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MELODIFESTIVALEN

A Canadian at Melodifestivalen: Laurell Barker on Sweden’s biggest stage

Back in 1988, a 20-year-old by the name of Celine Dion won the Eurovision Song Contest in Switzerland. Will Vancouver-born Laurell Barker this year be the second Canadian to win?

Published: 17 February 2023 16:40 CET
A Canadian at Melodifestivalen: Laurell Barker on Sweden's biggest stage
Will Vancouver-born Laurell Barker be the second Canadian to win this year? Photo: Janne Danielsson/SVT

The 43-year-old singer and songwriter is no stranger to musical success back home in Canada, winning “Best Pop Album of the Year” at the Western Canadian Music Awards, and a JUNO for “Dance Recording of the Year”.

She was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, to parents who originally came from Liverpool in the United Kingdom, and since being brought to Sweden by love five years ago, she’s been gradually making her mark this side of the Atlantic.

This Saturday, Barker will be competing as one of the seven acts in the third heat of Melodifestivalen. If she wins, she could represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest, performing her song in front of an estimated 170 million viewers worldwide.

This will not be Barker’s first rodeo in Melodifestivalen, nor even in the Eurovision Song Contest. If you saw last week’s show, you might have noticed her in the green room alongside 18-year-old Ukrainian Maria Sur, Barker being one of the songwriters behind Maria’s song ‘Never Give Up’.

Despite this being the first time Barker has performed on the Melfest stage, this song is her ninth entry as a songwriter in the competition, and she has written or co-written six songs in the Eurovision Song Contest, including Switzerland’s fourth place entry in 2018.

She told The Local that this year felt like the moment to try her hand as an artist in Sweden’s most watched TV entertainment competition, with her entry ‘Sober’, a party-pop number with lots of energy she describes as being “playful, trippy and very bratty”.  

“I think I am kind of all of those things,” she laughed in the interview. ‘Sober’ is about a big night out with friends, where even though the party has not started yet you meet a person that gets you to feel a bigger buzz than anything you have felt before.”

In a true only-at-Eurovision moment Barker is being joined on stage by four dancers with mice mascot heads bobbing around her among LED screens showing psychedelic patterns.

Apart from her love for her new hometown, Malmö, Barker believes one of the great benefits to moving to Sweden has been access to the Swedish music industry, an export powerhouse of pop music.

Her 2021 hit ‘Habit’ now has over 51 million streams on Spotify

Barker believes that there are numerous factors behind Sweden’s success, including “world class production quality” and songwriters she believes are more open to modulate and use interesting chords in their music.

Plus she describes the Swedish population as “beautifully musical”, adding “everyone here knows how to sing.”

“I think there is a level of excellence and the willingness to sit with a song and make it the best it can be. It’s about carving out and crafting a song, songs are re-written over and over again here and that’s why so many great songs are written in Sweden.”

And of course it is these great songs that make Melodifestivalen such an annual success on TV, but also in the Swedish charts.

On Saturday, Barker will be competing against six other acts for just two automatic spots in the final on March 11th at Friends Arena.

The overwhelming favourites to take one of the final spots are the Norwegian twins Marcus and Martinus, but it is anticipated that over half a million viewers on Saturday night will vote (many using the free Melodifestivalen app), and it is up to the people to decide the winner.

Melodifestivalen’s third heat is being held in the Sparbanken Lidköping Arena and will be broadcast on SVT 1 from 8pm on Saturday.

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EUROVISION

So why does Sweden ‘love Eurovision too much’?

'Please don't be angry with us, we just love Eurovision too much," went the chorus of the cabaret number Sweden's host Petra Mede performed at Thursday's semi-final with Schlager start Charlotte Perelli. But did they really explain Sweden's Eurovision obsession?

Published: 11 May 2024 15:39 CEST
So why does Sweden 'love Eurovision too much'?

