Messed!Up
Johan T Karlsson has carved out a unique space in the Scandinavian music scene under the moniker of Familjen, earning critical acclaim for his album releases while amassing a huge and loyal fanbase.
After a massive breakthrough with his debut album Det Snurrar I Min Skalle in 2007, just a year after Familjen started, he embarked on tour with Sweden’s biggest band at the time, Kent, and gained a wide fanbase in Sweden and has ever since been playing the major venues and festival stages across Scandinavia. With his fusion of early Madchester house and synthpop sung in Swedish, Familjen has made a mark in the Swedish music scene.
With a career spanning nearly two decades, Familjen has proven that electronic music can be both emotionally compelling and sonically innovative. However, despite the success, working as a musician is a struggle both financially and mentally, and Karlsson is trying to find new ways of being creative.
When he popped by Gothenburg for a gig at Pustervik a few days before the end of 2024, we sat down for a chat and talked about two decades in the scene, struggling with ADHD problems, and how to handle the attention from being a public person.
The game-changing debut album
Familjen has been around for almost 20 years. I remember buying one of your first singles, “Hög Luft”, in 2006. But at the time you were more of a producer and worked with lots of other bands, like David & The Citizens, and Familjen wasn’t your first priority when you started. How did Familjen become your most important project?
Oh, that’s so cool (laugh). I released my first single “Ivanhoe & Rebecca” first, which later was remade into the album title song ”Det Snurrar I Min Skalle”, and that same year I also released “Hög Luft”.
But I never had a plan for Familjen. I guess many bands say the same, it just happened and I still don’t know how. A friend of mine was running a record label in Malmö and he listened to some of my early demos and said ‘Man, this is so good! Why don’t release it?’. ‘Sure’ I said without any understanding of what it really meant (laugh).
I was working with one of the label’s bands at the moment, David & The Citizens as you mentioned, and we were in a studio far out in the countryside in Skåne (south of Sweden) where we also stayed during the whole recording period. In the evenings we used to chill out with a few beers together and I played some of the early Familjen songs I’ve done, and this label man was super impressed. As soon as the first singles were released it was like a snowball effect and it grew bigger and bigger really fast.
However, it could have been different. French cult label Kitsuné could have been first. They wanted to release one of my first singles but something happened in the process and I never signed up, and released it on Adrian [Records] instead. But it turned out quite well anyway.
And things started to move directly; you had a massive breakthrough the year after, in 2007, when you released your debut album Det Snurrar I Min Skalle. Another year later you supported Kent, Sweden’s biggest band at the time. How did you handle that sudden fame and glory?
By not thinking about it at all (laugh). As you say, everything happened so fast, and I played so much live so there was no time for reflection, but it was quite boring in the beginning. I did the first 9-10 gigs on my own, just me on the stage and backing tracks, but I hated it and asked Andreas Tilliander if he wanted to join me when I was at one of his gigs in Stockholm. It started as ‘You don’t know anyone who could join me on stage and help me out live?’, and he said ‘But I can do it’. I couldn’t believe it! Andreas Tilliander! At the time he was crossing the world to play shows on his own and I couldn’t believe that he would join me. But we have been stuck with each other ever since.
But there’s a fun story about that Kent tour; I turned them down at first. When their manager called me I said no because I was like ‘Kent? Fuck no, it’s not my kind of music’ (laugh). I just didn’t think they were any fun, but I phoned a good friend who worked at the Hultsfred Festival (Sweden’s biggest festival at the time) and got slated, ‘What the fuck?! Are you out of your mind!? Call them back and apologize’ (laugh). That tour gave me a massive push and then it was impossible to go back to play small club shows again.
It was a crazy time when I think about it. My fanbase grew for every show I played and some festivals ended in chaos. At the Roskilde Festival, I was booked to play at their smallest stage but double as many as the tent could manage turned up which caused sort of a riot and the organizers had to stop the show and tell people to back off. They apologized so many times for booking me at the smallest stage (laugh). But it’s also my best live experience because the Roskilde Festival had a huge influence on me, musically. I’ve been to that festival many times and watched lots of bands, some of which became my favorite bands, and that kind of shaped me musically. After the festival, I always headed home to the local record stores in Malmö or Lund and bought records by bands I discovered at the festival. Getting a chance to play there was just amazing for me.
