Moi Caprice Interviews
Michael Møller
An interview with moi Caprice
Written by Erin YoungWednesday, 17 January 2007
PowPowPow - powpowpow.com
moi Caprice are the rising stars of the Scandinavian music scene; a band who've been bubbling just below the surface for several years now, accumulating a loyal fanbase and working hard to create their magical blend of contemporary pop with hints of synthesised soft electronica and rock. With the release of their latest album last month, The Art Of Kissing Properly, and tours planned for both their native Denmark and abroad, the word is they might soon become your caprice too! PowPowPow spoke to Michael about the music, the band, and the myriad ideas that go into the making of this beautiful music in a two-part interview.
The Art Of Kissing Properly
There were a lot of expectations leading up to the launch of The Art Of Kissing Properly, especially around Scandinavia. As the follow-up to 2005's dynamic breakthrough 'You Can't Say No Forever', it isn't surprising that the past few months have seen so much speculation around, and in turn praise for, the four-piece band from Copenhagen.
We've received some amazing reviews, the radio really took it in, we went to the top slot of the Alternative Chart here and our old fans seem to be very happy with it. A lot of people call it our best album and that has a nice ring to any band releasing a new album!" says Michael of the record that's launched them headlong into the indie music spotlight once again. However, he's a bit more skeptical when it comes to the assurances of global domination suggested by some on the back of the album. "For some reason I don't think we'll ever get to be really big, I'm not sure exactly why. I'm not sure we're cut out for it in some way. We're not the kind of people who love to be in front of a lens or love to see ourselves go crazy in music videos. It sounds really slick, but we're really in this because we love to make music; everything else seems more or less like obligatory things we have to do. And we love to do as few of these things as possible, and I have an idea that you need to do these things to make it big in this business! Our goal at the moment is somewhat different; we hope to release the album in as many countries as possible and find our small audiences all around. Naturally we'd love to sell some more albums, to get enough money to live on this and be able to travel around the world with our songs, but we really have no aim of becoming a huge house-hold-name.
Modest words from the man behind what is being widely held as one of the most impressive albums to be released this year. One noticeable difference between this album and its predecessor is how much more mellow the sound is; how much more organic it seems with more instrumentation and less programming. Where does it follow on from 'You Can't Say No Forever'?
I think we're the kind of band where every album is in some way a response to the previous one, naturally within the frame of what moi Caprice is about. We always like to expand the frames of what our expression consists of instead of repeating ourselves too much, and it seems finishing an album closes down a chapter for us and fosters the desire to try out something slightly different. The first one was quite light, with quite a subtle production and thus the second one was intentionally nearly the opposite: Dark and heavily produced. The same goes for the new album, in many ways quite opposite to its predecessor. Where the latter was very mechanical, many synths, programmed beats, etc., this one is very hand-played. Where both our former albums had tons of strings, brass, etc., this one has no guest musicians (except for my brother, who plays a minor guitar part in one of the songs). We're naturally talking subtleties within our own sound, it's not like one of them is bluegrass and the next is goth, but I think our three albums so far differ quite a lot.
The album references a lot of cities, a lot of places, so the listener feels that - like on previous records "Once Upon A Time In The North" and "You Can't Say No Forever" - the influence of travel and of the continent holds a special place for the men behind the lyrics. The feeling one gets upon listening is that of a well-travelled continental person driving along a metaphorical and literal musical journey; the dimension it adds to the already sophisticated sound is palpable.
Travelling is a recurring theme on all our albums, it sort of keeps popping up here and there. There are numerous references to cities, countries, planes, actual travel plans, etc, and nobody ever really seemed to comment on this before. There are two aspects to this: The "cities-aspect" and the more pure travelling aspect.
