There is a place—somewhere far away from here—where life is always lived in elegant black and white, where loneliness is a part of love, where longing brings more fulfillment than having. It’s a place where a simply sung melody can blossom into a symphony, where music speaks in its own language, where it’s always breakfast time at Tiffany’s.
That place, apparently, is Sweden.
“Swedes have always very quickly bought into the whole pop-music era and the muse of pop music, and since then have embraced popular music more than other countries,” says Sarah Assbring, the soft-spoken, doe-eyed Swede who goes by the nom de chanson El Perro del Mar. “I don’t know why and I don’t know how. I guess pop music here—its eccentricity and directness, the instant force and the power—is very deep within the culture.”
El Perro Del Mar is Assbring’s contribution to the Swedish legacy of pop confection perfection, epitomized most popularly by ABBA 30 years ago. Speaking on the phone from her native Gothenburg as a blizzard shuts down the city—”When the occasional snowstorm comes, traffic stops and everyone is talking about it. It’s chaos,” she says—Assbring reveals that several national obsessions made their influence felt on her at a very young age.
“I remember my dad used to make homemade tapes from records,” she says. “Mixes that he mixed together with fairy tales with classical music and then with ABBA songs. I remember a lot of classical music and ABBA.”
Like many Western Europeans, Assbring not only speaks flawless English, but she’s more articulate than most native speakers. The songs of El Perro del Mar—sounding like a faded pastiche of early-’60s girl-group soul and the Twin Peaks chanteuse musings of Julee Cruise—are all sung in English, a decision that was never in question.
“I wrote a lot of poetry a couple of years ago in Swedish and I found it impossible to write it in English, but when it comes to writing songs, it’s always in English,” Assbring says. “I used to think it was because I had kind of a different relationship to writing music, that I wasn’t really being sincere or honest with myself. I don’t think that was true really. English just happens to be my language of music.”
So when she sings—backed by acoustic guitar, chiming bells, swelling strings, and her own bah-bah-bahs—of “This Loneliness,” the sadness is discernable through both lyrics and music. As it is with “Party” and “People,” songs that take as inspiration everyday subjects and from them mine striking emotions.
“I was very consciously working around trying to express different textures of emotion and very much contrast between high and low, joyful and sad, hopefulness and despair,” she explains. The richness of these conflicted feelings, she says, “came from being silent for quite a long time, which I was before I started writing these songs. I was in kind of a mean state where I didn’t sing anything at all and I didn’t write anything either, which was strange for me. I think the result was that finally I opened my mouth and that was what came out.”
Which is why there’s a sense of grief in the love song “I Can’t Talk About It” and a sense of imminent loss in the affirmation “God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get).” Whether that grief and loss are personal or for the world at large, Assbring leaves to the listener.
“When I wrote these songs, I definitely thought there was a loss, something missing, but at the same time, the joy in the record is saying goodbye to something, to be able to start something new,” Assbring says. “That void that I don’t really know anything about—it’s there. And that void, I hope, in some strange kind of way, will never get filled, because it’s what makes me want to make music.”
Such poetic dialogue from such a demure artist from such a distant place—it’s all very easy to get caught up in. Juxtapose that allure against the propulsive, pop-noir sound of El Perro del Mar and you have bittersweet sonic drama of the highest order. Assbring revels in it herself.
“The feeling that I have for pop music is almost exactly the same as the feeling that I had when I was growing up,” she says. “It does something to you that is very natural and not very complicated. It’s like being a child—you don’t really think about it, you just let the music do whatever it does to you, to your heart, to your body. That’s the basic idea and power of music, and for some strange reason we take it to our heart.” 