Swedish Punk band Rotten Mind put out their latest album, Rat City Dog Boy in February of 2020, and the band’s vocalist and guitarist, Jakob Mind (aka Jakob Arvidsson), has followed that with his debut solo album, The One Who Got Away, from Lovely Music. It is currently available digitally and arrives on vinyl on May 10th. For Jakob Mind, working on songs meant that some ideas didn’t always fit Rotten Mind’s style, and while a few accumulated along the way, it was only with the halt due to Covid that he tried to pin down a whole set for some solo work. It was a very freeing solitary approach for him, making demos on his phone, and eventually going into the familiar studio of friend Jakob Blom to produce what was, in some ways, quite a surprising outcome.
The collection of songs strips back the darker approach you might expect given Jakob Mind’s other work and revels in the many influences on early Punk music, including Classic Rock. The layered, lighter sound on The One Who Got Away, vies with thought-provoking lyrics and reflections on things that were beautiful but passing. There’s a positivity to the sound and subject matter and a kind of warm isolation to the music that makes this a special album. But don’t worry, this is still “Loser Punk”. Jakob Mind spoke to me from Uppsala about the genesis of the music, the turns it took, and the madcap videos that have been released for the album’s singles by he and Blom.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I saw that there would be several vinyl variants for this solo album. Are you a vinyl collector, or is it more about fans wanting to collect?
Jakob Mind: Both, I think. I like vinyls. I collect them. It’s nice to have that in your hands when you’re done with a record. But also the label likes to do it. I think it’s nice. It’s cool.
HMS: You’ve worked with Lovely Records before, for Rotten Mind, right?
JM: Yes, they did all four records. I’ve been working with them since 2015, I think.
HMS: When Rotten Mind performs, do you sell a lot of your own merch at shows?
JM: Yes, we do. Rotten Mind also have CDs, but most people want vinyl. I think it could be a genre kind of thing. People who like Punk also like vinyl. Though maybe everyone likes them. There’s something nice about putting the record on the table. It feels real, in a way.
HMS: I know that you had a 2020 album with Rotten Mind. When did you actually start working on this solo work? Has it been accumulating over time?
JM: At the end of 2019, I recorded two or three songs, just for fun. I wasn’t thinking about it more than that since we had a new album with Rotten Mind and we were going to tour all year on that. Then, when the pandemic came and the label showed some interest in the songs, I just decided to write a bunch of songs and record them. I’d been thinking about it for a while but if you have a band and are doing stuff all the time, it’s not as important. But when I couldn’t play shows, it felt like something fun to do.
HMS: Was doing solo work more practical during the pandemic because you didn’t need a lot of other people to work on it?
JM: Definitely. Some of the songs were actually written for Rotten Mind, and we tried them, but they didn’t really fit the sound. I liked them, so I took them and did my thing with them instead. There’s a freedom if you’re the only one who decides basic things, like how the drums are going to go. I don’t have to talk to anyone. It’s easy to just do whatever you want to do.
HMS: Were you at all surprised by the sound direction that you took on some of these songs? Did you make any discoveries about what sort of songs you wanted to write?
JM: I was a little bit surprised, maybe. I was surprised by how Poppy they sounded. I thought they’d be a little bit harder and faster. I knew how the songs sounded, but it was more about how we did stuff in the studio that affected it. I didn’t bring anything to the studio. I just used whatever was there. That’s mostly because I didn’t want it to sound too much like Rotten Mind, so I tried to do something different.
HMS: I wasn’t surprised by how energetic it was, since maybe I expected that. But I was surprised by how positive it sounded. There’s a lot of positivity to the sound, even when the lyrics are heavier. In a way, that’s very good for the world right now. Musically, that creates a positive charge, and it also creates an interesting space for thinking about things without it getting too heavy.
JM: That’s awesome if you think that way about it. The big difference between Rotten Mind and this is that Rotten Mind is darker, more Post-Punk stuff. I wanted this to be a little bit more easy, more like Classic Punk Rock. That’s the feeling I wanted it to have, to be a more basic sounding album, and more positive.
