David and his grandpa.

He's a bit weird, but in a good way. Maybe it's because he's from up north (Västerbotten) and uses words that ring nicely in my ears.

An album called "Om det inte händer nåt innan i morgon så kommer jag", which only consists of one song. This song is about David's grandpa - Sigvard Nilsson. The guy who made the record is David Sandström from Teg - a village that aided Umeå when it burned in 1888. He used to play drums for Refused and is now a member of The Facer.

David started playing for Refused in 1992 and continued to do so for 7 years. "I just found myself in that environment. It wasn't really because I wanted to make that kind of music, it just seemed to make sense. Lyxzén and I bonded and I got really caught up in it. When you hang out in a circle like that it becomes your whole world. We did Refused for a fucking long time and when it was over I was restless. I wanted to do everything at the same time because I hadn't been able to do other stuff for a while. I recorded a solo album just after we did "The shape of punk to come" though. We also began recording a last Refused album that Kristofer, Jon and I finished under the name Text. Since then I've been working with this latest thing - the grandpa album."

When I ask him why Refused broke up he simply answers that it wasn't as fun anymore. "It was typical, you can see any rock documentary. You can see a crappy movie like "Almost Famous" - it's basically the same thing."

When you hear the way he talks about music it seems almost silly to ask whether he's had other interests or projects, but when I ask him anyway he informs me that he had a promising career as a motocross driver, that he is an exceptional soccer player and that as a wrestler in his youth he was the worst but one in all of Västerbotten until the worst one died in a bizarre snowmobile accident.

Why do you call it "the grandpa album"?

"Because the record deals with my grandpa Sigvard Nilsson who was a smallholder in Degernäs, Västerbotten. At that time the swedish government had bereft the northern part of Sweden (Norrland) of it's most valuable resource: wood. They had funded the industrialization of the south by selling the raw, unprocessed timber to southern european countries and suddenly smallholding was considered superfluous and was settled in a few decades. All he wanted was to run a farm and that possibility was taken from him. He hung himself in 1968, he couldn't take it anymore, the world he wanted to live in and be respected by just disappeared. There wasn't room for him anymore.

David slips into the subject of Norrland's role in Sweden and vice versa. He says that a majority of the political activists in the late 90's focused on solidarity towards oppressed people in China, South America and USA, which of course is a good thing, but that noone in his or the younger generation cared, or even knew anything about Norrland's economic history; what the swedish government has done to its own people.

What kind of solution do you see to Norrland's problems today?

"I don't know. The regional politics are marked by some kind of emotional panic. They scatter the money sparsely enough so that nothing can happen. There's no focus on a specific problem; should we save the interior of the country or should we develop our cities? That's what's going on in Umeå; the city is still growing rapidly but nothing is happening with the downtown area, they just keep on building new residential quarters, the city is spreading out. It's weird how Degernäs, the village, is still there but the people who live there now are the ones that can afford to commute, they live in a museum. The old culture is gone though you can still se traces of it and the people there commute to town in their new Volvos. They built new ugly fucking houses next to the old beautiful ones.

Would your grandfather have liked the album?

"Yes, I think so. It's weird, I missed him by seven years but through this project I've interviewed people from the village and this woman in Degernäs who was the daughter in a family were he came to work as a farm-hand. I've talked to my mother and done some research into his situation and I've really tried to get to know him through all this. I've discovered sides of him that not even my mom knew about. Noone really talked about him, it was like he'd never existed. I never had much of an image of him but I've created my own through this project and I've figured out alot about how and who he was and that is fucking amazing. I saw him as depressive and dark, sort of dangerous. But he was a happy, positive man, just as stubborn as I am. It just got to be too much for him."

Was it because you wanted to know about your grandfather that you came up with the idea?
"It wasn't an idea really, it wasn't like I thought to myself: "-Hey, I should make a record about my grandfather". It was totally compulsive. It's often like that with things I do. They just turn up in my head and then I have no choice but to realize them. It's a responsibility I have towards myself. It wasn't like I thought it was a good idea, because it was a stupid fucking idea to do this record. It became too much, I almost burst under the pressure of this project. I started writing it three and a half years ago. I wrote most of it in the winter of 97-98. It was at first supposed to be an instrumental album. The different instrumental parts had their own functions already, they described different periods of his life. Words started showing up mainly to clarify musical passages, to underline this or that, to destill the essence. I made no effort to make the vocal parts seem connected; they show up where they show up, they're just hanging there. They didn't show up because I wanted to sing something nice or make a good melody."

