Peter Bjorn and John — "Young Folks"

Twee aesthetics, songs about fleeting youth (sung by people who are objectively young), and lots and lots of blogs—that’s right, we’re talking about indie rock in the aughts. Today, Rob recounts how Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John came from humble beginnings before their single “Young Folks” whistled its way to many best-of lists and became one of the era’s defining indie anthems. Later, he’s joined by ‘Such Great Heights’ author Chris DeVille to discuss the legacy of Peter Bjorn and John’s album ‘Writer’s Block’ and how it signals a shift in the commercialization of indie rock. (00:00) Intro: Is the Beach Fossils Bass Toss indie rock’s peak?(26:43) This week’s song: “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John(31:50) The band’s early days in Sweden(36:43) ‘Falling Out’ and PB&J’s songs of fading youth(45:31) Indie twee and Rob’s whistling perils(52:38) “Young Folks” and highlights from ‘Writer’s Block’(01:02:55) Interview with Chris DeVille(01:27:55) Outro Host: Rob HarvillaProducers: Julianna Ress, Chris Sutton, Justin Sayles, and Olivia CrerieGuest: Chris DeVille Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2. CONNECTInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/60songsthatexplainthe90sTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@60songsthatexplainthe90s Email us at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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  Hello friends. A quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So, watch us on YouTube, check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still, under the name Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening and/or watching and we'll see you on the internet. Hello friends. A quick announcement, we are doing a mailbag episode in which we solicit listener questions, comments and gripes. And then I answer those questions, comments and gripes. Let's try and stick to questions as opposed to comments or certainly gripes. Please email your questions to 60songspod at spotify.com. That is six, zero, songs, P-O-D, at spotify.com. Please submit your questions by Monday, September 21st, 2026. And please be nice.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. This episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s is presented to you by Nintendo. Some things stick around for a reason. A great song, a favorite movie, a game everyone wants another turn at. The Nintendo Switch 2 system fits right into that tradition. With two controllers included in games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bonanza and EA Sports FC 26, there's something for every age and every mood. Whether you're at home or on the go, it's easy to keep the good stuff in rotation. Learn more at nintendo.com/ninteswich2. Games and systems sold separately.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Games rated E to E10+. Okay, quick question for you. What is the single greatest moment in indie rock history? When exactly did indie rock peak as a musical style, as a cultural force, as an ethos? What is indie rock's apex mountain? Did indie rock peak on August 30th, 2009? When Jay-Z and Beyonce watched a Grizzly Bear concert on the Williamsburg waterfront in Brooklyn and 800,000 people blogged about it? Did indie rock peak on February 13th, 2011?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  When The Suburbs by Arcade Fire quite unexpectedly won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out Eminem, Lady Gaga, Lady Antebellum and Katy Perry? Katy Perry probably should have won. Did indie rock peak way earlier? In the 2004 feature film Garden State? When Natalie Portman put her headphones on Zach Braff's head and told him that the shins would change his life and then she fell in love with him and he directed it? Those are all great guesses, but I'm sorry, those are all incorrect. No, indie rock peaked on July 4th, 2010? During a live performance by the Brooklyn band Beach Fossils?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  When Beach Fossils bassist John Pena physically threw his bass guitar into the East River? Holy shit. If you're not watching this, don't worry, I'll walk you through it. All right, here we have most likely iPhone video of the young Brooklyn indie rock band Beach Fossils performing on Water Taxi Beach in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City. All four dudes in Beach Fossils are wearing shorts. Bassist John Pena is barefoot and the drummer is playing while standing up, which conveys

• 5:26Speaker 02

  authenticity. We got no stage. We got a chain link fence behind the band with a pink banner for a cool local clothing company. And beyond that fence, we got the roiling murky splendor of the East River, which is a lovely body of water so long as you don't ever go in there or look at it too hard. There are too many indie rock bands with beach in the name, but I'll allow it this time because Beach Fossils sound like a band called Beach Fossils. Pleasantly archaic, breezy, but with an alluring hint of decay, deceptively placid and therefore prone to sudden tumultuous rages.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  For example, the band set at Water Taxi Beach here on the 4th of July, 2010 will be ending semi-violently in roughly 30 seconds. Uh-oh, we're getting rowdy. Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Paiser, he's the wailing gentleman there. Dustin has just now divested himself of his electric guitar. He unplugs his guitar, he knocks over his amp, he drags his guitar on the ground behind him as he sings.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And impressively, none of this rowdiness appears to affect the music itself in the slightest. Meanwhile, another important element of this video is that the only real visible audience member is a child? I don't mean that ugly. I'm guessing there's plenty of people in the crowd here, but the person filming this is in the second row, basically standing directly behind a little girl, seven or eight years old maybe. And the girl's standing like six feet away from the band and she's wearing giant hearing protection headphones, like the kind of headphones conscientious parents buy their children so they can safely enjoy medium rowdy indie rock concerts.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  This kid keeps stealing worried glances at a mostly off-camera adult standing next to her who might be her mother and might be a total stranger. But nonetheless, this girl's a little closer to the rowdiness than I personally am comfortable with and she doesn't seem too psyched about it either. All right, fellas, time to make the donuts. Time to make indie rock history. Okay, what do we got happening here exactly? Let's see, the lead singer's really wailing now and he kicks over a mic stand and he kicks

