Ebbot Lundberg, singer and guiding light of The Soundtrack of Our Lives, always knew where the Swedish band was heading. “I thought we were going to peak around 2010 or 2012.” He pauses, and roars with laughter. “Which suddenly is pretty soon.” With the new album Communion, he is ready to take off.
Lundberg is a man with a grand and far-sighted scheme for his life's work. Since The Soundtrack of Our Lives (TSOOL) came together around 1996 in Göteborg on the Swedish west coast, it has become Sweden's greatest home-grown rock band, worshipped around the world by other artists and bands, including Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Oasis.
The band has released four amazing albums — three of those, double albums — plus another double-CD collection of out-takes and oddities, A Present from the Past (2005), which is better (and bigger) than most ordinary groups' Greatest Hits.
On November 26, 2008, after two years in hiding, TSOOL return with another double-CD: Communion. It is quite probably their best so far. Full of epic, sky-scraping highs and equally blissful meditative moments, it encapsulates all the moods and ideas that have entranced the band's fans these past 12 years — and more. So, maybe Lundberg's vision wasn't that far-fetched after all.
Fresh start
The story of Communion really begins after the completion of the campaign for 2004's Origin Vol. 1. For that album, TSOOL were under increasing pressure to compromise their music for radio airplay. However, once they had released Origin Vol. 1, as well as the 2005 compilation, they had fulfilled their obligations to Warner Brothers, and were free to start fresh.
“With Communion we didn't have anyone calling all the time, asking which track was going to be the single, or anything like that,” says Lundberg. “It was the opposite of the Origin sessions. We could work in peace.”
The Soundtrack of Our Lives have been playing together since the 1990s. Ebbot Lundberg is fourth from the left. Photo: Fredrik Wennerlund
TSOOL also moved their Svenska Grammofon Studion to a new location in Göteborg. Freshly liberated, and with an unfamiliar playground to romp around in, TSOOL were ready to start a new chapter. Surprisingly, for a band that has released more than a hundred songs of their own and have at least as many up their sleeve unreleased, the album sessions commenced with a cover version — the first one they have ever recorded.
“As a joke, we thought: Let's do a ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ thing,” Lundberg says, referring to when The Byrds “electrified” the well-known Bob Dylan song, “only with ‘Fly’ by Nick Drake, just to get people pissed off.”
Many others wouldn’t go there, with Drake being so highly admired and respected. But TSOOL thought differently. “We felt like it was really cool,” Lundberg says. “Imagine what The Who would've done if they'd covered one of his songs. It was a jam, a really easy experiment, and that's how we got the whole thing rolling.”
An absent fan
Another legendary figure from pop's golden age would prove influential on the album. “On some tunes, we had Arthur Lee from the band Love in mind”, Lundberg says. “He was dying of cancer, and we were talking of putting on a show at the Astoria in London with Robyn Hitchcock, as a tribute, but Lee passed away.
“One song, ‘The Fan Who Wasn't There,’ is pretty much about a conversation I had with him. I spent three hours with him in a room, drinking, talking about everything.”
The connection with Lee's music runs even deeper: as some of the Swedish brass section he was using to replicate the orchestral splendor of Love's classic album, Forever Changes, appear on “The Fan Who Wasn't There,” and several other tracks from Communion.
The sense of these two tragic heroes hovering above Communion possibly contributes to its occasional air of melancholy. But with an album that runs across two discs, there are, as Lundberg points out, “plenty of mood swings.” If the mood gets blue, just around the corner there's the stratospheric mood elevation of “The Ego Delusion,” or the starlit romance of “Without Warning.”
At every turn, there's magic in the air. On this album more than ever, when TSOOL's music plays, it feels like Christmas all year round.
Hand-picked team
When Lundberg first formed TSOOL, he cherry-picked his bandmates from around the Swedish rock scene: guitarist Mattias Bärjed from The Nymphet Noodlers, bassist Kalle Gustafsson Jerneholm from Electric Eskimos and drummer Fredrik Sandsten from Whipped Cream, as well as keyboard virtuoso Martin Hederos.
