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Roxette - Room Service - Interview CD   (Promo) Title
 
Type album
Date of release 03/01/2001


This release has been viewed 19851 times.
Description:
Room Service - Interview CD includes interviews with Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle which was sent out in advance of Roxette's new album Room Service.

They talk about the recording of the new album and what they have been doing since their previous album Have A Nice Day was released in 1999. The main purpose of this CD was to provide radio stations with an interview which they could broadcast since Per and Marie could not visit all the radio stations themselves.

Transcript of interview with Roxette released

Back In Business
Per Gessle:
Well, we released the last album in the spring of 1999... 'Have A Nice Day' was the title, so we've actually been busy doing promotion with that one, and we decided not to tour with it, just went straight back into the studio, so we started working on this album in January 2000. So... That's basically what we've been doing for the last two years. And prior to that of course we started to work on 'Have A Nice Day'. It takes about a year to write an album.
Marie Fredriksson: It feels great. We always have a lot of fun together, and we know each other very well. And this album, the new album, 'Room Service', both of us really like very much and there's a couple of songs that are very much Roxette, they're very... I think it's a mix between the old days and how we sound today, so... I'm really looking forward to promoting the album.

The New Sound
PG: Well I think that the new album is a little bit of a reflection of what we tried to achieve with 'Have A Nice Day', y'know, 'Have A Nice Day' was the first album for us for many years and... we didn't really know what it was supposed to be like, we went in to work in the studio doing so many different things, and it's a very complex album in a way, because it's going in so many different directions.
The new album is the opposite, we tried to take it back to classic Roxette. For instance, on 'Have A Nice Day', all my vocals are distorted, on this one it's very plain, y'know, stuff like that. We tried to make it simple, obvious, easy-going and fun, y'know? I think this is probably the most commercial album we've done since 'Joyride'. We just sat down and wanted to make something that was... classic Roxette, what we're really good at, doing pop. A pop record.

More Upbeat
PG: I think we wanted to make an album that was up-tempo and had lots of energy, and we were a little bit... For many people the classic Roxette song is a big ballad. The ballads on 'Room Service' are much... smaller.
We have a song like 'Milk And Toast And Honey', which could be like a big, pompous thing, but we try to produce it a little smaller, so to speak. We just felt like doing that. A little bit tired of ourselves, sometimes.

Creativity
MF: When we work together it starts with a demo from Per...
PG: Or a demo from you...
MF: (laughs) not very often... This time we started in January last year, and we started with, I think, five or six songs, all written by Per...
PG: ...which turned out to be crap! (laughs)
MF: No! That's not true, there were some really good ones. And then we took a break, and I worked a lot on my own stuff, in Swedish, in between the sessions with Roxette.
Then we started off again at the end of March, I think it was, no, March or April. We recorded some new stuff, and then we had a summer break. So it's so easy to work together, because we work for like five or six weeks in the studio and then we don't meet each other at all. I sit down and write and Per sits down and writes and we do other things. It makes it so simple, it makes it so fresh all the time, when we come together and work together.

Digital Domination
PG: Yeah, the way you make records today is very different from how you did records in the mid-80's when we started out. You work with computers and ProTools systems or whatever, so the whole... way of thinking is totally different.
The negative side of it is that it's very easy to over-produce and to overdo things these days. I mean in the old days - not that long ago - you actually sat together, five people in the studio, and you played the song, and that was the take! (laughs) You don't do that any more, we don't do that any more.
You make the drums or the bass sounds or whatever on the computer... So of course it's different, and that changes the way you write and that changes the whole attitude.

Still Dressed For Success?
MF: It's always important with big hits! (laughs) No, we love, y'know, good pop and rock songs, we love strong melodies, we... It's always been our trademark, all our singles have always been really melodic, very easy to remember. Everything from 'It Must Have Been Love' to 'Joyride' to 'Sleeping In My Car' to... What is it? 40 singles or something like that... So that's, both of us, we really love strong melodies and straight pop and rock songs.
I think that nowadays, of course we want the new album to be very successful, of course, we've worked really hard for it, and we love to perform for our fans, it would be great if we could do another tour in the future. It's just that we are older. (laughs) In our hearts of course we want it to be really big.

Room Service
PG: Yeah, well, 'Room Service', the title 'Room Service', we thought it was... (laughs) what music is basically about, it fills up a room with energy and communication, so it's some sort of 'room service' isn't it? You're always trying to find some kind of concept or idea when you're making a new record. It might as well be called 'Roxette 7' or '8' or whatever it is...

