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Meja's
Stroboscope Sky, Yellow Ribbons & Sleepless Nights |
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Swedish singer, songwriter and human rights activist
Meja will be releasing her 11th album (two
of which were with Legacy of Sound)
Stroboscope Sky in April and it will feature original songs such as, “Blame
It On The Shadows,” and “Sleepless.”
Since making a big splash on the music
scene in both Sweden and America in the early to mid nineties with Legacy of
Sound and co-writing the Dance hit “Happy,” with Anders Bagge, a song that
charted on the Billboard top ten in America, Meja has become a music icon at
home in Sweden, a superstar in Japan and is highly respected in the American
music community, as well as many other countries. In addition to her songs
“Happy,” and “All ‘Bout The Money,” American music fans may remember Meja for
the duet and music video
“Private Emotion,” that she recorded with Ricky Martin.
Music however, is not the only thing that Meja is passionate about, as she is an
accomplished painter and sculptor and she is a human rights activist.
She is currently collaborating with
Amnesty International to draw attention to and to seek the release of an
American, Albert Woodfox from Angola prison in Louisiana where he has spent the
past forty-two years in solitary confinement for a murder conviction that has
been overturned three times by the American courts, but the state of Louisiana
has refused to honor those appeal decisions and Woodfox has remained in jail. Meja wrote the song “Yellow
Ribbon,” (not to be confused
with a song of a similar name made popular by Tony Orlando and Dawn) and on
January 15th of this year released
the companion music video to draw attention to the Albert
Woodfox situation. We asked her how the music video was received by those in
attendance in Stockholm.
As for what inspired her to write the song “Yellow
Ribbon,” and what prompted her to collaborate with Amnesty International, Meja
says, “It started with me coming back to my house on Christmas Eve in 2013.
Christmas is really hectic and I am Christmas allergic (she
laughs) to some extent. It gets to be a little too much. You have to buy,
buy, buy and people are running around. You have to be happy and you have to
meet this person and this person and you have to make all of the food and there
is so much at Christmas that it stresses me out.
I chose to leave the Christmas party quite early and I went home to my
house and I just sat down, had a glass of wine and I read my Amnesty
International magazine, just by myself. I found this article about Albert
Woodfox and it caught my interest and the question began rising, how on earth in
2013 at the time, is it legal to keep a person in solitary confinement for
forty-two years? It is beyond any (she
doesn’t finish the sentence, because it is beyond comprehension)….It is
torture. Of course I understand that you need to have solitary confinement for a
couple of months or whatever for people who are in need of being in solitary
that are real, real bad criminals, but forty-two years? That caught my interest
and I started to Google and I found all of these links on the internet
about this specific case. I wrote him a
letter the same night and I received an answer from Albert on January 9 th of
2014. I found a link on Youtube called
Who Are the Angola 3 and it is a documentary where I
found new information about the Angola 3, about the case, information about the
Black Panther party that I didn’t know before, because all that we know here in
Sweden is that the Black Panthers were angry young black men with guns who
wanted revolution with guns. Of course they must have been angry young men. Of
course that must have been the case with a few of them, but the other side of it
was they had all kinds of different programs and wherever they had Black
Panthers the community was huge. They had breakfast communities and they had
communities for kids and for the elderly. It was this huge social network thing
they built up to take care of each other. To be a member of the Black Panther
party there was a list of ten books that you had to read and you had to know the
books by heart, so you were educated and there were books about the legal system
and how things work, so you knew what you were fighting for.” Meja has been active with Amnesty International since
1998 when she, along with some other noteable Swedish artists recorded the song
“Tusen Röster,” (English translation: A Thousand Voices). “We did a local thing (the song “Tusen Röster,”) in
Sweden with Peter Jöback, Lisa Nilson and a whole bunch of Swedish artists that
joined together and we sang a song that was written by Mauro Scocco and Max
Martin. (Other artists included, Koop,
Dilba, Stephen Simmons, Plura, Uno Svenningsson, Ulf Lundell, Peter Lemarc,
Sophe Zelmani and Rebecka Törnqvist.) We recorded that song and released it
to support Amnesty here in Sweden. Since then I have been a member, read my
magazine and I support Amnesty International every month, but I haven’t been
active like I am now. I just decided when I was sitting there on Christmas Eve
and I read about Albert that I wanted to write him a letter. I explained my
situation and the nature and my dog and what I am doing. I tried to explain my
reality. Then when I got the letter from him that is when it fell into place. I
was sitting and writing the lyrics for a song that I had just received from my
producer and his sister. They had a melody and the vibe of the song, so I was
going to write the lyrics for it and I couldn’t. I was wondering what I was
going to write about. Then the same day I got the letter from Albert and the
words yellow ribbon popped up in my head and it just felt really good singing
yellow ribbon. I didn’t know what it meant, because in Sweden we don’t have that
tradition of the yellow ribbon. I went out and Googled it and I saw wow, this is
exactly what this thing is about with Albert and it is a welcoming home. It is a
freedom song. I want to tie yellow ribbons in all of the trees in the whole