How does it feel to share something so personal?

"The problem is that I built the whole thing. I don't want to expect anything from a listener. I don't want myself to sit and think: "People should view this like this or that way". It's like a person. You have your close friends and then you meet someone you really dig and you get worried. You don't want to present him/her to your friends because you're something might turn out wrong. They might not understand. I would like to be at home with people and wait until they're really in the mood, you know, when they sit down in their couch and they've been drinking some tea, before I push play. So that I'll know that they do it right. My brother and I drove around a lot in Västerbotten and searched for the most beautiful section. From Bygdsiljum to Norsö - that route is perfect for listen to the album while driving. There's a nice café in Bygdsiljum, "Westman café", in the summer they have peacocks in the open-air section. It's next to a little lake. You start there and then drive towards Norsjö. I'm neurotic about that, I think I should at least give people a chance. If they then choose to have it on low volume in the background while doing the dishes they can do that if they want to. If they think it sucks then at least I can blame it on that."

Does it feel like it is done?
"It is not about being done, it turned out good. We can say that there are about thousand different ways of playing a song and maybe three out of those thousand are really fucking good and I think I've found at least one out of those three." Laughter…

Are you happy with it?

"Yes, it was a nice process. I think we cut out about 30 minutes of music the last three weeks that we just through away." Doesn't that feel weird? "I work they way things just happens, I work in a compulsive way. I don't put a lot of judgment on my own part into it, it's more if it's interesting and works with the other parts that is interesting. There are parts of the album that I'm not really interssted in but they fit in nicely with the other parts so they are justified. There is a scale of eight choir singers that I see more as a Monty Pyton thing (laughter) but on the album it sounds serious and mature. I think that is odd. I think about they every time I listen to it, damn this is supposed to be as insane as the Monty Pyton sketch Spam." But your choir does not sing Spam= "No, no. They sing something really pretentious about the mythology of "slåttanna". That's how it sometimes is with my music; I don't really mean it but it works. I can hear when it works. If it's something that will appeal to someone we will see later."

Have you had any feed back about the record?

Yes, I got all the feed back I really need, my mom thought that I had succeed, that she got pictured from Degernäs when she heard the music, pictures from her childhood and my grand father. It is weird that his identity to us has been his absence, grandpa has been gone, his not being has been his part. He's there now my mom said to my brother. Now grandpa is there, he is on the record."

David works all the time with different things, he has problems with taking breaks and be totally out of work. It's nice to have some lighter stuff, like The Facer to keep occupied with when taking time outs from a heavier project like grandpa.
"I think that the grandpa thing was the climax of one thing. Everything is in place, fuck I talk too much…what I was thinking when I started to make music as a teenager. I've either been working on making good instrumental stuff which I've put a lot into or I've been writing lyrics that I've put a lot into and then made music to them afterwards. It feels like the grandpa record became a fusion of both those things. The most extensive I've done and far more sincere than before. It was really serious, it was important. It took one tone, that there was a story and that I - one of those fucking vegans from Umeå - took it and wrote it down, yes there is some kind of charge in that. I was really motivated throughout the whole album but it got overhand and I felt really bad, I didn't take care of myself. I get so tired of myself, that I'm always doing stuff and I thought that the next time I'm doing something it's going to something really easy that hits home at once. But everything just keep on happening, they just show up. Then I have to do something about it."

Is it difficult to do stuff yourself when you are so cought up in yourself?
"It can be both. Since I don't do anything else all of me has to go through the music. I have a life and the music has to be charged with everything that I want to get out of life. That sometimes makes the music strained and that's dangerous. That's the only negative thing I can see, that I all the time do everything a little too much, I go out too fucking hard."

The musicians playing on the record has been given a lot of liberty, he doesn't believe in having everything planned. "When it came to the string section it was like that, they are brought up to not improvise too much. But I forced them to improvise bizarre funk parts. They are educated musicians from the opera and I just stood around and waved at them, they got all exited and started to cutting the strings and strings just started flying everywhere. It was fucking amazing - an improvisation that run amok.