I read some reviews about your albums and it’s interesting to see how your music has been labeled over the years. Det Snurrar I Min Skalle was called synthpop while your latest album Nerver av tvål is radiopop. How do you define it today?
First, I never read reviews because I’m terrified to read about what people think about my music. I’m not tough enough to deal with them.
But in terms of music, I’ve been very open-minded to everything. Familjen started in a period when I was super tired of guitar-based indie pop and I couldn’t stand another indie band – they popped up like mushrooms. Today I want all that to come back again (laugh), especially the shoegaze era. But being tired of guitar pop led me to do something different from what I was doing at the time. I loved early house music and the whole Madchester scene and wanted to find a bridge between that and the electronic music I made. It was such a positive vibe in that type of music. And it had vocals, it wasn’t instrumental like much modern house music, and I wanted my own music to be like that as well – but in Swedish.
Different genres or different types of music have always been inspiring to me, and I’ve played in hip hop bands and indie bands, written lyrics in English, and all that kind of things before Familjen started. It just felt authentic to do Familjen in Swedish. It was also cool to keep the Skåne accent (spoken in the south of Sweden), especially since there was a hype around it at the time with bands like Bob Hund and Timbuktu, and I’ve always had Peps Persson as some sort of role model. So I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fucking awesome to combine electronic music and the Skåne accent?’. It seems to have been a very good idea seeing how it was received by people back then.
Facing the challenges of a life with ADHD
I remember a few years back when Justin Timberlake publicly confirmed his diagnosis of ADHD and pointed out that it might have been one of the reasons why he was being called weird and different. I may not be a fan of his music but when ‘superstars’ come forward with their challenges about something that is quite common among musicians, it puts focus on the struggles creative people are facing in their daily lives. Society judges people who are different and don’t “fit in.” But truthfully, it’s unique people who make life interesting and we should appreciate and support them, not criticize. Just take a look at the list of prominent creative people, actors, politicians, and other personalities that have enjoyed great success despite their diagnosis: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Britney Spears, Kurt Cobain, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Richard Branson, Michael Jordan, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci – all of whom have achieved extraordinary success despite, or perhaps even because of their ADHD.
While ADHD often brings challenges like difficulty focusing, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, it also comes with unique strengths that can be incredibly advantageous in the realm of music. In general, recent research studies prove that many children and adults with ADHD have a deepened access to music, presumably due to their above-average creativity.
Familjen-Johan recently wrote a chronicle in a local newspaper about living with ADHD, thus adding his name to a long list of successful artists in the music scene struggling with the challenges it involves.
I read your chronicle in the local newspaper Kristianstadsbladet where you write about living with ADHD, and you put focus on what many creative people have to deal with every day, but how to handle it can be seen as a double-edged sword. Some people see it as a gift that is needed for being creative because they’re afraid of losing their creative ability if they get medication for it, even if it makes them feel terrible. How did you deal with it?
Well, I did it because I felt like shit and I’ve had terrible problems to deal with. It got worse for every year that passed by and I had to do something about it. I don’t care if it affects my creativity, I just want to feel good and be happy again and not wake up with anxiety.
The thing is that it didn’t work out at all for me at first. I tried some sort of medication for three months and I didn’t get better, just worse, and I felt really bad. It’s like having a sort of chemical hangover which never disappears. Sure, you feel really well for a short while but the aftermath are terrible. In the end, I had to get psychiatric help, and that doctor told me ‘Stop taking those pills’. My first doctor may not have been the best in helping me out, but I’m up for a new assessment soon.
But I can’t say it had a negative impact on my creativity to be on medication. Sure, I wasn’t really myself when I was on medication, it was like having a sort of tunnel vision and being hyper-focused as long the effects of the medication lasted but being hyper-focused was also good. I could be in my studio for 4-5 hours, fully focused, and record a lot of music. The medication just shut me off from doing anything else – no phone, no email, and no family. Maybe it wasn’t that good to forget about the kids (laugh), but that’s how it worked out. On the other hand, I lost the ability to see the bigger picture while writing music meaning that the positive effects were outbalanced by some negative effects.
What’s fun is that people just laughed at me when I told them about the diagnosis, like ‘Did that come as a surprise to you?’ (laugh). I’m a Gen X and we were rarely diagnosed as kids. If you were an ass in school and would bug your friends, you’d get a slap in the face and were sent out of the classroom. It would have been different for me today if someone had taken care of it when I was young.
