Peter Morén could have just chilled on being the cool guy from Peter Bjorn and John forever, right? But nooo, he had to go and create SunYears, his dreamy side project where he’s all about jangly guitars, deep feels, and serious sonic wanderlust. His latest SunYears album, The Song Forlorn, was released August 21 via Villa. What’s Going On caught up with Peter in the lead-up to the album’s release to talk about what makes SunYears distinct from his past work, the inspirations behind the album’s genre-spanning sound, his creative process, and so much more.
Jeromme Graham: SunYears feels like such an intimate, almost confessional space compared to your other projects. What is it about this particular outlet that allows you to be so emotionally vulnerable?
Peter Morén: Good question. I guess it all sort of took shape during the pandemic, and I was home alone a lot. I have a family, but I was in my apartment a lot and sitting by myself playing guitar.
I was supposed to go out on tour, but that didn’t happen. So I looked inward a bit more. And, also, just being alone, playing in new styles and trying new things and getting to the core of why I started doing music in the first place. I grew up in a really small village in a very rural area of Sweden, very different from where I live now in Stockholm. Back then, music for me was a lot about sitting by myself, thinking about things, getting into playing guitar and writing songs.
I’m in my late forties now. There are many things happening at this age. With middle age, if you’re open to it, you can almost be more vulnerable than before because your kids go through a lot of stuff, and you have to face challenges as a parent. Then you have your own parents who are getting older, maybe people around you are getting sick or are going through things, divorces, depressions, etc. There are all sorts of things. Also, you’re getting aware that you’re not eternally young or you’re not gonna be here forever. All these things, if you’re open to it, can inform the songs you’re writing.
JG: Do you write differently knowing that it’s a SunYears song versus a Peter Bjorn and John song or something that you’re writing for someone else?
Peter Morén: Yes and no. The thing with this project was that I made the first record essentially during the pandemic, and then it took a while before it came out. When that finally came out in 2023, I’d already started recording this new record because I just felt inspired. There are a couple of songs here that could have gone to Peter Bjorn and John because they’re not that different in the writing. Just kind of similar melodies and everything. But since I was in that headspace and I was inspired while doing the first record, I wanted to continue doing something quickly again.
I also have this thing about doing duets, which I did a lot of on the first record. So I did that on this record, too. And, also, there are some instrumental songs.
Some of these songs could have been Peter Bjorn and John songs, and not having to think about that, not having to think about the band with all the baggage we have and the long career and also not having to think about the other guys because we’re all really strong personalities. We’ve been together so long, and we know each other well, almost too well. When you bring a song to them, you think about how they’re gonna react, and you think, How would this fit? How will we arrange it? Not having to think about that made me freer in the writing, and I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t think about it, could this be a single? Or will John like this idea for the drums? Not having to think about anything like that and not having to explain the lyrics. All that kinda made me a bit freer, I think.
But you also said if I’m writing for someone else. I mean, definitely, because that’s a completely different thing. Obviously, with Peter Bjorn and John, even though it’s a band, you’re still gonna sing it yourself. But when writing for someone else, you have to talk to that person and get into their head. And so that’s a different experience.
Then, of course, there are a couple of songs on this record that I did co-write with other people. So, I mean, there’s never any fixed ideas. It’s more about maybe later what will go here and there, and what will fit.
JG: As you mentioned, you have a lot of collaborators on The Song Forlorn. You know, Lisa Hannigan, Nicole Atkins, Madison Cunningham. On the last record, I loved what you did with Ron Sexsmith. What draws you to collaboration so often?
Peter Morén: Specifically with this project, it was a pandemic thing. I think it started with the title track for the last record, “Come Fetch My Soul.” At that point, I was listening to the then-current Jess Williamson record. I can’t even remember the name of it, but it’s not the most recent one. It is an earlier one. I just thought about that song that I had just written, and thought, yeah, this will be nice as a duet because obviously I have a history of doing duets. But I was able to not think about, do I know these people? Do they live close to me? Can we work together in the studio? For me, that was a pandemic thing because most people were at home. So you could reach out to someone that you didn’t know and just ask them, send them a song and see if they wanted to sing on it. And everyone said yes because everyone was home.
It was a little like Christmas Eve getting the files back from a vocalist you really like and then thinking how do we arrange it and what phrases do I sing best, what phrases do they sing best, and putting it together. If it turns out well and you hear someone else sing your song, it’s almost like you can take a step back. It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience, and you like the song maybe even more. It becomes more emotional because it’s not you singing it. It’s a weird feeling, but I really, really enjoy it.
I do like writing songs with other people in different ways, but maybe not as a career. There are so many Swedish pop writers who only do that. They only write songs for other people, but it’s like an assembly line just churning out hits. And I’ve tried that a little bit, and I don’t think it’s for me. I can write for a specific project if I think I can deliver something that fits that project, but I can’t just write anything. Maybe I can, but I don’t enjoy it. Maybe that’s a better way of putting it. Yeah.
JG: You covered Sandy Denny’s “Like an Old Fashioned Waltz” and David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners.” Why did “Absolute Beginners” feel so resonant for you now?
Peter Morén: It’s a song I’ve loved since it came out. I wasn’t really into Bowie then as a kid. I didn’t know a lot about him, but I remember that song. I thought it was so powerful. And then he passed away all those years later. I was involved in organizing a charity concert in Stockholm, where all the money went to cancer research. There were a lot of different artists involved. I was hosting, but I also had to sing a song, and I picked “Absolute Beginners” because I always thought about wanting to sing that song at some point. It was with a house band, and it sounded like it was a similar arrangement to the actual recording of the Bowie original.
