Messed!Up
At the beginning of March 2020, we met up with Christoffer Franzén and chat about his eight-year-long career as Lights & Motion. Little did we know that just two weeks later, the world would end up in a global lockdown that has plunged the music industry into its biggest emergency ever, a plague that still haunts the industry almost two years later.
However, although the pandemic has caused all live concerts, performances, and festivals to cancel, labels to postpone their releases and had a dire impact on the livelihood of many musicians, it hasn’t had any impact on Franzén. In fact, while most bands and artists had their careers brought to a stand-still, he exhibits a rarely seen productivity and has released more music than ever. And a week ago it was time for yet another Lights & Motion record to leave his Gothenburg studio.
Messed!Up set off for another talk with Franzén and ended up in a chat about his new album The World I Remember, finding back to his songwriting roots, and never having time off between records. And he also reveals that he will release another soundtrack later this year.
Never having time off
The world has changed completely since I met you two years ago. Two weeks after we met up the world went into lockdown which changed everything, especially for people working in the music industry. But it doesn’t seem to have affected you.
(laugh) No, not really. I’ve been writing music as usual and the pandemic hasn’t affected my creativity and output at all. For most people, it has been a tough time not having any social life. But my life is this [working in the studio] and it hasn’t really changed at all the last two years. I’ve been locked up in here the last ten years (laugh).
Many of my friends that started working from home during the pandemic find it hard to still do it two years later because they’ve lost their daily social life. But for me it’s nothing new, I lost that sort of social context already when I started working full-time in the studio and made music my job, and had to learn to deal with it already ten years ago. It is a lonely job. So, when the pandemic arrived my life didn’t change at all.
Last time we talked about your creativity and that you rarely have time off between albums. If you release an album on Friday, you’re back on Monday to start on something new. Has it never happened that you’ve lost creativity or needed time off to find inspiration?
Very often I write a piece of music but don’t know how it will turn out in the end or if it fits with any other pieces, but I do it to keep my creative flow running. I don’t know what will happen if I stop or have a break. Just like you say, if I end something on Friday I’m always back on Monday to restart the process even if I would love to have a few days off, I’ve always had that kind of routine. I worry about losing my creativity if I have a long break, maybe I won’t return to the studio again if I did (laugh).
But I’ve had time off, especially after my third album [Chronicle]. That whole writing session was very intense and I worked too many late nights and never slept, and it got to me in the end. I didn’t feel well at all. Then I had a break before I went back to the studio again. But usually, I spend the whole day in here even if I don’t get anything done. It happens that I knock my head against the wall for eight hours because nothing happens, but suddenly an idea turns up. By now, I’ve learned that when everything feels hopeless and I can’t write anything, I just need to work harder to find my creativity again rather than giving up. And I always find back to it.
A few things have changed since I started though. I don’t work at night anymore because I didn’t feel well doing it. Other than that, I still have the same discipline and turn up at the studio every morning no matter how I feel. That’s how I get the work done. I wouldn’t get anything done if I would sit and wait for creativity or inspiration to arrive, it’s a lot of discipline behind my writing sessions. And when inspiration turns up, I usually turn into a maniac and won’t stop until I have a full album or at least full songs. I really don’t like to have bits and pieces of music lying around, I always want to finish them.
Going back to the roots
The heavy atmospheric, colourful sonic landscapes and cinematic beauty made Lights & Motion’s The Great Wide Open one of our favourite records of 2020. Those kinds of sonic impressions have been synonymous with Franzén’s work ever since he released his first album, Reanimation, in 2013.
On the new album The World I Remember, Franzén is on a journey to find back to his roots. After finding his old Stratocaster in the attic he found himself eye to eye with his younger self and decided to go back to the song-writing process of his first albums and put focus on the guitar again. The result? An uplifting record.
Your new album The World I Remember arrived a week ago. How would you say it’s different from the 2020 album The Great Wide Open?
It’s different because I rediscovered the guitar, the whole album revolves around guitar layers. Most of The Great Wide Open, and the album before it, was written on the piano which of course affects the overall composition of the songs. They sound completely different.
The guitar is also my main instrument, that’s how my songwriting started ten years ago. But it’s too easy to forget your roots when you discover other instruments and you get bored playing an instrument you’ve played your whole life. That’s a bit sad. I guess I needed to record a few albums to realize that I need to write music on the guitar again.
I found the old Stratocaster that I haven’t used for 12 years, in the attic. It sounds very different from any of the guitars I have in the studio, and as soon as I started to play it I came up with the idea for the single “The World I Remember” in just one day, the very same day I brought it down from the attic (laugh). That song set the tone for the rest of the album, that’s when I decided to not write anything on the piano and only use guitars to create the framework for the album before the song-writing process started.
