Tim: Paul had a somewhat decent Melodifestivalen entry this year which got him through to the final; I don’t know why he didn’t go with this one, though, as it’s much better and he’d only need to chop a few seconds off.
Tim: The PR bumf for this comes with the line “I wanted to pay homage to the ‘ugly side’ of a relationship”, and so I was initially “oh, great because no-one’s done that before”, but I decided, against all my natural cynical instincts, to give it a good chance, and I’m glad I did.
Tom: I’m not convinced it’d work as a Eurovision track, but I’ll agree that it’s a better song. There are some lovely choices by both composer and producer in that chorus.
Tim: The thing that impresses me most about it is how, whenever he’s singing, there’s really very little instrumentation going on underneath – a light guitar in the verse, a drumbeat in the chorus – and so the vast majority of the song it carried solely by his vocal and the floaty underline bit (there’s probably a better name for it but you know what I mean), and both of those sound good, for individual reasons.
The voice, because it’s strong, emotive and powerful, and the floaty bit (yep, sticking with it) because it gives a lovely pleasant ambience to the song.
Tom: Right! And both singer and producer need confidence in those vocals in order to put them this clearly in the mix. I’m not sure it’s necessarily “stripped-down” instrumentation, which was the term I was going to use — it’s just produces so it backs up the vocals rather than competes with them.
Tim: So we’re given two things to focus on, both of which work well – and I think that’s a good recipe for a song.