I'm from a really small city and since I was quite young I always knew that I wanted to move to a larger city - I've always loved the city feeling when I saw it in movies, sitcoms and things like that as a kid. So in my lyrics you often find that kind of town vs city battle, 'cause both are vital parts of what I am. "The Town & the City" is pretty obvious, but "I Dream of Cities" is probably our quintessential song on this subject; it's basically all about this dream of cities, of always wanting more, of always dreaming of other cities, of the unknown. I think I have an ever-growing longing for this. It's a bit like these books that name the films you have to watch before you die, and I always get nearly anxious that I wont make it, cause I really wish to get through all these. I have the same thing for cities - I would love to have spent a lifetime in New York, Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, but at the same time I really love living in Copenhagen, and I sometimes get nearly depressed that I don't have enough life-time to experience all these great cities. I might travel them, but even with my best effort I wont really get to know even half of these cities the way I'd like to. Cities are kind of an obsession to me, I've seen quite a lot of the major cities and I know that I'll spend my life tracking down as many as I can.
This in some way leads to the...travelling. We're all quite well travelled, we've all backpacked our way through Europe, went to the US or Asia and we all travel quite often. I think we share that feeling of excitement whenever we set foot somewhere new, or at least relatively unknown. To me this feeling is probably one of the greatest sensations in life; some of the happiest moments in my life have been those endless walks in a new city where you get lost and love it. "Drama Queen" is all about this, it's basically a long tribute to travelling; it's the essence of being happily lost, that home is not where the heart is, that the heart beats its heaviest when everything is new and exciting. A tribute to those moments of feeling nearly reborn in a new country - by a new coast or in an unknown city. And in this way travelling is closely related to one of our other big lyrical themes - love. I honestly think that these two are very similar, the excitement of the new where you feel so alive - being in love or travelling. The two themes are also often interlinked in our lyrics, like in "Riding in Cars with Girls", "Single Glamorous Women Who Served Caviar in the Sky" or "The Town & the City", they always represent nearly the same thing. A lot of people thought "Drama Queen" was a love song, which it really isn't (in what we normally term a love song at least) - it's about the splendours of travelling, about loving that feeling of freedom that one finds in travelling and in some way it nearly takes this interlinked love/travelling-theme to it's fullest in it's concluding line: "My love is the parts of the atlas I have still to roam". It's both about the travels that have already thrilled you throughout your life and about the dream of travelling, of escaping everyday life.
At some point I actually had an idea that I wanted to make our third album an album about travelling. "Drama Queen" was the first song finished and from that it evolved in a different direction, but I could easily imagine making an entire album about this someday.
So what of the other great influence in their work - love? The undercurrent that runs through their words is one of the complexities of human emotion; that things are more complicated than what is implied in standard pop lyrics, where things tend to be portrayed in a monochromatic landscape of getting together/breaking up.
Inspiration comes from many different sources and naturally you get inspired from your own life. Autobiographical or not, the stories that surround you always seem an inspiration. But stories can be written in many ways, and I always try to write these with a twist, as I really hate your average I-miss-you pop lyrics. Perhaps because there are so many love songs and most of them portray love way too simply...there's really a score to settle, to give meaning to love lyrics and explore something that's so caught up in standardized clichés. Love is really complex, but this doesn't show in lyrics very often.
"You Can't Say No Forever" was very much inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially Tender is the Night. His depiction of the endless parties that end up making you feel lost and hollowed and his violent descriptions of the battle between love and desire just seemed to hit a nerve in me, it seemed to add words to how I saw life around me at that moment. I remember shortly before pinning down most of the lyrics for our latest album I saw this really weird French art musical - "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg". It has a rather odd happy end that tells quite a different story than your average love story; that things never work out the way that we had planned, but that we can end up happy in quite a different way than we had once imagined. That the end of one relationship isn't the end of everything, but might foster another one that's different, but will make us happy in another way. That happiness doesn't really end, it has different stages, and even when it seems to have left forever it's always on its way back in an altered shape. The movie had this strange notion of hope, this indisputable wisdom within an art form, which is often so caught up with an idea of everlasting love. This was not about "the one", but about the different ones that make you happy throughout your life. I think this thought, this glimmer of prevailing hope, really inspired me for this album.