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The summer night of July 2013, in the small Dala-Floda national park on the Västerdal river, was a bit surreal.
The children of the countryside in Mando Diao were received as heroes in the home landscape. 2,500 tickets sold and awkwardly in front of the small stage. Low-stage children, stingy men, fathers and mothers, and more than seventy children with thermos and camping chairs. They all gathered in Strandbacken to hear the band’s performances of Gustaf Fröding’s more than 100-year-old poems.
“It looks like we have reached 20 percent of every age group in Sweden,” said singer and guitarist Björn Dixgård with a slanted smile in the tent behind the scenes before the concert, when DN interviewed them.
Mandio Diao – at the beginning A supporting rope band in tight leather jackets: He soon became the best Swedish champion thanks to Fröding himself. For a total of 167 weeks they were on the top list with the beautiful poem by the Warmland poet “Strövtåg i homygygden”. When they were removed from the main roster in the winter of 2016, Gustaf Norén, one of the founders of the band, had already left the group. Disagreements over musical visions were declared as reasons. The atmosphere was frozen.
Mando Diao continued with a partially new crew. Four years and three albums later, Björn Dixgård and guitarist Jens Siverstedt meet at Tegnérlunden in Stockholm. In May, they release their new album.
– First we thought it would be called “The Scrubs of the Soul”, because that is the best description on the album of how difficult it is to be human, which is something that goes back to these songs, says Dixgård.
The melancholic minor tones and the opaque natural lyric are recognized in “Infruset”.
– Karin Boye and Ferlin, as we portrayed on the album, wrote lyrics that were also often minor. Although Fröding’s text on the disc is perhaps more like a … swirling stream.
Jens Siverstedt and Björn Dixgård.
Photo: Josefine Stenersen
The big exclamation point Malin Holmlin and Hans Dixgård are still on the album. The parents of the singer Mando Diao. They have written four of the songs in the song, including “The Soul’s Scrubs”. A highly incompatible collaboration between son and parents.
– My father is very good with the piano and we have actually talked for a long time about him joining us and recording with us. Emotionally, it is good that both are now included and engraved, as it is written in stone, the son says:
– Mom has always liked Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen. Dad was also interested in avant-garde jazz from the beginning and listened to Miles Davis and Archie Shepp and others. They are very open to all kinds of music, although they have had some problems with hip hop before, he adds.
The four parent scholarships in the album they’ve been writing for a long time, says Hans Dixgård by phone from his home, south of Borlänge.
– But now they fit into this musical context. The fact that they also end up on the record is great, to say the least, a bonus. It links our common musical experiences and those of Björn, both in rock, pop, and song, and classically it spreads in every way possible, says and continues:
– It is not strange for us to make music together. We have previously made songs for parties and family together with Björn. And our daughter Linnea sang “Infruset” on stage with Mando Diao.
Wife Malin Holmlin also describes the family home as a place where music has always had plenty of room. The son’s career choice was not a surprise.
– Björn has always had the ability to be passionate about what he thinks is fun and music came early in his life. When he was little, he got a tape recorder with which he sang, he was four years old. He mixed “Squirrel sat on the Christmas tree” with Twisted Sisters “We’re not going to take it,” he laughs.
The natural lyrical element of her album lyrics – “Sparven”, “Lullaby” “Stora Björn” and “Soul’s scrubs” – particularly captures her own relationship with the biotope forces.
– We are a bit romantic by nature, we live right on the edge of the forest and there is a lot to get from the calm. You punish yourself for being in nature and reflecting, stresses Hans Dixgård.
What do you think is the explanation for the impact that Fröding’s poems of over a hundred years still have?
– Let them enter the soul of the people, respond to Malin Holmlin and receive the support of her husband:
– You have read the poems at school and you have listened to them in other contexts. There is a legacy in the texts. Fröthing’s poetry is simply part of our culture. He also wrote about things that are still topical in everyone’s lives, says Hans Dixgård.
The recording of “In the sunset” is done in the simplest possible way: two microphones in an old mission house north of Koppslahyttan on the outskirts of Borlänge.
– It was a cruel aura there with five meters of ceiling, and a lightness and sound that really highlighted the letters, says Björn Dixgård:
– We had a microphone hanging from the ceiling and I had my microphone to sing, that’s all. We moved around the amp, double bass, and others to be at the correct distance from the two microphones, like in the 1950s.
The recording was ready in four days Jens Siverstedt is similar to the experience and methodology of the Danish film movement dogma with its strict design requirements.
– At the same time, the main limitations imposed by the working method were psychological and creative solutions for us, he points out:
– Not being able to change anything and sing live into the microphone in the middle of the room and then choose the best version of the song from three recordings. It has been very nice, especially to avoid all the cumbersome work.
Björn Dixgård believes that the band will create more Swedish music in the future.
– Now this edition of Mando Diao has just received how wonderful and free it felt to make “In the sunrise”. We want to experience that feeling again.
Siverstedt points out that throughout Mando Diao there is a special fable for the oldest Swedish music.
– All from Olle Adolphson, Hoola Bandoola Band, Cornelis and Monica Zetterlund. There is Swedish music that is as close and warm as Stones or Elvis. I would like to make more music that can reach generational limits.
To continue singing in both Swedish and English, neither of them sees it as a difficulty.
– It’s about not finding it difficult. Two weeks after this album was finished, we started working on an English album that we recorded in the same way. It also has a bit of a popular tone, though more to the American side, says Dixgård, who has never been oblivious to stern-style releases.
Photo: Josefine Stenersen
His resume already contains British rock riff, soul r’n’b and hip-hop projects with the Salazar brothers in Latin Kings, blue-eyed soul, eighty high-gloss Russians and swampy southern state boogie, among others.
– What we are still doing is trying to make our musical palette as big as possible. The most important thing for us as a band is to constantly develop what in our hearts we feel we must do. We don’t sit down and take into account what works on Spotify. The day we do it, there will be no more Mando Diao.
His next tour, like so many others, is canceled as a result of the crown pandemic. The ambition is to eventually play the music of “In the Sunset” in concert halls. The solution until then is the broadcast of concerts, as well as television and radio performances.
The premiere of the musical performance “Infruset – The Scrubs of the Soul” with a symphony orchestra on the big stage of Malmö Live, with which Björn Dixgård worked for over a year, among others, Arja Saijonmaa and Shirin El-Hage, has continued until 2021.
– That performance is a musical story of life, that is what all these lyrics have in common and reflect in different ways. I think much more today about those topics that can work therapeutically: the meaning of life, loneliness, community, death, he says.
How is the relationship with your former bandmate Gustaf Norén today?
– Zero I would say. It is a non-relationship. We won’t meet
They were good singing together.
– Well, we have already talked about it in the band, we are working to get such a vocal song. It was one of the things that was clean with the two of us: we had a bit of an Everly Brothers vibe between us, it was fucking cruel, Dixgård replies.
– I can miss that with him. But otherwise, I’m extremely satisfied with how Mando Diao is doing now.