Home Sweet Home
MF: This time we recorded the album in Stockholm. I think mostly we worked in the Polar Studios...
PG: Yeah
MF: And there was another studio called Atlantis. I think it's quite a big difference if you compare it to the 'Have A Nice Day' album, which was mostly recorded in Spain. So of course it makes it a little bit easier when you can work at home. Our homes are here, our families. But it was nice in Spain because the weather is so much better there than here at this time of the year, at wintertime.
PG: You get more things done in Stockholm because the weather is terrible here, so you spend more time in the studio. But it's fun working at Polar, it's cool, it's a great studio, it's got this ABBA, Led Zeppelin, Genesis legacy. It's still a very good studio, a great environment. Got some terrible restaurants down the road though...
MF: (laughs)
PG: But they have taxis in Stockholm, so it's no problem.

New Faces
PG: Well, making 'Room Service', as always we tried to bring in a couple of new people into the environment, so we changed engineers on this one for instance. And also we started working with a guy called 'Shooting Star', who is a programmer, a Swedish guy, who is 200 years younger than us...
MF: (laughs)
PG: ...so he's sort of got his ear to the street in a different manner, which is very interesting to do, because if I make a demo, for instance, and I give it to him and he starts to freshen up the programming, then it turns out to be a different song. So it's... well, as always, you buy a lot of records all the time, you listen a lot to what's going on... But - as I said before - with this album we wanted to make a classic Roxette album, so we tried to y'know, get a little of this, a little of that but still make it very obviously Roxette. So some of the songs still have the 12-string Rickenbacker stuff, some power chords, y'know... Classic stuff! (laughs)

Full-Time Job
PG: Well, I think... You don't really do anything, at all. I mean you don't really change your life or anything just to get inspiration for a new album. Life goes on, you do different things all the time, even when you're just finishing off an album, you start immediately thinking, going off in different ways. It's a constant process all the time, I mean, you just get on with your life. Interrupted occasionally by going to the studio! (laughs) ... and trying to make sense there. So it's nothing really. I think it's important though to try to... I think over the years, I think it should be a natural thing. It's our work. It's the way we communicate. You just go to the studio, you spend a lot of time in the studio and you make records. It's the way it's been since I was 19, y'know? It's a natural thing, and that's great because it's a natural way of doing things.

After All These Years...
PG: Well, when you start out as a young musician, everything is very romantic, y'know, the whole industry, going into a studio, whatever. Of course things change after a while and there's... nothing that... romantic left (laughs) in the music industry for us and so of course it turns out to be a professional thing in the end. But still it's important to maintain the love affair you have with music, I mean you have to be interested in music. You have to be interested in what you do. In that sense I don't want to be a professional, I still want to be a fan. And that approach is crucial, actually, to having success in the end. I mean you can always go to the 'How to Write a Hit Song' book and have a hit, but at the end of the day, it won't last. To have a career that goes on for a couple of decades, I mean, you have to be true to yourself. So...

Got Any Good CD:s?
PG: The last records I actually stole from my record company! (laughs) It was the Coldplay album, I think that's a very good album... There's a Swedish band called Eskobar, I'm a big fan of Eskobar, they've just done a new version of one of their songs, 'Tumbling Down'. I mean that style of music's not very new, it's a very traditional sort of pop music, for those of us that've been around for many years. But it still has a lot of energy and it makes sense, and it's great songwriting. And at the end of the day I think that's what it's all about...

Concept
PG: The good thing with a good title for the album is that you can actually use it on tour, on stage, in the packaging. What we did was, we went away to a strange hotel in California called the Madonna Inn, and we did a lot of the footage for the sleeve as well as the first video. So we used the hotel environment to make a point, and it turned out really well. And it also felt very fresh, because we'd never done that before.

Video Concept
PG: We haven't done a video where we've performed for many years, so we wanted to do a performance video, and the whole idea for the video is that we're performing in a room – well, in several rooms actually – and there's lots of people in other rooms, watching what we're doing on television, and lots of things happening in all these different rooms.
So it's basically a performance video, but it's just taking place in this peculiar place.

Madonna???
PG: Well, Madonna Inn, it's... The first time you see it you think it must be a joke, because it's so American kitsch,
from the 50ґs, it's unbelievable, but the people who own it and the people who work there take it very seriously. (laughs) And... It's for real. It's hard to describe but... All the rooms are... weird. There are pink rooms and red rooms and green rooms, and they have waterfalls in the men's room. All these big chandeliers... Christmas trees (laughs) It's unbelievable, and we tried to use that on the album sleeve and the video as well.
I'm so surprised that no one has used that place before because it's so special. Everyone knows about it, but nobody's worked there before. It's cool...

Sourse: Daily Roxette, 2001

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Room Service - Interview CD (album)
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Roxette - Room Service - Interview CD    (Promo)
Promotion interview CD
United Kingdom CD Roxette Recordings / CDIN 131 2001
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