world to welcome him out from his hell (editor’s
note: In some parts of America a tradition exists to tie yellow ribbons around
trees to welcome home those who have been imprisoned).” The Albert Woodfox case is not the first time that Meja
has become an advocate for a matter concerning human rights. “It is the way that I am as a person, I have always been
involved with different causes. I built a school in Tibet. I have been
supporting the Swedish Tibetan Society for a school in culture for fifteen years
or something. I have this school that I built to help these kids in this little
town in Tibet. Also, my family, we are supporting a group of child orphanages in
India. We try to go once a year and we hang with the kids and it becomes a
personal thing. We support these kids. We hang with them for a week, but of
course we help them and we pay for their school, their food and all of that
stuff. I am also an ambassador for the Non Violence project, which is the
knotted gun that was founded when John Lennon was shot. That (being an
ambassador) goes on and on and on. It’s a lifelong thing until you feel that you
can’t support that cause anymore. There was a Swedish artist called Carl Fredrik
Reuterswärd and he created it in ’85 or something like that. He is still around
and he lives close to me at Torekov and he founded this and when John Lennon was
shot that was one of his inspirations. Now you have this powerful symbol and you
have original statues standing outside the United Nations in New York and in
Luxemborg and this one in Sweden (Editor’s
note: in addition to several other locations in Sweden, replications of the
sculpture also exist in Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and France). Yoko
Ono is a part of this whole thing and so you have different artists and sports
people that are ambassadors as well and what we have all done is to decorate our
own gun. Every ambassador has their own design for their own gun. I have a
symbol (that she used
previously as a stage decoration
during her performances) that is a drop and I made that drop as a disco
ball drop. We had it covered with this plastic glass and I haven’t been using
that one for ages, so I just thought I could transfer it to being on the gun
instead. I took all of these hundreds of small pieces off of the drop first with
a hammer and a nail and then after that I placed them on the gun by hand, piece
by piece to make it sort of fit together. It took tremendous time to put it in
place, but the first result I think turned out really well. It was not by chance that Meja ended up with a music
career, as a highly respected international recording artist and an accomplished
painter and sculptor. Those influences began with her grandfather Per Lundqvist. “I
grew up with having music and art around me. My grandfather was a composer and
he was writing everything from ragtimes to songs to a piano concert to full
orchestra and rhapsodies. He would make pieces for a horn orchestra. He wrote a
lot of different types of music. He was in charge of the orchestra on Sveriges
Radio (Swedish Radio)
for about twenty years or
something like that. He was a music director and a composer. At one point he was
at the Swedish opera where he used to work with Jussi Björling the fantastic
Swedish tenor and he worked with all of the people who were at the Swedish opera
at the time. He was really a big influence for me. I grew up sitting by the
piano and listening while he was doing his compositions and he was writing down
everything, all of the harmonies for a full orchestra by hand, like Mozart or
Chopin would do. Also my mother was recording when she was around eight
or something like that. She was a singer and she wrote some songs with my
grandfather. They released those songs on television and they did the LPs and
stuff like that. Then she decided when she was eleven or twelve that she wanted
to be a painter. She quit the music. That is why I have the art. She has been
painting my whole life,” she recalls and you can hear the warmth in her voice,
as those memories with her grandfather and mother come to life again.
We posed the question to Meja whether or not her other
artistic endeavors gave her an opportunity to step away from music and just
relax. We received a bit of a surprising answer. “I find myself being slightly over creative, so I never
really relax in my head and when I started surfing I think that helped me to
take all of the thoughts out, because I really can’t think of anything else when
I am on the water, as there is so much else going on. That helps me to keep my
head clear,” she says. Then of course there is Chaplin, her little white dog,
her constant companion and whom she absolutely adores and he adores her. What
more could a woman ask for? “I have always been writing and the creativity when it
comes to writing and writing poems and short stories. I started to write my
first poems when I was six years old, so the writing has always been my main
force. I remember I had always been singing in choirs since I was six. Singing
in choirs has been a big part of my musical education. It is a great team
building thing where you just have to be one in the group and you have to listen
to each other to function as a whole and it is really, really good. That is what
I was doing and singing at home. I moved to Mallorca when I was fifteen and I went to
school. Through my mother I met a Jazz musician called Stephen Franckevich and he
was from New York originally. He was a fantastic guy and I kind of got caught up
in (Jazz), because he was a fantastic trumpet player and a singer. My mother has
been listening to Jazz at home my whole life, but it hadn’t been my kind of
music, until I heard it live when I was sitting in the Jazz clubs in Mallorca, a
fifteen year old in the Jazz clubs. All my friends were hanging out at the
discotheques and dancing to whatever music was popular at the time, but I would
be sitting in the Jazz club (she chuckles)
listening to the guys playing. That influenced me a lot and he (Stephen) tried
to drag me up on stage. He would say you have to sing a song, but I was too shy.