Is everything written in northern Sweden?
No, most of it was written in England. It was during a period while I was reading a lot of literature from Västerbotten. The biggest inspiration was from a passage in "Hjortronlandet" by Sara Lidman.

David tells me about his relationship with his grandma and that she was the one that turned him on to Sara Lidman. He thinks it is scary that many he knows don't have a close relationship to their grandparents.
"Sara Lidman had a constant presence throughout the whole process, she was there all the time. She was on documentaries on TV, a new book, she got an award and was in the paper, she held a lecture at the university and I got an opportunity to talk to her. It feels like I built the whole album on her spine, in her world."

"It was when I left Västerbotten for Scotland at some vegan bed and breakfast who had some crazy manger - they usually are, those rural vegans - that it all stepped out. I was sick of playing guitar so I tuned it differently and searched for different vibes and I suddenly found one and a riff appeared. In one way it felt old already when I wrote it, it felt like it was rooted in all the thoughts I've had about Västerbotten. It's hard to explain, bang, and there was all those parts, I felt that this will be a fucking long song… I'll have to make two parts out of it and then I just kept on dividing it as it kept on growing.

So it was originally just one song?

"It was one song the way I saw it, the whole album, one long instrumental song. We recorded it all, I was in the studio for a year and a half. During the first three months. I lived in the studio because I had nowhere also to live. I worked all day and all night and that was really fucking stupid, it became ineffective, you have to go there and go home. Then it was on and off for two years. It was apparent from the start what it was all about, the main riff that shows up in different places. It was just grandpa. It's hard to explain. I've never intended to explain, I don't think it's a good idea. It's something no one can really understand. It something that shows up, that bands and twirls. There's nothing there that I know anything about. When you've heard the album you know as much about it as I do. It's not mine, I don't see it that way. I would like to sell it, but there is no one there to buy this piece of shit.." (laughter)

Do you think the album will be something for people living in northern Sweden, that they will feel that it belongs more to them than anyone else?

"No, there's a of shit going around up there, they'll say "Who are you to go around and interpret my Västerbotten?" I've moved to Sundbyberg (Stockholm) so my voice in this debate doesn't count as much anymore. I think it should be able to be appreciated from the outside, from under.

The project was financed with help from the Swedish council of cultural affairs. With a lot of old debts and other problems he felt after his days in Refused that he to clear his mind should "play around with a demo". He did so and sent it away. After three months he got the message that 120 000 (about 1200$) had been put to his disposition and that he could start recording anytime.
"I wasn't really in a position to start then so I waited for a while. But when I finally started I ran out of money pretty quick. I recorded it with a guy called Henrik Oja who was really involved. If I fell asleep on the couch he would go into the studio and record the guitar, it is our record - Henrik's and mine. The economical part has been pretty tough. Thanks to The Facer I collected enough dough to carry on. The time it took to complete the whole thing I never paid for, it is Henrik Oja who really believed in the album and really wanted it to be finished, he felt that it was his album as well. He gave me free time, evenings and nights. It was gift, nothing I will never be able to pay back or something I have deserved. You just stand there and shake your head and it's hard to understand that there are people around like him. It's big, that people like that exists. On the edge of bankruptcy just because I didn't understand better. Henrik Oja. I call him Hoja, he's from Skellefteå."

Right now he is building a recording studio in Boxen . the collective where he lives, to get bigger opportunities to record when he wants to and not when other people has told him to do so. He hesitates a little when I ask if he think people will buy the record.
"It's easy to be freighted by such an album. When I started to make it, my aim was to make it into pop-culture because I wanted as many as possible to hear the story. But I have such a distorted picture of what that really is! This is to me pop music but it doesn't seem like I'm catching up on the norm of today. But it is beautiful. There are moments on the album where you really have to grab something. The footsteps at the end where he leaves in the morning. He gave up, he didn't have the resistance."

He says that you have to be as stubborn as he is to make something like this "it is 5% inspiration and 95% pure fucking stubbornness." The whole album is a paradox; "because if those thoughts and feeling that I bring forward on the record was my true attitude against the world then I would never had made the album". He talks about "going off on seeds", the music he says is a mixture of "indie grinding, Sonic Youth, Refused", mythology from Västerbotten and he is guided by Sara from Missenträsk who says that you are "angry enough to live." But most of all it's grandpa.