HMS: That reminds me that early Punk had a lot of influences from other types of music that it was converting into the Punk format, even covering songs and changing them. Some of the songs on this album reminds me of other music traditions. The song, “Rock ‘n Roll’s Got Me All Messed Up” made me think of Classic Rock elements, almost like it’s an early Punk version of a juke box song. I know you like your Ramones, though, and they, of course, were bringing elements in from other traditions.
JM: Yes. I used to have a delay pedal for my guitar that I wanted to sound like 60s type bands. When we would do sound checks for Rotten Mind, I would always try that riff [from the song] with it to see if it sounded right. When I wrote the whole song, I wanted it to sound a little bit like the Shangri-Las or something like that, but in a Punk way.
I think my life-long love for The Ramones is showing there, though, because I think that they were influenced by The Shangri-Las, and The Beach Boys, and stuff like that. It was only a few years back that I started listening to a lot more stuff like that, 60s Rock music.
HMS: Can you tell me more about the term “Loser Punk” that I see describing the album? Is that a sub-genre or just a phrase you like?
JM: [Laughs] We did a festival show in France around 2016 with Rotten Mind. We did an interview there and we aren’t really good at interviews, I think. Our old bass player did most of the talking. He didn’t have any answers, so when they asked, “How would you describe your sound?”, he just said, “Loser Punk”. That’s what it’s from.
HMS: [Laughs] You need to put that on some t-shirts and get that out there. Does it have any specific meanings for you? Does it suggest a certain attitude, like you don’t take yourselves too seriously if you call yourselves that?
JM: Yeah, maybe. It’s not really something that I’ve thought about much at all. I think we’ve always tried not to be too macho and stuff. We’ve always tried to tone that down as much as we can. I think calling ourselves “losers” is a way of doing that.
HMS: It definitely works. It’s like doubling down on being outsiders. It goes further. To go back to when the record label became interested in this solo work of yours, you posted the song, “7 Days” online, didn’t you? What was the reaction like?
JM: I put it on Facebook, I think. I didn’t think anyone would listen to it. It wasn’t even mixed or mastered or anything. But then the label contacted me, so it worked.
HMS: Was that the first demo you created, or you had several and you just picked that one to put up?
JM: I think there were two or three and I just posted that one.
HMS: Did the fact that “7 Days” got attention influence the sound on the other songs and how they turned out? Did it kind of set the direction for things?
JM: When I did the first two or three songs, I had an idea how they were going to sound. But that was the first one where I really felt like, “This is something different than I’ve ever done before.”
HMS: Yes, that one is the most different on the album. It has a unique quality. It sounds like the most upbeat of any of them.
JM: In some ways, writing that song was the way forward. I think it was the first song I wrote for this project, as well.
HMS: I love the vocal style on that one. It sounds almost New Wave at times, though I don’t know if that’s a bad phrase to you.
JM: No, I like that. That’s alright.
HMS: What had you created for these demos? You did vocals, guitars, and drums, right?
JM: That demo that I posted was actually the same recording that ended up on the album, it just hadn’t been mixed or anything. When I did my own demos, I just recorded acoustic guitar on my phone. That was the only form of demo that existed.
HMS: I heard that you wrote the other parts, like the drums, too. How did you “write” those parts? Did you wait until you were in the studio for those?
JM: I had the acoustic guitar demo on my phone. Then I went to record the whole song. Then I just thought about how the drums would go. In the studio, I always recorded the drums first, then put bass and guitar on afterwards. [Laughs] I had to sit and play those four and four beats and just think of the song in my head. Sometimes I played too long or too short, but it worked.
HMS: What part did Jakob Blom play in putting all this together?
JM: He was actually the first bass player in Rotten Mind, and after he left the band, he created a studio here in Uppsala. The songs were done when I came to the studio, but I almost let him decide the sound of everything. I didn’t give much input on anything because I trust him as a sound engineer. Those were his guitars, amps, drums, and all the pedals that I used were his, too. He basically decided what sound I would have.