But then I kind of continued to sing that song. There was a friend who had a birthday party, and I just got up on a table and sang it by myself. That’s the thing with covers like this. It’s the same with the Sandy Denny song. I first sang that as I have a friend who wrote a book that was partly based on Denny’s life, but it was about her life and his own life kind of intertwined. He asked me to sing a couple of Sandy Denny songs for that book party, basically. Sometimes you stumble upon a song through something like that, and then you continue singing and and and really enjoying singing it. For me, I always enjoyed singing covers, when you almost, like, when you sing them so many times, so you don’t really think about the original anymore. You’re just like, oh, I love this song.
I think it’s kind of interesting to learn other people’s songs, because sometimes you don’t know if you’re gonna pull it off. It might be tricky. And the Bowie song is quite a tricky song, but I just love it. It’s a bit dramatic, no? It continues building. Part of the idea with the recording for me was that it comes from that 1980s period when the productions were so big and bombastic. Having taken the song out of that context and doing it a bit more acoustic and with pedal steel, it’s a very different scenario, but the melody is the same. At shows, it’s really fun for the live audience to hear new takes on these really classic songs.
JG: I especially love what you did with “Absolute Beginners.” You really made it your own while staying true to the original. There’s a real warmth and vintage quality to the sound of SunYears. What influences were you drawing from, or were there any particular records you had in rotation while making The Song Forlorn?
Peter Morén: Oh, that’s a really good question. When it comes to sound and recording, I don’t want to be doing any sort of retro lo-fi thing, even though the way I make and perform music is maybe in some sense dated. I want it to be as good, clear, and precise as possible in capturing the performance. I like it to be up-to-date and modern. When it comes to hi-fi sound, I think maybe pop music peaked in the late ’70s to early ’80s, in just full good sounds before synths and digital took over and made it all thinner. Even though the music I might reference isn’t always from that era, it’s still a touchstone when it comes to sound.
With the engineers I work with, they know the dry drum sound I generally like, the bass, vocal effects and such. Also, since there are not that many elements in most of the songs, it’s easy to make them pop out and be heard. I don’t want it to be too cluttered or messy, which is something I’ve brought with me from Peter Bjorn and John and which we often liken to hip hop or R&B production, but it is also applicable to classic small group jazz recordings of the ’60s or even most Beatles’ albums. Then there are songs where I go more wishy-washy and reverby with layered walls of sound deliberately as a contrast.
I do think my ears are pitched to mid frequencies, high mid and low mid and some lower bass rather than the most piercing trebles. If I’m thinking of more modern stuff that sounds good to my ears, at some point, I toyed with having the engineer for the Big Thief records like “Capacity” and “Two Hands” do some mixing for me, just because I like their sound a lot. Also, Madison Cunningham has a great group presentation on her records, straightforward and to the point. The same goes for Fenne Lily. All guitar music, of course.
Spoon’s records always sound fantastic, especially their latest, Lucifer on the Sofa.
The new Michael Kiwanuka record, Small Change, has a restriction that I admire and again a great presentation of the core elements.
Julian Lage’s latest record, Speak to Me, is, of course, more in the jazz realm, but it does speak to me. I also really like the ragged nature of Jeff Tweedy’s solo albums more so than recent Wilco. It sounds raw and improvised, but still really, really good. Great guitar and vocal sounds. When we mixed we did reference Blur’s The Ballad of Darren which I think was recorded after we recorded most of this album since it took so long to come out, but I just like how such classic pop/rock music can still sound so present and in your face modern and we did found out that it was rather compressed which can become tough on the ear if not used wisely but it worked wonders for some of our softer songs. Bill Ryder-Jones’ latest is a fantastic album which has less of my preferred sounds, but it was inspiring to the more reverby acoustic tracks like “Last Night on the Mountain” and “If You Were to Ask.” But when it comes to writing and arranging, my inspirations are less modern and more classic.
JG: So, between producing Robert Forster’s “Strawberries,” reuniting with Peter Bjorn and John for the Writer’s Block anniversary and the second SunYears album, you’re clearly in a very creative and collaborative and productive phase. What’s next? And are you already looking ahead to what’s to come?
Peter Morén: At the moment, I’m just doing interviews like this, and I’m still waiting to get the album from the press. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s not finished. I’m so particular about everything from the actual music and the mixes to the cover art. All of those things are still kind of being finalized.
Other than that, I’m always writing, and I think that’s a good thing about SunYears. It has made me a bit freer in my approach because when we started Peter Bjorn and John back in the day, I didn’t think about audiences. I didn’t think about being an indie musician. I just wrote for my own sake, and this has kind of bounced me back to that. I don’t really know where all these songs will go. I can’t really answer that.
At some point, we might have recorded two and a half Peter Bjorn and John songs that might come out next year if we are able to finish them. We’re gonna continue to tour next year, because next year is actually the twentieth anniversary of Writer’s Block, so we’re gonna milk that a bit more and maybe put out a single to go with it. But again, I don’t know. It’s not finished, so we’ll see. And, I’m also gonna tour with Robert Forster for his record this fall in Europe, and I know he wants to do some shows in Australia as well.
There’s gonna be a lot of live playing in the next couple of years and hopefully with SunYears, too. As you were kind of alluding to, it’s kind of my heart project. I want to continue exploring that and play those songs live if I can. It’s kind of hard to start a new project at this point. It’s hard getting the word out and getting people to connect the dots that it’s me. Because I also want the name. I don’t want it to be just me. It’s kind of in the middle between a band project and just being on my own. Definitely a different space. That’s why I wanted to start over again with this. Apart from that, I don’t really know. A lot of touring with different things and more recording, and there’s definitely a lot of songs that I have to finish. But it’s always easier to start the next thing after a release. You can get that out of your head, and then you start focusing on the next thing.
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