Metal Hammer©, October 1997
interview by Chris Ingham, one night with misery loves co. in Uppsala.
The best types of music come out of honesty. How manytimes have you been listening to your favourite band and thought; 'that's my life you're singing about', or heard your own passions and frustrations set down perfectly to the riffs and beats of your favourite song? Connection is born out of truth. Lyricist and singer Patrik Wirén and guitarist Örjan Örnkloo, the two man nucleus of Swedens's Misery Loves Co., understand this more than most. Their new album; 'Not like them' is the result of 13 months hard labour spent isolated from the rest of the world in a basement studio. I f you crave honesty in your preferred music and you are willing to hear the sound of your own frears and inadequacies bein lived by someone else, then 'Not Like Them' is the only album for you. It's almost as if all the dark moments of despair in yours, mine and everybody else's lives have been sucked into a massive vacuum and MLCo. have emptied the bag onto the dinner table.
Twenty-five year old Patrik Wiren is shifting nervously in front of a tape recorder. Magazine interviews and Patrik are not comfortable bed fellows; he sees no reason, and harbours no ambition, to see his soul laid out bare to the trivialisations of the music press. Musical mastermind Örjan shares this awkwardeness with his vocal partner and he too is often keen to deflect questions aimed at intimacies in favour of the wider impact of MLCo.'s music.
"Misery Loves Co.
is a way of communicating with myself" says raven-haired
Patrik, nervously lighting a cigarette. "The lyrics are me
working out what I think and feel. Doing an interview for a
magazine and being asked to expose these feelings is really quite
alien to me".
Unlike someone like Marilyn Manson, whose overblown public
personality places a cushion of unreality between him and the
audience, thus enabling him to get away with almost any lyrical
intimacy, when Patrik Wirén puts his heart on a record, people
will believe it and because they believe in it, they're gonna ask
the very same question: what went wrong, Patrik?
"I would never do
a Jonathan Davis and tell the whole world what happened to me in
my life so many years ago. I wrote the lyrics, the job is done,
and now it's up to you. You go away an dwork it out and let the
lyrics mean whatever thay have to for you. It's my personal
sorrow an dlife on"Not like them" and I don't like the
idea of it being entertainment for everyone else in a
magazine."
But it could be argued that now you've committed your thoughts to
a CD, which is getting racked next to Boyzone and Mariah Carey
records in shops the world over, you've compromised that privacy
once and for all.
"What do you know about my personal life?" he returns. "Nothing. Nothing at all. You don't actually know if what I've written on those songs is my real life. I want to defend that privacy. I don't feel that I have to explain anything. If someone were to come up to me on a more personal level and ask me what something was about, then I might be more inclined to tell them, but open myself to a magazine? No way, that's not me!"
This shouldn't really come as much of a surprise, since this is the guy who has written the lyrics to the most nihilistic tunes of the year. I fPatric were your regular beer-swilling, pussy-chasing "rockstar", then the crushing isolation of "Happy?", from their eponymous debut, or the debilitating "Deny Everything" from the new album would hardly have made it past the basic riff stage. Nope, Patrik writes Misery lyrics for Misery musci and it's a cold, isolated world he paints.
"There are times when I feel completely cut off fro every other human being on the planet, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling like that. That's probably a feeling most can relate to", he shrugs. "I wouldn't consider myself an extremely miserable person either, it's just a feeling I get sometimes. It comes over me and destroys any logical or positive thinking that goes on. It's one of the most intense feellings a person can have and because of that, I seek to represent it in my lyrics."
"'Not Like Them'
is a dark album, but I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm
pro-suicide because I'm not, and I don't have a death wish, I
enjoy being a live as much as I hate the triviality of being
here."
But that being said, take, for example, the lyrics to 'Infected',
one of Not like them's darkest numbers: "Don't want to
be the way I am/I'd like to turn around and walk away/I wish I
had the courage to kill/God, I wish I had the courage to kill."
Now what are you supposed to make of that? Sound like pretty
strong suff to me. Patrik nods, acknowledging the difficulty of
the situation and draws deeply on another cigarette.
"No,no. I don't wish I had the courage to kill myself. I
don't think it takes courage to do that; in fact I think it takes
quite the opposite. It's a very personal song; it's about when I
would visit my grandfather in hospital. The whole atmosphere that
surrounded him was that he was wanting to let himself die and I
suppose that that was the outlook I was exploring. I put myself
in a similar position and took things that I could relate to and
that came out". You want the details, you pay the price.
"I never force myself into a negative mindset just to write lyrics, that would be faking it. When I write, I'm not always feeling that bad, but I do try to represent the intensity of feeling like that," admits the singer. "My negativity is not something I can control nor a place I wanna be. Everyone is different and different things affect different people in any number of ways. Maybe I'm more sensitive to things that the next guy would shrug off, I don't know."