Lundberg himself was already something of an international alt-celebrity, having fronted the Swedish post-hardcore punks, Union Carbide Productions. That band's ultra-confrontational style won them many friends in the United States, such as Jello Biafra, Sonic Youth and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who sent them a postcard to wish them good luck prior to Union Carbide’s farewell gig.
Lundberg has often spoken in bewilderment and awe about what happened next in his career: the seemingly miraculous way in which he got the TSOOL team together, and how they then spirited up their first album, 1996's Welcome to the Infant Freebase. Back then, Lundberg wrote most of the songs himself, alongside Björn Olsson and guitarist Ian Person, both of whom had served in Union Carbide.
When Olsson retreated from touring, and eventually from the band altogether, Lundberg soon found himself bombarded with ideas from all his cohorts.
With five albums and a fan list that includes Robert Plant, the Gallagher brothers and Chris Robinson, The Soundtrack of Our Lives is one of Sweden’s greatest ever rock bands. Photo: Fredrik Wennerlund
Going global
Extended Revelation (for the Psychic Weaklings of Western Civilization) (1998), and particularly the gem-packed Behind the Music (2001), saw TSOOL's renown spread far beyond their homeland. Their famous fans — Robert Plant, the Gallagher brothers and Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes — all invited them on tours around the United States.
In other words, the band that reconvened to make Communion was globally vindicated, amply staffed creatively and, after the contractual problems that overshadowed Origin Vol. 1, eager to go. As ever, Lundberg's chief songwriting partner is the pop-hearted rocker Person, but the rest all chip in too.
Sometimes there is a growing sense in rock culture of hyper-acceleration — ever faster arriving disappointments. Then you can only listen in wonder to Communion, as classic song follows classic song. In this band that ultimately evolved out of Union Carbide's antagonistic attitude, there is a palpable sense of satisfaction of having delivered more hits on this album — where they don’t have to answer to anybody — than any record label's marketing strategists would have known what to do with.
Careful collection of songs
The first single from Communion is “Thrill Me.” “It just feels like it's the simplest song,” Lundberg says, almost a little dismissively. “I'd love Little Richard to record it. It's just a small part of the album. Sometimes you need a song like ‘Thrill Me’ to wake it all up a bit.”
Under Lundberg’s supervisory gaze, a TSOOL album is never a random mix of songs the band might have cobbled together. He says Communion is like a book, with each song representing a chapter. He notes that there is one for every hour in the day.
For all that, he concedes that: “I can't understand how the album actually happened. At the moment, it feels like a mixture of everything we've ever done — even Union Carbide — on tracks like ‘Distorted Child’ and ‘Ra 88.’ It's like a micro record collection; everything you need.”
Modern mass psychosis
The punk-ish attitude carries over onto the album's front cover, where an affluent fifty-something couple in toweling robes smile sinisterly at you, holding glasses of some weird intergalactic-green fruit-shake. It is a nauseating, almost hallucinogenically scary image of the wealthy, healthy affluence that modern society holds up as its model.
“While we were doing this album, I was thinking about mass psychosis,” says Lundberg. “Like, what is the psychosis of today, or what's the picture we're trying to follow? It's actually the kind of picture you see every day. It's what people try to be.
“They're the image of successful people, and now the whole stock market and world economy is going down. It feels like there's a synchronicity to everything.”
Time for departure
Maybe if we all fully grasped the synchronicity that Lundberg perceives, we wouldn't need TSOOL albums. We could work out the whole cosmic post-millennial confusion for ourselves. As it is, it feels like we need a Soundtrack album now, more than ever.
“I just love the feeling of being back where we started, as an idea,” Lundberg says. “It will be fun to take this wherever it may go, just to see what's going to happen when it comes out; if it will be a big thing or not. You know, time for another trip?”
Fasten your seatbelts.
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Related links
tsool.net — Official The Soundtrack of Our Lives site
Andy Perry
Andy Perry is a freelance music journalist. He writes mostly for the Daily Telegraph, Mojo and Blender. He’s also a big fan of The Soundtrack of Our Lives.
The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.
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