Writing this album was like getting back to the writing process of my first two albums which have very distinct sounds dominated by guitar, bass and drums. Sure, I have lots of synth layers and strings on those records as well but there’s a very clear-cut guitar sound that you won’t find on The Great Wide Open. In a way, it’s about creating limits to what instruments I’m allowed to use in the writing process, and when I do that I also become more creative.
The World I Remember feels like a happier album and many songs are written in a major key. Gone are those dark and aggressive songs building up to crescendos, like “Sypher” and “Phoenix” from your last album. Was it by purpose or did it just happen as the writing process progressed?
It’s definitely a record written in a major key, save for “Panic Attack” and “The First Day”, but I don’t know how it happened (laugh). It wasn’t my purpose. Maybe my subconscious wanted to write something happier as a reaction to the darkness that has plagued the world the last two years, I don’t know. But I’m very happy with the result and how it ended up; one year of hard work and you get an uplifting record (laugh).
How about the concept of the album? I know you always work with concepts and themes.
This time the concept or theme is personal, it’s about me rediscovering my origin as a guitar player and how I wrote music when Lights & Motion started, and I wanted to return to that process.
It may sound a bit weird but it felt like I reconnected to the younger me because I remembered how I felt when I wrote my first records again. And that period in life was quite important to me because it was the first time I got the opportunity to visualize my ideas and turn them into songs on record, and I wanted to find that type of feeling again. That’s why I’ve worked a lot with different guitar sounds on this album. It’s loads of electronic layers as usual, but if you listen to the full album you’ll hear that there’s a very clear focus on the guitar.
On The Great Wide Open you also worked with guest vocalists, but not this time. How did you reflect on it when you wrote this album?
I haven’t worked with guest vocalists in the same way on this album, but I’m doing choruses myself on all songs, and on a few songs I’ve also worked with Adna, a Berlin-based vocalist. She’s doing choruses with me on five songs. When you combine dark male and bright female vocals you get this really fat sound that I always look for.
I would love to collaborate more with guest vocalists in the future, similar to what I did on The Great Wide Open, but this album was about rediscovering myself and the guitar and going back to how I wrote songs at the beginning of Lights & Motion.
Where on a Lights & Motion timeline would you place The World I Remember when you consider the work process and the overall sound of the album?
To me, it’s a continuation of my third album Chronicle because of the focus on the guitar in the production. But it’s hard to compare albums for me, they all represent fragments of my life rather than a sound. Albums are always something more than music to me.
I was 23 years old when I worked on my first album and this year I turn 34, and I recently realized I’ve been doing this, going to this studio, for ten years now – and I don’t know how it happened (laugh). Time flies. I lost track of time; some days I feel like I started yesterday and yet it’s ten years that have passed.
As you say, it’s soon ten years since you released your debut album. Is there any celebration plan in the works, like releasing a special edition or doing a remake?
I have put some thought into it but haven’t decided yet what I will do. One idea I have is to re-record the whole album and add a modern mix to it, but it depends on what happens the rest of the year and if there’s any time left to do it. But I also have to reflect on if I really want to change the original recording. On one hand, I would love to give it a modern mix because I’m so much better at it today; on the other hand, the original mix represents who I was ten years ago. Why change something I was very proud of back then?
Let’s just wait and see, shall we (laugh)
More music to be released in 2022
Obviously, your scene is in the US. You have an American label and have frequently worked with the American film industry. In Sweden, few people know about your music, but increasing attention in the US may have changed that.
Not much at all. I’ve done a soundtrack to a Swedish film, but that’s it. To answer your question: no (laugh).
It’s hard because I don’t do live shows and won’t meet an audience after I release an album. I meet fans on Instagram and Facebook and have realized that most of my listeners aren’t Swedish, they live in North America or Asia. If I look at my Spotify stats most fans live in New York and LA, and there’s no Swedish city anywhere at the top-ten list. But I don’t try to get more attention in Sweden either.
But you wouldn’t have time to be as productive as you are if you would go out and meet fans at clubs.
Exactly! I don’t know how much time other bands put into the writing and recording process but for me, an album takes a year of really hard work.
But although I’m used to working like this, my album circuit can feel a bit abstract because I don’t have a clear-cut end of the process. When you also tour your music you can divide the album circuit into different stages, very often ending with a tour. For me, it ends on Friday and restarts on Monday, and I don’t know if people even listen to my music or not. I find out about that a lot later.
Which means that you already started to work on something new even if it’s just a week since you released the album?
(laugh) Yeah, I actually did a soundtrack to an American documentary about their health care system alongside working on The World I Remember, and that soundtrack will be released sometime during 2022. Let’s say that last year was quite busy (laugh).
But it will be released under my own name just like all soundtracks. To me, it’s quite obvious what Lights & Motion is, and it’s very different from my soundtracks. Soundtracks are collaborative projects and other people are involved in the process, like having ideas on what type of music they want for certain scenes. It’s a completely different writing process when I work with people.
But let’s wait and see. Something will happen in 2022 as well.
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Photographers: Richard Bloom and Björn Vallin
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