“Yes we’re slightly obsessed, but this competition is what we do best”, asserted the tongue-in-cheek song, written by scriptwriting trio Edward af Sillén, Daniel Réhn och Mathias Venge.

The song put Sweden’s Eurovision obsession and the resulting success down to the country’s dark, cold winters and the way schools promote music among the young. 

“You have to understand this is Sweden. It’s cold and dark. we were desperate for an effort to ignite a spark. So this contest gave us the idea, to show you all we’re more than depression and IKEA,” Perelli explained in the song’s break. 

“In Sweden we teach our kids in school more than history and sports,” Mede takes over. “They learn that the Eurovision is cool, and non-political of course. That writing songs is the ultimate success, if not for Sweden, then try your luck for Cyprus.”

This was all meant in fun, but is there a grain of truth to this explanation for Swedes’ national obsession with the schmalzy overproduced pop that characterises most Eurovision entries?  

READ ALSO: Why Melodifestivalen constantly outperforms Eurovision in Sweden

It’s certainly true that Melodifestivalen, held in February and the start of March, is perfectly timed to help Swedes survive the final spurt of the grim Swedish winter, with friends and families using the performances to justify Saturday nights spent huddled on the sofa gobbling crisps and debating the merits of each performance. 

It’s also true that school, or at least the Culture Schools or Kulturskolan you will find in every Swedish town and city, have helped make the country the world’s leading per-capita exporter of pop music. 

According to Bengt Månsson, host of the Swedish fan podcast Sa du Schlager?, who The Local met in the Eurovision press centre in Malmö, these schools have helped get Swedes singing. 

“For only a small amount of money, they teach kids music or singing, and, of course, Eurovision and Melodifestivalen is an important part of that. Because the kids gets interested in music through Melodifestivalen and Eurovision, and of course, they want to sing like Loreen, or else they want to sing in a choir.” 

But Månsson argues Sweden’s more obsessive relationship with Eurovision started not with ABBA’s 1974 victory in Brighton with Waterloo, but a bit later.  

“Everything, I think, started in the 80s. First the gay movement adopted Eurovision, and then the parents that were young then introduced their kids to Eurovision and then you have these Melodifestival tryouts, and that makes it like a folkfest or ‘people’s festival’.” 

Becoming a folkfest allowed Melodifestivalen to then channel the  much older and deeper Swedish tradition of group singing.  

“We like to sing in public, but not when other people notice you,” Månsson said. “If I sing in a group, then it doesn’t matter if I sing badly. There are so many choirs in Sweden, and they are singing, of course, Schlager.” 

He also credits the Swedish music mogul Bert Karlsson with giving Sweden’s entries their commercial edge, saying his Mariann records “had almost every single artist that was in Melodifestivalen in the 80s on his record label”, including Carola Häggkvist, Herrey’s, Kikki Danielsson and Eddie Meduza.  

The group of about 30 songwriters who stand behind almost all Melodifestival contestants, he continued, had largely stuck to Karlsson’s successful Schlager formula.

“I think that these people have followed in his footsteps and learnt their trade from that,” he said. 

In their act, Sweden spoofed how Finland would have hosted Eurovision had Käärijä won. Photo: Jessica Gow/TT

Still, how it has hosted the contest six times, three of them in the last eleven years, Sweden at least knows how to put on a good show.

In their song, Mede and Perelli tackled head-on the strong feeling among many Eurovision fans that Finland’s Käärijä was the rightful winner in 2023, with his wild outfit and pounding drinking son, Cha Cha Cha, with Sweden’s Loreen only rescued by the national jury votes. 

“We can hear your complaints, we can feel your fury, when they close the vote and we meet the jury,” Mede sung, before introducing a performance that gave a light-hearted take at how the Finns would have tackled the contest had they hosted it, with dancing Moomins and spinning Finnish folk designs.

It would have been a bit too close to the mark, if the dancers hadn’t then given way to Käärijä himself, who sent the crowd absolutely wild. 

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