Is Love Pop or Not?
Johanna Hedborg
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Despite the name, El Perro Del Mar is not Spanish, but rather — just like José Gonzalez and I'm From Barcelona — from Sweden, where melodies flow like akvavit and moods oscillate like the subpolar seasons between sunshine-giddy and despondently dark. El Perro's emphatically on the latter axis: The singer, born with the rather less mellifluous name Sarah Assbring, has to date offered up three albums of poignantly evocative, achingly melancholic music which bears a fluctuating but always intriguingly complex relationship to the notion of pop. After an eponymous debut that cribbed its ba-ba-bas from '60s girl groups and a liturgically informed follow-up of spare, hymnlike intensity, her surprisingly easy-pleasing third — the concise but immersive Love Is Not Pop — finds her working with Rasmus Hagg of the blissed-out organic-electronica duo Studio, and gleaning some of that group's lush, dubby fluidity. I caught up with Ms. Del Mar by phone as she holed up against the rain in an NYC café.
City Paper: It's been especially lovely listening to your album with all these rainy days we've been having. Somehow it's hard to imagine any of your music being made in sunlight. What time of year did you work on this album?
El Perro Del Mar: I started working on writing songs last summer, here in New York, in the middle of the hottest month. I was in a pretty bad state emotionally, right in the middle of a breakup. The initial idea around the album came about in New York, but the good parts, the inspirational parts, happened later, when I was living in Paris — both cities were really important to the album. The actual recording took place in Sweden, really quickly, in a really fun and creative atmosphere. I wanted it really minimal in length — I had things I wanted to say, and I wanted to say them and nothing more. I wanted it to go fast and it did. All in all writing and recording took about three months.
CP: You made the first two records pretty much all on your own, right? How did the collaboration with Rasmus Hagg happen, and what was that process like?
EPDM: After I finished my second album, I felt that I had reached a point where I could not do something on my own for the next thing. ... I knew that I had to bring in someone else, and he was the only person that I really considered wanting to work with. So I finished the songs, handed him a demo, and he went and experimented with them — he was into toying around with drums; we spent a lot of time fixing a proper drum sound. When it came to the vocal recording, I'm used to doing that on my own, and I'm very private about recording my vocals. We each worked on things individually and passed them back and forth, and then we'd have other sessions together. So it was private and social, by turns.
CP: What do you mean by "Love Is Not Pop"?
EPDM: It was kind of the theme of that year for me. Everything seemed to be about love and music and pop, but at the same time, not. During the time I spent in Paris, I saw Last Tango in Paris again — there's a scene where Maria Schneider is talking to her husband-to-be, and he says to her: "Love is pop" — as in, something that is very easy to do — with regard to talking about marrying. And she's involved in this seedy relationship with Marlon Brando, which is very mysterious to her; her life is totally in chaos, and she's thinking about marrying this square guy and is really upset and she yells back at him: "Love is not pop!" And I knew that was all my life was about at that time, and that was the title of the album. It's an enigmatic sentence, it's not supposed to be anything specific, but it's a way for me to describe the way things were then: It was very easy and very hard and very rosy and very dark.
CP: I noticed that the album ends with a joke: "This isn't over till I say when ... when." Which seems uncharacteristic for you.
EPDM: Yep.
CP: That's pretty pop.
EPDM: Exactly. There's another thing that people might miss out on sometimes: that I'm always close to, or glimpsing toward, irony and humor in my music. And I'm like that as a person. If you don't know me you think that maybe I'm all dark and sad all day, but that's not the case.
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