I never wanted to do that. It took a few years for me to figure out that I
should really try to do this. Once I made up my mind I moved back to Stockholm
and that’s where it all took off,” says Meja. Meja’s original reasons for moving to Mallorca to study
had very little to do with music. “I went to Mallorca first, because I wanted to
study languages and Spanish and all of that, so the school was the main purpose
of me going to Spain. Then I got introduced to all of these people and I found a
different international scene than we have here in Sweden, meeting people from
other cultures and languages and influences that made a lot of difference from
being brought up in Sweden.” Meja has recorded a few songs in Spanish and on her
Mellow album she recorded one in
Portuguese, but she confesses, “I have this thing for Dutch (she
laughs lightly). I don’t know why, it’s kind of round and friendly and it
sounds funny. It has the round thing that American English has as well. It is
rounded, sounds nice and it sounds friendly.” After returning to Sweden Meja met Brad Vee Johnson, an
American from New York who was living in Stockholm at the time and who had put
together a cover band. Meja says, “He was the main guy and we were three girls,
singing backup and singing our solo songs.” It was also about this time, in the early 1990s that
another music professional’s star was rising, renowned Swedish songwriter,
producer and sound engineer Douglas Carr (Acqua, Ace of Base) who was working at at the famous
Cheiron Sutdios and Cheiron Records founded in Stockholm, by Denniz PoP and Tom
Talomaa. Carr recalls, "Someone called in this girl to sing
background vocals on a song. While Meja, was in the vocal booth and I was
adjusting a mic-pre amp and eq'ing her voice I remember I looked up, turned
around and just said instinctively, wow, what a nice voice! Wouldn't it be great
to record an album with that tone of hers! It's wasn't until Meja and I were way into the writing
and recording of her first solo thing that I started to recall that it was her
who was in front of the mic at Cheiron when I had that "moment" of what a great
voice she has.”
We (Karlsson and Meja) started talking about doing
something together and it was Lasse who introduced me to Douglas again. We made
this team with Lasse as the manager and Douglas as the producer and me the
artist and then we started writing songs and creating the first album that was
out through Sony Music in 1996. We released the first single in Sweden and it
didn’t really do anything and then somehow the Japanese office heard about this
album and they totally fell in love with it. Suddenly “How Crazy Are You?” was
climbing all of the charts in Japan. It happened in Japan (first) and then
Sweden went, what’s this? Have we missed anything?” Watching Meja perform today and watching some of her
earlier performances, what strikes one right away is her ability to interact
easily with her audience and her command of the stage, but she says those things
did not always come easily to her. “I can still feel insecure talking in front of an
audience. I just have to make sure that I really know what I am going to say and
all of that stuff. When I was singing backup with Brad Johnson and we had the
cover band and all of that and I remember the first time that I sang my own song
and Brad chose for me to sing a song called “Everything I Miss At Home.” It is a
ballad. It is a very beautiful song, but it is very difficult to sing. You
really have to be one hundred percent power when you are singing it and I was so
fucking nervous. We had this guy who was a really good stylist and he put really
good clothes on us. I had this short skirt on and my knees were going like
maracas (she imitates the sound of
maracas) while I was singing. I couldn’t have my hand on the microphone
stand, because I was so nervous and the whole stand would shake like crazy, so I
would leave the mircrophone in the stand. I would hold onto the stand like it
was a tree and then when I was standing there I felt my upper lip going (she
imitates the sensation of quivering lip) and I was shaking as well. I was
this whole power of nerves. (She laughs)
I definitely had a natural reverb going on (she
says repeating my words). I was
really struggling in the beginning to get rid of that nervousness, because you
can hear it in the voice. The vocals wouldn’t be straightforward, really clear,
crisp and (were not) so secure. They would be more wobbly. I was fighting with
that for a long time and then after that I was just, I don’t know…I am really
lousy when it comes to rehearsing and I never take any singing lessons. I never
do anything like that. It is pretty much me when I walk up on stage. If I
rehearse something I will pretty well forget it anyway. I don’t think so much, I
just am,” she says. Meja refers to her first tour in Japan, “It was crazy.
