Radio LBB: A Homage to My Home Country

It’s not super uncommon that I find myself in conversations about artists or bands where I go “Yeah, no, they’re Swedish”, or “Yeah, no, the songwriter/producer is Swedish” and it is also not super uncommon that this tends to come as a surprise to people. The fact is that Sweden is not only the home of IKEA and the Dala horse - it’s also one of the world's most successful exporters of chart music, as well as being the birthplace for various music and tech companies such as Spotify and Teenage Engineering etc. Music just seems to flow in our DNA, and with having free music education in school from an early age paired with speaking a rather melodic language, it's not that weird that the country churns out hit after hit with killer toplines. 

As I am now finding myself on the cusp of becoming a British citizen (scr*w you, Brexit) I thought it would be fitting to pay a homage to my home country by highlighting Swedish artists and bands that have played part as soundtracks in my life, and some of these I’ve even been lucky enough to work with in various studio and administrative settings over the years.

And no, ABBA is not in this list, because even though I'm happy to boogie down to Dancing Queen at any given day, I wanted to broaden our horizons for a bit this time. Equally, as much as I’d like to highlight all the work from Swedish songwriters/producers in this list (special shoutout to Max Martin for all the '90s bangers I grew up with!), curating a playlist like that would be almost an impossible task due to the sheer volume of amazing tracks, and would probably result in me developing carpal tunnel syndrome. But maybe next time.

Hope y’all enjoy these tunes, I’m pretty sure you’ll know a lot of them really well already.

Big hug x