• 8:14Speaker 02

  over the drums and he's crashing into the bassist a little bit. And oh, look, there's a second shirtless guitar player who's been playing guitar while staring at the ground this whole time and who's so far away from his bandmates, I hadn't even noticed him before. And the song ends in an abrupt discordant burst of moderate societal dissatisfaction. That's all pretty normal, conventional, medium rowdy rock and roll stuff. That's cool. Hmm, and also, whoa, Nelly, that guy just chucked his bass into the East River. Holy crap. Beach Fossils bassist John Pena unplugs his bass and he shrugs it off and he winds up

• 8:57Speaker 02

  and he goes whoop and he just launches it over the fence and into the fucking river. Let me say this clearly, spectacular throw. We got just a phenomenal bass toss here. Remember when Nirvana played Lithium at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1992? And right at the end of the song, Nirvana bassist Krist Nova Selich goes whoop and he threw his bass straight up and then he tried to catch it and he clonked himself in the head and fell over? There's no reason not to play this for you, I suppose. What did I buy all this video shit for if not to play this for you?

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  I love that once again, none of this routiness appears to affect the music itself in the slightest. Chris Novoselic tries to catch the bass, you see. There's your trouble. That ain't gonna happen. That is not a catchable object. It's not the bass toss that gets you. It's the bass catch. If you were athletic enough to catch a flying bass in midair, you never would have gotten into rock and roll in the first place. Anyway, that's the best bass toss in rock history, in my humble opinion, given the profound historical significance of Nirvana and the VMAs and whatnot. But also, it's the sheer awe-inspiring

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  verticality of the Nirvana bass toss itself. A-plus throw, D-minus catch. Okay, so the Beach Fossils guy, this is the horizontal version of that bass toss. Beach Fossils on the East River, this is a line drive. This is a frozen rope. We have caught some serious air. This thing's got a lengthy upward trajectory. This dude's bass is clear for takeoff. This thing is still in midair now. You don't necessarily go to indie rock shows to see world historical feats of strength, but that is a silver medal javelin throw.

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  Kudos. Let's watch it again, or you can just listen now to the crowd react. The mixture of gasps, whoops, and nervous laughter. The little girl with the headphones, she has no visible reaction to the bass toss, but the adult standing next to the kid, possibly, but possibly not the kid's mother, this lady clamps both hands over her mouth in the universal posture of, oh shit. Meanwhile, unlike my 600th time watching this video, I just noticed that after the bass toss, a photographer with a non-iPhone camera immediately walks over to the fence and looks down and tries to take a photo of the bass sinking into

• 11:51Speaker 02

  the river. Great instincts. All of these people are clearly aware that they've just witnessed rock and roll history. They've also kinda, sorta, probably witnessed a crime.

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  I am not aware of any additional video footage of the great Beach Fossils East River bass toss, other than in this video, you can also clearly see a mostly off-screen second person filming all of this on their phone, because by the late 2000s, we all spent much of our time at rock concerts, shooting phone video of other people shooting phone videos. And that's too bad. I would love a dedicated home run camera that just follows the glorious arc of the bass itself, in its breathtaking romantic path upward toward the sky, and then downward toward the sea. The river, toward the river, the East River. Not the

• 13:01Speaker 02

  most romantic river. No offense. So the bass toss video gets posted on Brooklyn Vegan and goes semi-viral. Brooklyn Vegan, the great longstanding, super-respected indie rock blog with show listings and rad photography and disconcertingly bitchy commenters and whatnot. And here in 2010, I am working for The Village Voice at the time, the even longer-standing, increasingly disrespected New York City alt weekly. And I make the very 2010 indie rock media decision to blog about their blog by simply listing my favorite Brooklyn Vegan comments about the Beach Fossils bass toss. This is how music journalism