The strongest experience that I had was on the first tour that we did of Japan.
We had been rehearsing and planning everything and then we went to Japan and we
did the first show in a theater I think about 4,000 seats. I had no idea of what
was going to happen, because we had just been rehearsing at home in Sweden. Then
I ran out on stage and I was welcomed by 4,000 people, just standing up
screaming “I love you.” All of that energy from these people got right to me and
I just started crying. It was like this massive cloud of love that just
bombarded me. It was fantastic, but it took me by surprise, because I didn’t
know what to expect. I had been doing festivals and things like that, but this
was in the theater and with this intense energy. “How Crazy Are You?” opened up Sweden and the Nordic
territories and Japan, but “All
‘Bout the Money,” hit everywhere. “All ‘Bout the Money,” is a
bigger song as a song. We were working on the second album, as always we were
writing and recording a lot of that album in Douglas’ (Carr) apartment. We were
sitting down in the kitchen as we normally did with a guitar, drinking coffee
and fiddling around. He had this riff going with this hooky thing and I started
singing some kind of a melody and then it felt nice to sing
All ‘Bout the Money. I had this idea
that I wanted to sing about that and make it a hidden political song in a way.
There is so much shit going on and what people will do for money is just
insane.” It would appear that it is Meja’s willingness and
ability to be transparent, genuine and natural when she is on stage that draws
people to her and to her music. Those in the music industry that know her echo
those sentiments and it is reflected in the songs that she writes. We mentioned the song “Sleepless,” earlier and Meja
shares the backstory to the song. “I wrote “Sleepless,” a few years back when I
was living in Mallorca. It is the fruit from lying awake at night and thinking
and being worried and wondering. You can’t really sleep, because there is so
much going on in your head. There are people around you, family and friends who
you are worried about. It is kind of a little worried song and then having it as
a support in a way. “Blame
It On The Shadows,” is also connected to that. It is the first song
that I wrote with Nicolas (Gunthardt), the producer of
Stroboscope Sky. When you look back
into childhood there is so much stuff that happens all of the time and that you
take on as a kid. There are things happening and oh it must be my fault. This
should be this and maybe this has to do with me, but things occur when you are a
child and you don’t have anything to do with it really, it’s like the grownups
world. That is a little bit what the song is about. The years go on and you find
yourself (she starts to laugh) in the
couch with the shrink going through this and talking about that. At the end of
the day you can talk about things forever, but at some point you just have to
let it go. Things happen and I think that it is important that you look into it
and you talk about it and you get it out of your system.” As for 2015 Meja says, “I am starting off slowly and I
hope “Yellow Ribbon,” will last another two or
three months, that the song will live that long. You never know how long a
single is going to be around, but I hope it is going to be picked up on radio
all over the place to be able to support this cause. I am also doing Pledge Music a crowd funding thing. It
is like Kickstarter. I am going to sell things that I like. I have homemade
hats, there is music and some things that I have worn on different cover shoots,
(as well as) some art pieces. I want to work further on this project with
Amnesty International and Albert Woodfox. There is nothing that I get. There is
no money involved in this of course. Everything is charity and we need to get a
little help on the way to be able to continue. April 17 th is the
release date of Stroboscope Sky and
on April 17 th Albert Woodfox will have been in solitary for forty-three years.
We are planning on doing something on April 17 th and that is why I am doing the
crowd funding, so we can support the whole thing and we can do something really
cool for him. We have a few ideas that we are working on. We will release it on my own label (Seven Sisters
Network) to begin with and then we will see. It would be great if I could have a
record company to come on and to join in, but for the time being there is so
much that I have had to work on, so I haven’t really had the time to sell it
into any record company yet,” she says. You
can visit Meja on her website or on
her official Facebook page.
You can also
visit Meja's art website.
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“It was fantastic. It was really, really the way that I
wanted it to be. 
I (started) doing a lot of studio work and I went out on
tour with Rob'n'Raz DLC, but then Anders Bagge (Janet Jackson, Celine Dione,
Jennifer Lopez, Santana, Madonna) came down to a place where we
were playing and he saw me one night. He dragged me to the studio the day after
and then we started working. That work turned out to be the Legacy of Sound’s
first album. That is how it evolved. It is all about timing. We did two albums
with Legacy of Sound and I think Canada was one of the main markets for the song
“Happy.” With that song in America on Billboard we were up on the Dance top ten
charts. It was released in twenty-four countries and that was the first single.