SPOP: FELICIA TAKMAN TALKS VIT MÅNAD
"Had a thousand excuses for why I couldn’t"
Daniel John
People can disagree but I still think everyone will agree you pretty much won last year. A year in which you went from strength to strength, received so much love and encouragement, and injected some fresh energy into Swedish pop?
Oh, what a tribute (laughs) thank you! I really feel like I’ve only just begun. Last year was kind of a taste of what’s to come. And I honestly haven’t reflected on the past year at all, I’ve mostly just kept working. But all the praise and love feels super nice.
You’re starting the year with a New Year’s resolution. 'Vit Månad' is a fresh-start song about taking a good look at yourself, more specifically, in this case, about focusing more on your own problems instead of having to deal with other people’s. But everyone can relate to starting a new year with whatever kind of life change they feel they need. Do you want your music to be as personal as it is relatable?
I’m probably quite personal in my music whether I want to be or not. I’m just bad at making things up out of thin air. And I think that’s when it becomes relatable, the more specific and personal you are. Writing about love or heartbreak on the surface doesn’t grab me in the same way. But I rarely think about whether people will be able to relate to it or not when I’m writing.
What did these lyrics come from for you?
My boyfriend at the time and I were “on a break”, and a friend of mine was having a dry week. That’s when I got the idea that it would be fun to write a song comparing an ex to a bad habit, like alcohol. So it ended up having a pretty clear theme and feeling running all the way through it.
So was January particularly “dry” for you?
Alcohol-wise, no! Staying away from old exes, yes!
I could be wrong, but this is your first song, after previously working with producers such as Anton Engdahl and Mark West, to be produced by Elias Kapari?
I think Elias came up pretty early in the process. We thought it would be really cool if he put his own spin on the song because we felt it had a bit of a “Oskar Linnros vibe”, and he’s worked with him quite a lot. So we basically got in touch and asked if he was interested, and that’s how it happened! Elias is genuinely amazing and so lovely to work with. So I think, or hope, we’ll cross paths again.
The song was one you’d had with you for quite a long time?
Exactly! It was written as far back as last autumn. I’m glad we waited until it found its home and that we chose to release it specifically on the first of January.
Is it usually the case that you can let songs sit for a little bit?
Actually, I’m far too restless and want to get songs out before the initial excitement completely disappears. That’s why most of the songs I’ve released have been relatively newly written when they came out. But I also have loads of demos that I feel are meant for a “later stage”, and many that I haven’t been able to let go of yet. So maybe that is becoming a thing.
In a normal year, you naturally get quite a lot of breaks from all the creative work. But over the past year, almost all of your time could have ended up being spent on it. I imagine that must have been both good and bad?
Up and down, like for everyone else, I think. And I’ve definitely been stuck in a studio more than I probably would have been otherwise, but rather I’ve felt such an enormous need to be there. It’s been a safe place where the pandemic hasn’t felt quite as tangible, and you’ve been able to write about things that have nothing to do with the outside world. I’ve worked a lot with the same people, and we’ve really become a tight-knit group this year, which feels like a nice consequence of a shitty year.
Do you think that being able to write with other people makes inspiration flow anyway, even though you don’t get those much-needed moments of inspiration in other parts of life?
Absolutely. You talk about memories and dream off together. I can sometimes have a slow start and then need someone to talk about something that makes something click in my head for things to get going.
How much new material do you think you’ve written over the past year?
Hmm, I counted at one point how many demos I had put together since last autumn, then it was around seventy, and now a few more months have passed.
I heard somewhere that you sometimes write songs starting with the actual title of the song, that you come up with a song title first. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that from any previous guest. Are you someone who would rather sit down and always write that way, rather than being the person who perhaps has “a few thousand notes” in their phone?
A mixture! I love writing from a specific theme, and then the title can be an obvious first thing to start with. A title can also say so much. Then you’ll often dig up old thoughts you’ve written down too, things you’ve written that might fit into the theme. But it also varies depending on who you’re writing with, how they like to start, and what feels appealing that particular day.
In 'Dunka dumma hjärta dunka' you sang about having “gotten tired of Swedish pop before you’d even had the chance to release anything.” A line that I think speaks both to those of us who listen and to you artists who create, in the sense that it’s a narrow genre, and because of that, a lot of it eventually starts sounding the same, making it difficult to create something fresh from it. But your music is one example of someone managing to do exactly that, making Swedish pop feel like you’re hearing it for the first time again?
Oh, what a lovely way of describing it, thank you for that compliment! That’s obviously something I really strive for! Ironically, I love Swedish pop and always have, but for me it has never been a genre in itself where everything sounds the same. I’ve always gravitated toward music in Swedish because the lyrics have always been the central thing, and good lyricists have been the people who inspired me to start writing myself. What I’m hinting at in that lyric is probably “the Swedish pop sound” that has become a thing over the past few years. It’s pop, in Swedish, but the lyrics are missing a bit of soul and most of it sounds the same. They’re written in a “hit” kind of way where what is actually being said doesn’t matter that much, and that’s when I personally lose interest.
Do you remember any of the very first songs you wrote?
(Laughs) My best friend and I entered the Swedish Junior Eurovision festival when we were eight. That was probably the first time I actually wrote an entire song from beginning to end. “I don’t want you, but you want me” was the opening line. Cocky love songs even back then!
Who were you inspired by back then?
When I started writing “for real” I was very inspired by Melissa Horn, Håkan Hellström, Veronica Maggio and Little Jinder. It was either very much “me and my guitar” or a hundred synths playing different melodic lines.
How early did you start to write music?
I wrote music in secret from when I was about eight until maybe twelve. I would write on the guitar on and off throughout my teenage years, but songwriting really started to take off after high school.
You had music with you from a young age, but somehow ended up with a detour in the advertising industry, and when you finally decided to pursue music anyway, you initially did so by writing songs for other people. Why do you think it wasn’t obvious to you from the start that you should simply put everything you had into yourself?
I definitely lacked the courage and self-confidence! But I also needed to grow and try things out a bit until I realized that there’s nothing else. To decide that this is what I’m going to do. Honestly, I’ve always felt that music is my thing, but I had a thousand excuses for why I “couldn’t” do it, and I probably needed to work through those first, in order to realize what I was really supposed to be doing.
Do we have to wait long for more songs?
I’m working on finishing my debut album which is coming this year. I don’t know how much more than that I’m allowed to reveal at this point. But there will be music coming already early this spring!