• 13:44Speaker 02

  worked at the time. And so, look out. Top six Brooklyn Vegan comments about the Beach Fossils bass toss. Here we go. Number six, five years from now, mutant fish release chillwave album. Let's go in. Number five, whoa bra, hardcore, nice shorts, lol. I told you about the shorts. Number four, most interesting thing they've done. That's not very nice. Number three, nice hooks and appealing harmonic interplay. That's nicer. Number two, I am

• 14:29Speaker 02

  also frustrated with the sound of this band. That's not nice, but that's pretty good. Super dry sarcasm is the reliable default mode of most indie rock blog discourse. And finally, number one, the best Brooklyn Vegan comment about the Beach Fossils bass toss, how can you afford your rock and roll lifestyle? Aw, come on, tell me. That's the winner. Any Cake reference automatically wins any competition, as far as I'm concerned.

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  From their 1994 debut album, Motorcade of Generosity, that was the all-time great Sacramento rock band Cake, with their modest alternative radio hit, Rock and Roll Lifestyle. I weirdly, vividly recall hearing this song for the very first time, late at night on the radio, as like a dim-witted 16-year-old. This song was my introduction to Cake, one of my favorite bands, and also my introduction to the idea that relentless, shameless, soulless, capitalist consumption is poisoning classic rock, or alternative rock, or indie rock, or whatever. Excess ain't rebellion. Even as a dim-witted 16-year-old, I knew enough to know that I

• 15:58Speaker 02

  maybe ought to remember and fully internalize the idea that excess ain't rebellion. I really wanna do something right now, but I'm not positive that we're legally allowed to do it. And so, I'd like to introduce a new game I just invented called, Can We Do That? This is a game where I ask our friendly, hard-working lawyers and editors, I ask them offensively frivolous hypothetical questions, even though the vast majority of my coworkers have much better things to do. So today's question is, can we show slow-motion footage

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  of the Beach Fossils bass toss set to the Olympics music? Can we do that?

• 16:53Speaker 02

  No. The answer is no. They were polite about it, the lawyers, but nonetheless, we maybe ought to avoid the Olympics music in general, and opt for Olympics-type music instead. That's disappointing. That's too bad. I'll get over it. But yeah, not all the Brooklyn Vegan commenters are psyched about the East River bass toss, which is, okay, technically, it's literally littering. Yeah, he threw a large object into the East River and he left it there. That's true. It's a question of scale, though, right? If you're standing next to a guy and he throws a McDonald's wrapper into the East River, you'd be like,

• 17:36Speaker 02

  well, that guy's an asshole. But if you're standing there and this dude throws his bass into the East River, you'd be like, well, that's the coolest guy I've ever seen in my life. Such is the transformative power of rock and roll. I'll tell you what really pissed me off, though. I missed it. I did not personally witness the East River bass toss. I had to watch it on the internet later, like everyone else, like a chump. No, I went and saw Beach Fossils live three days earlier, on July 1st, 2010. I was there. I saw this band at a tiny, long-gone Brooklyn club called Brewer Falls, which was indoors and

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  had a Pac-Man arcade machine, and was not within throwing distance of any famous bodies of water. To answer your question, yes, I blogged about it. And Beach Fossils bassist John Pena played barefoot at this show as well, despite it taking place indoors. And at some point, a heckler yelled, put on some shoes, dude, or you're gonna get trichinosis. Someone actually yelled that at a rock concert. Not me, someone else. That's not even heckling. That's just good advice. Here's what Beach Fossils sound like in a more formal, non-bass toss context, by the way.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  From their self-titled 2010 debut album, that's Beach Fossils with a song called "Daydream." And not a day goes by or an hour without times I can't remember what I'm thinking about, because my head's caught up and tangled in those dreams. Yeah, that sounds relatable to me. As a guy podcasting about 16-year-old indie rock blog posts. So during that Beach Fossil show at Brewer Falls, the non-bass toss show, the band's last song ends with an abrupt discordant burst of moderate societal dissatisfaction, right? And Beach Fossils bassist John Pena jumps into the drums and knocks them all over, just like Kurt Cobain used to do.

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  And in my dumb little blog, I write, quote, "Though a vaguely cathartic and rock and roll moment, the drummer does not look particularly pleased, understandably." Three adverbs in one sentence. And then I say, "I'm glad I don't have to ride in the van back home with these guys." End quote. I might have seen the bass toss coming. Also, I'm ashamed to tell you that my blog about this show ends with the single meanest sentence I have ever written in my 26-year rock journalism career. I can't believe this. This was a three-band bill at Brewer Falls. First, a band from Queens called The Beats, B-E-E-T-S, like the vegetable.