Are there specific
things that you think you are more sensitive about than other
people? There's a long pause before he hesitantly breaks the
silence.
"My contemplation over the bleakness of life, perhaps.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out what is the point of us being
here. A lot of the lyrics on "Not Like Them" deal with
existentialist thoughts. At times, I can be a real dark
philosopher," he says, flashing the briefest of grins.
How healthy is that
way of life?
"I don't know, I'm not so sure it is healthy. A friend asked
me only a couple of weeks ago if it was hard to exist with all
this negativity around me. They were looking at the first album
cover, and I didn't know what to say. I mean, sure I get a kick
out of writing powerful music, it's the only release I've got,
but at the same time, I do find it draining.
If Anything, Örjan understands the nature of oppressive isolation even more than his writing partner, because it was he who spent a great number of Not Like Themäs hundereds of studio hours alone in 8his quest for musical perfection.
"Because Misery
is not a full rehearsal band, most of the time it's just Patrik
and I sitting in front of the sampler or the computer with a
guitar. The guitars are all real, but the structures and forms
are all arranged on the computer. Maybe next time we'll use a
full band with five people contributing and then it'll go
quicker," he reasons, keenly aware of the 13 months of
production hell he's just left behind.
"We nbever settle for just 'alright' or 'it'll do', it has
to be perfect. It has to sound like that there was no other way
it could've been done and sometimes what would be an essentially
finished song would have to be completely rewritten once the
vocals were introduced , due to the added effects that they
bring."
(yes, I did have to type all this up myself... -H.A)
Later on this evening,
Patrik will say that he's never met anyone as perfection driven
as the shaven-headed studio wiz. what drives Örjan is his
business, but there are signs that Not Like Them has left him
with enough mental scars.
"There's been plenty of times when I've been sat in front of
the computer at two in the morning playing the same fucking riff
for the hundreth time, trying to work out why it doesn't sound
the way I want it to. I don't like having to do that, I just feel
that I have to do it if I want it to sound right."
"Sometimes it is a bit too much," he sighs, casting a
weary look. "I wouldn't mind swapping places with Patrik
more. On the other hand, I'm a perfectionist and I'm very
demanding. I could never leave something I felt was half done - I
would feel like a complete asshole!"
Does that mean that the aforementioned concept of writing and
recording with a full band is a real possibility for the future?
"We don't know yet whether there's room enough for anyone
else in Misery," he admits. "But it would be nice to
try something different."
Given that you are
prepared to spend four whole months of your life within the same
four studio walls, what constitutes a successful day's work as
far as you're concerned?
"Maybe finding a guitar sound that I like or, more likely,
getting a hunch about what I might want the guitar to sound
like," he smiles with no obvious hint of irony.
Fuck! Punk bands the world over complete their entire careers in
the time it takes this guy to decide which guitar he's bringing
to the studio! There is a school of musicianship that believes
that passion is only born from spontaneity. Given the duration of
'Not Like Them's gestation, it might be fair to question the
state of Misery's human heart, Örjan's having none of it.
"Absolutely everything Misery has done has been aobut
passion. We don't write speculative pop music. We wrote for 13
months and spent four of those in a studio recording it and,
yeah,, we're pretty sure we didn't write a top hit album, but we
care every bit as much about the songs now as we did when we
started them. That's passion."
A little later in the
afternoon, I'm set with Misery's musical half again but this
time, Patrik is absent. It seems like a good opportunity to build
a beter picture of Misery's quietly spoken singer with the help
of one of his closest associates.
"Patrik and I are friends, we share privacies with each
other, but I don't push him to know what his lyrics are
about," says Örjan. "I know enough about him to know
what some are concerned with, but there are others I'd rather not
know. Some of the lyrics such as 'Prove Me Wrong', I think are
universal human thruths. The lines 'We fuck cause we have to,
if we don't there's something wrong'K - I've lived some of
those lyrics and I'm sure a lot of other people have as
well."
Later still, and
(ahem) a few drinks the wiser, I ask the pair if they've ever,
even slightly , wanted to be a part of the old "married with
2.4 kids, two cars and a holiday in the sun every year"
scenario that gets sold to us all?
"yeah, I've thought about it," laughs Patrik. "You
know, what would it be like to have the theings you want? I mean,
it would be a convenient life wouldn't it?"
"When you're sitting at home with no fucking money and you
have six songs to write, then, yeah, of course you think,
'Fuck,that would be great', but we're not those people,"
replies Örjan, adding with a smile, "Hey, we're not like
them..."