‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Perfecting Pop With the Swedes, “Lovefool” Edition

60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 107 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.

The Cardigans form in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1992. The Cardigans consist of guitarist Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and lead singer Nina Persson. Nina had never sung before, but Peter and Magnus were like, Trust us on this. Peter and Magnus both started out as metal dudes. They played in heavy metal bands—as did Max Martin, come to think of it—but they got sick of metal, and now they’d like to play in the poppiest pop band ever born. And the Cardigans will devote their lives to proving that pop and metal are quite tonally similar, at least the way they do it. They do that in a song called “Rise and Shine,” and this one’s called “Black Letter Day.”

And here’s the whole ball game, really, with Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans: She sings beautifully and exquisitely and elegantly and delicately even when she’s singing what could totally be Metallica lyrics. James Hetfield totally would’ve written and barked out a song called “Black Letter Day” if he’d thought of that title first. James Hetfield got so mad when he heard this song. The first Cardigans album, called Emmerdale, comes out in 1994; the album cover is a blurry photo of a dog. It’s an extremely 1994 album cover, I have to say. A blurry photo of a dog perfectly sums up the dominant vibe of alternative rock in 1994. Time for a piano ballad.

This song is called “After All,” and it sounds like Nina is singing directly into your ear, which means that the t in the word insanity is really going to pop when she sings the word insanity. Is she singing, “I’m scaring close to insanity”? Because if she is, James Hetfield is so pissed he didn’t think of that first. James Hetfield is pissed regardless, obviously. You want the chorus? Do you think you can handle the chorus? Well, let’s find out!

And this, too, is an extremely 1994-type vibe, yes? Tremendous darkness in a tremendously bright package. This bait-and-switch approach is not exclusive to the Cardigans, or exclusive to Sweden for that matter, but it feels exclusive, it feels fresh and freshly unsettling when the Cardigans do it. Talking in early 2023 with a newspaper called The New European, Nina says, “Isn’t it a universal thing, really? If you made stats, there are few pop or rock songs that are only bright—that’s very rare. The rest of them are dark! I’ve always had a hard time talking about the Scandinavian mentality, but I think it’s art in general. I think what we are drawn to—which might be a Scandinavian thing—is to sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ your product; put it in a costume of something that’s light and upbeat.” All right, so time for something light and upbeat. Name that tune!

And then the Trojan horse opens up and oh, shit, it’s the Cardigans’ cover of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Told ya pop and metal were quite tonally similar! Take it, Ozzy!

Songs That Explain the ’90s, the Book

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I feel as though Ozzy and Nina would really get along. I don’t think Nina Persson would bite the head off a bat or snort a line of ants or befoul the Alamo, but she sings as though she’s considering doing all of those things. All right, we got ourselves an intriguing and sweetly confrontational Swedish alt-rock band with sophisticated pop overtones; time for the second Cardigans album. You know the greatest feeling in the world? You wanna know my favorite thing? I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: It’s when you love a song, but you totally forget about that song, and then you hear that song again years and years later, and you fall in love with it for the first time but also simultaneously realize that you’d already fallen in love with it.

The second Cardigans album is called Life, it comes out in 1995, and we have leveled up in terms of brightness, cheeriness, catchiness, and also, possibly, subversion. There’s an exclamation point in this song title.

That song’s called “Hey! Get Out of My Way.” There’s Nina, on the cover of the Life album, smiling extra brightly, lying on her stomach in a powder-blue dress with furry sleeves, propped up on her elbows with a little sunflower pinkie ring, her feet crossed and dangling in the air, and she’s wearing ice skates, and it occurs to you, pretty immediately, that ice skates are just blades for your feet. Hey! Hey! Get out of her way. This song’s called “Tomorrow,” and it’s as close as Jönköping, Sweden, has ever gotten to Motown.

Is morning a sugar kiss, though, really? The Cardigans are not setting the world or the pop charts on fire at this point. But they are building toward something, and this precise three-year span, 1994 to 1996—post-grunge, pre–nü metal, post–alternative explosion, pre-Napster—this is a great time to be building toward something, pop subversion–wise. The third Cardigans record, released in 1996, is called First Band on the Moon. Nina, in a 2014 interview, says, “Every record we have made with the Cardigans has been a counter-reaction to the previous one. And by then we were really tired of everybody calling us cute, after having done sort of cute and ethereal—we felt like we weren’t easy listening. We weren’t taken serious. So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking.”

As an added bonus, this song has the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on this whole record. Get a load of how rad this guitar riff is:

Y’know how Black Sabbath–esque that guitar riff is? It’s the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on an album where, just for emphasis, the Cardigans cover Black Sabbath again.

Yes, the Cardigans do “Iron Man,” and I used to play the Cardigans cover of “Iron Man” all the time on college radio, and I’d be just tremendously pleased with myself. As an added bonus, this record, First Band on the Moon, has another track that went semi-arbitrarily viral on TikTok in the spring of 2023, and I love it when semi-arbitrary ’90s songs go viral on TikTok; that doesn’t make me feel weird or old at all. It’s called “Step on Me,” and Nina means it literally.

That’s the sped-up TikTok version of “Step on Me.” I feel great. This phenomenon of speeding up songs for TikTok, I understand that perfectly. I don’t feel like my bones are grinding themselves to dust and blowing away in the wind at all. That quote of Nina’s, about wanting to be taken seriously and be more respected and gritty and rocking on this record, there’s one last part to that quote, actually. She says, “So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking. But then we made ‘Lovefool’ on that record, so we like totally dug our grave.”

And maybe there is nothing that I could do. The mass appeal of “Lovefool” was immediately, painfully obvious to everyone, and that includes the band—this song’s mass appeal was painfully obvious while they were still writing it, before they sped it up. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Nina says, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record—which, objectively, it still is. Before we recorded it, it was slower and more of a bossa nova. It’s quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.