‘Fans stole my underwear – and even my car antenna’: How Roxette made it have to be love | culture

Per GesellSinger, songwriter, guitarist

In my early twenties, I was a member of the biggest band in Sweden. But after two generations Tider [Golden Times] I broke down, and I was depressed for two years. Initially, Roxette only came together when our singer Marie Fredrickson was not busy with solo things. To keep her in the band, I needed to make it work, so I was very excited.

At that time, with the exception of Abba, Sweden was an underdog. Our goal was to reach other Scandinavian countries, or even Germany. But EMI Germany couldn’t get us on the radio, so they suggested I write a Christmas song. I wrote It Must Be Love (A Christmas for the Broken Hearted), as it was originally titled, on the grand piano in my house in Halmstad. I actually started it as a love song: “It must have been love, but it’s over now.” But after requesting the German sign, I added a single reference to Christmas in the second verse. It was spring and it didn’t feel like Christmas.

My demo had bad vocals, because the song is really hard to sing, but Mary was up to the challenge. We recorded it just in time for Christmas 1987 and in Sweden it went to number five. But EMI Germany hated it and didn’t want to.

Two years later, after we had other hits, EMI called from Los Angeles and asked me to write a song for Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. The soundtrack already included David Bowie and Robert Palmer, but we were about to fly to New Zealand, so I told them I was very busy. Then I remembered “The Christmas Song.”

We quickly went back to the studio, changed the lyrics of “Christmas Day” to “Winter’s Day”, and added a new guitar melody at the beginning. Not long after, director Garry Marshall called me and said, “I wanted to tell you that when your song plays in the movie, there’s no dialogue. It’s just 55 seconds of your music that drives the entire movie.” The rest is history.

One time, after we got huge, we had 2,000 people outside our hotel room in Buenos Aires singing our songs all night. David Coulthard later told me that all the Formula 1 drivers were staying there the same evening and were really upset because they couldn’t sleep. I got 4000 cards for my birthday. I’ve had people sleep in my yard, steal my underwear, and even my car antenna! Today, the song has close to one billion streams.

People think it’s a powerful song, but it’s not. Production is sparse. It doesn’t need strong strings or big orchestrations: all the power is in Marie’s voice. She had the ability to pour her heart out. After I got sick, she came to one of my solo shows in Amsterdam and I asked her if she wanted to join me on stage. She did not sing in public for eight years but made an appearance and sang “It Must Be Love”. I have never seen so many people cry in my life. Mary got so much energy from that that she wanted to release another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a few more years.

Clarence Öfwermanproject

An engineer friend of ours had just bought a studio in Stockholm that had a Synclavier, one of the first digital sample synthesizers, so a lot of It Must Have Been Love was produced by programming. Then we added drums and guitar at EMI studios. I improvised a piano solo, the only time I’ve ever done that. Immediately after the solo, there is a big key change where Mary suddenly sings much louder. It’s really hard to sing like that, but she gave a great vocal performance.

It wasn’t a festive tune, so we didn’t try to make it Christmassy, ​​with bells or anything. For the second version, Mary came again to sing the changed line “A Winter’s Day”. Otherwise the two versions are not different. For the second song, though, the Los Angeles mixing engineer put a load of gated reverb on the snare drum that he called his “lucky snare,” because it was already on about 10 of the singles.

Before the movie came out, we had almost forgotten about the song and weren’t playing it live. Then suddenly she was hit brutally. I never got to meet Richard Gere or Julia Roberts, but I will always remember that first day in the studio together. Per made us T-shirts that said: “Today Sweden, tomorrow the world.” We all laughed and said, “It happened to Abba, but it will never happen again.” And then I did.