But I guess it has been sort of helpful after your breakthrough and being on one of Sweden’s most popular music TV shows where you interpret other artists’ music. It gave you a massive outreach in Sweden and many new fans; I guess people came up to you on the street after that. ADHD also comes with attention-seeking and maybe it was easier to handle the fame and glory that came with being on that show.
(laugh) Maybe, I’ve never had a problem with attention, just being confused when people looked at me on the street.
But at first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be on that show, it’s not really my type of TV show. But my manager and my record label wanted me to, I guess for the exposure and free promotion, and one day they phoned me and said ‘You’re in, book the whole summer’. But my friends thought I’d gone mad and were like, ‘What are you doing?’ because it’s not the type of TV show I would watch myself (laugh). But I actually liked the idea of sitting down for a beer with Carola and Orup (Swedish pop stars) and interpreting their songs.
When looking back on it I’m not sure it was a good decision. Sure, I got a lot of exposure and many new fans but I didn’t like all of it. People were smiling at me on the street and since I never knew if it was someone I actually knew or not, I always smiled back. It was better to play it safe; you don’t want to end up in a situation where you just walk by someone you know unnoticed, they will think you’re an ass (laugh). But I loved when people you didn’t expect to recognize me walked up for a chat, like when the local junkie at the subway who probably did not own a TV lest a flat would pop over and say ‘Hey, it’s you from that music show on TV’. I mean, that’s nothing but charming (laugh).
I don’t care much about it anymore, it’s many years ago now and I’m older and more experienced and know how to deal with it. The problem is that attention affects how you write music. Your debut album is easy because no one has any expectations, it’s just you and your music. The second album is a lot harder to write, especially if you made a banger debut album and you start to think about it too much while working on the second one. I had so much anxiety and didn’t know how to deal with the expectations, both from me and my fans.
Finding new ways to be creative
Like you said, there wasn’t any plan when Familjen started – everything just happened. But there must have been times you wanted to put an end to it during these 20 years.
Having doubts is part of your daily life (laugh). Let’s say I’ve had a sort of life crisis the last years and asked myself ‘Is this really what I want to do? And how long am I going to continue?’ several times. I have looked around a bit to see if there’s anything else out there for me, like working as a sound designer in the gaming industry, because being a musician is about living under financial pressure all the time, especially when you have a family to support. The last two years haven’t been amazing and that’s mentally stressful. I’ve been thinking about putting Familjen on hiatus a lot but when I talk about what has happened since 2006, especially when we talk now, I get so much energy and just want to go back to my studio and write new music. You know, I just love to do it.
When you have been doing it for such a long time as I have, you have tried everything out and earned money to buy gear for your studio – I have everything I need now. It’s only about finding new ways to express my creativity. I don’t need more attention, that part of my life is over, but I need to find new ideas about how to write music.
The new project I started with Andreas [Tilliander], Innerst Inne, is that type of project. Our ideas transpire into music directly; they go from the brain throughout your body and down to synthesizers in front of you. We put together a full album in a week!
It’s a challenging project because you need to accept how music is composed, like ‘That song we did back then, recorded it on a four-channel Portastudio and didn’t use any software or laptop’, and we can’t recreate it the same way. When a song was recorded we disconnected all synthesizers and started writing new songs with another set of synthesizers. That’s fun, creative, and challenging, but it won’t give us any money (laugh). But if you think like that, art isn’t a free space anymore, it’s governed by money, right?
When I was young I didn’t want any side projects at all, just being focused on one thing at a time and putting all my energy into it. But I’m not like that anymore and don’t like to work on my own in the studio which I’ve done most of the time. But that’s something that is about to change. I work with Martin Sköld (former Kent bassist) and we write a lot of fun stuff with guitar and bass and drums, no synthesizers or electronic instruments. Why not write a full Familjen album with acoustic drums next time and bring a drummer on stage? That would be awesome!
The whole craft of being in a studio with other people for a few days is rewarding and contributes to better mental health. Ok, you have to let go of controlling everything but I’ve reached a point in life when I’m all good with that.
As a last question, and tapping into your developments in the studio; your 20th anniversary is coming up, is there any kind of celebration in the plans?
Actually not at all, but it feels like I have to do something. It can’t go unnoticed. People would think I’m an ass otherwise (laugh).
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Photographer: Richard Bloom
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Familjen pages
