson is feeling similar sentiments, but there’s an anchor attached to these thoughts, a piece of cold, hard life that weighs them all down, keeping them less frantic, but in place. She’s now able to think about the act of attraction and the irascible emotions that barnacle themselves to the whole production in a more even way. She’s able to see it not as a lucky strike that needs to be protected and chased and fought for, but more something that has substance that cannot be ignored or brushed away. It’s something that cannot just get away from you, as it does in “Lovefool.” It’s likely to haunt you and follow you around, whether you’d like it or not, for a good, long while and you’re forced to deal with the ramifications of getting wrapped up in something that will consume you. It can come back around and darken your door, or it can find you with an offering of light when you need it most. It will nibble on your insides and cause you more sleepless nights than you’d ever want to count, but Persson seems to have come to the conclusion that we have no choice but to endure whatever it wants to do to us. We don’t have to seek it out. It will find us and it will stick to our sides like a faithful dog that, every so often, will snap.