HMS: He’s known you a long time, then. Was he surprised by the sound that you were coming up with?
JM: No, I don’t think so. He plays in a great band called The Real Tears. It’s not too far from this. It’s kind of the same style. He was never impressed or anything. He just kept recording. He wants to drink beer, really. I think that’s the most important thing to him. [Laughs] He didn’t really care what it sounded like.
HMS: You’ve released a couple of videos to go with songs from this album.
JM: Jakob did those two as well.
HMS: Those are fun videos. I don’t know if the songs or videos were influenced at all by the experience of the pandemic, but “Let Them Know” feels strangely appropriate. There’s a feeling of coming out of separation.
JM: Actually, I wrote that one in the studio, and it was about a time about eight years back. Jakob and me, and some of the other guys, were out every night going to same place, called Palermo, a good bar. I was thinking about that time. At the beginning, no one wanted to be at that bar, but now it’s really, really, popular, and all the students go there. You have to stand in line to get in, even though it’s a small pizzeria, and nothing special. But it’s our old place. If we, who started going there before it was popular, could book tables there, we would. But it’s not possible. That was the idea for the song, but it was kind of inspired by the pandemic because it was looking back at what we had and looking at what we could have after the pandemic.
HMS: That’s very relatable. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York and it’s always your favorite dive bar that becomes really popular and you can’t go anymore.
JM: Exactly. You have to find new crappy places to go.
HMS: That one almost has a California Garage band vibe to it. Now the video is totally, wildly different from the sound and the lyrics. It’s shot in the snow, and you’re doing terrible things to a guitar. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone try to snowboard a guitar down a hill before. That was interesting.
JM: Yes, it was. It was kind of nice weather the whole week, and we didn’t have any idea of what we wanted to do for the video, but on that day it started snowing like hell. So we thought maybe we should just do a green screen video because we needed to do that day. But Jakob came up with the idea of doing a tourist attraction video for Uppsala in the worst weather there could possibly be. And do it as badly as possible. It didn’t turn out like a tourist video, but it’s something.
HMS: It’s a fun video. A lot of people wouldn’t include video of themselves wiping out and falling down, but that does suggest that you don’t take yourself too seriously, and I think people can appreciate that. Were you injured?
JM: I’m okay.
HMS: Was the guitar okay?
JM: I don’t think so. I think I broke the neck. We have a friend who fixes guitars and he’ll have to take a look at it. It was one of Jakob’s guitars. He had an idea like that before in the other video. He told me to throw a guitar down a hill. I told him that I couldn’t afford to throw a guitar, but he told me that I could take whatever I wanted of his. I’ve trashed two of his guitars for two videos.
HMS: That’s on “Watch The City Burn”. I saw that. It’s for the sake of art. Both these videos have a retro aspect. The first one looks like cut-up collage layers. I also liked how the cars are going by below on “Watch This City Burn” as well. That one has a more summery look, though it was shot in black and white. Any reasons for that?
JM: We tried color and black and white, and black and white just looked better.
HMS: The most complicated thing about both of these videos is that you’re playing all the parts. You had to film each of those parts separately and then edit them.
JM: Yes, it was really, really weird to just sit on the grass and play the drums. It’s a student area of Uppsala with grass and tall buildings. After a while, a crowd started gathering to watch. I just sat there and played drums. It was weird. But I think it looks okay. We didn’t have any budget for anything, so we did it as cheaply as possible. It turned out to be cheap for me, but I don’t know about Jakob! He had to sacrifice two guitars and some drums.
HMS: Wait, what happened to the drums?
JM: I think we threw them down a hill as well. I don’t know if that made it into the video, but we did something to the drums.
One Response
interesting Interview with a wunderfull swedish Person Their Punkrock is very impressfull. Thanks for publishing this Interview <3