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  Then Woven Bones, lots of bones back then in indie rock as well. And then Beach Fossils played last. And so I write a bunch of stuff, a bunch of adverbs about Beach Fossils and Woven Bones. And then here is the last sentence of this blog. I gave this sentence its own paragraph. Quote, "I tried to spend The Beats' entire set playing Pac-Man, but I ran out of guys." End quote. That's fucking rude. Yo, that's unprofessional. What kind of way is that to behave? Apologize to The Beats, Rob. Play a song by The Beats to apologize to The Beats, Rob. Don't be afraid, you will not die.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  And if you die, whatever. That's The Beats, B-E-E-T-S, with a song from 2011 called "Doing Like I Do." "Don't be afraid, you will not die, and if you die, whatever." That's also good advice. In the video for that song, they're at the beach, and a wave knocks over the giant colorful cutout letters of the word "whatever." Do you think that when The Beats named themselves The Beats, that they were aware there was already a band called The Beats, B-E-E-T-S, from that old animated kids TV show Doug?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  The 90s Nickelodeon tween anxiety cartoon Doug? Because I gotta say, the Doug Beats have really screwed up the SEO for the Queens Beats. A-I-O, Killer Tofu. That's the Doug Beats with a song called Killer Tofu, which I've had stuck in my head for 30 minutes. I have personally gone to hundreds of concerts involving real-life indie rock bands that look like the Doug Beats.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  The sunglasses on stage, the child's drawing hairstyles, the clashing outfits. And I'm standing in the crowd like, are these guys huge weirdos or are they just English? Yeah, a lot of shared DNA between the Doug Beats and the Queens Beats. I gotta say, a real simpatico vibe there, even visually. Primary colors, childish whimsy with a vague hint of melancholy, a clear preoccupation with death, et cetera. They should tour together or something somehow. Anyway, I apologize to The Beats, the non-cartoon Beats. But so, yeah, I personally missed it. But after his East River bass toss goes semi-viral, Beach Fossils bassist John Pena is treated

• 23:28Speaker 02

  to a late online roasting. People on the internet make fun of his band or his shorts, or they accuse him of having a trust fund to support his bass tossing rock and roll lifestyle. And so my friend and colleague at The Village Voice, the great writer and editor and author Zach Baron, Zach takes the next logical step for a circa 2010 indie rock blogger. Zach interviews the guy. Hell, yeah. Headline, "The Beach Fossils Bassist Responds: Why John Pena Threw His Bass Into the East River." Solid headline. Great SEO. Zach does a quick email interview with this guy, and he asks how John's bandmates feel

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  when he trashes or deep-sixes the band's gear onstage. And John says, quote, "I don't think they are too worried about it as long as I replace anything that gets broken. Sometimes it's a bummer to see the money from a show go toward fixing equipment instead of rent, food, and girls. It's not something we spend a lot or any time discussing, really." End quote. John also says, quote, "I really loved that bass, but it was on its way out." Literally. End quote. And finally, Zach asks, "Any response for the haters?" And John says, quote, "Ha, that would be pointless."

• 24:56Speaker 02

  John also says, "It'll all blow over soon enough. Just gonna focus on my friends, family, my band, and this beer. America." End quote. "America" in all caps with an exclamation point. End of conversation. I think any interview with anyone talking about anything in any medium should include the question, "Any response for the haters?" I don't care who you're talking to or why. You will never get a dissatisfying answer to that question. Everyone's got a response for the haters. Beach Fossils are still at it. They've got some delightful mellow jams. They've put out four albums so far, including their last album called Bunny in 2023.

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  And they've got a few tour dates this month in September 2026 in Mexico City and South America. Maybe look out for flying bass guitars if you're floating in an inner tube down the Rio Magdalena. That's a river in Mexico City. That's a joke. That's stupid. I'm sorry. I should note that former Beach Fossils bassist John Pena is long gone. He left the band in 2011, the year after the bass toss. That personal dynamic maybe wasn't working for reasons I can't even begin to fathom. I'm really getting into this early Beach Fossil song "Daydream," by the way. And we go outside when the morning's dark and we fall in the grass of an open park

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  and the sun will break when our heads hit the tree. Yeah, what's happening here lyrically, they're lying in the grass in the early morning sunlight. Lyrically, this song "Daydream" is simple enough, but it's the profound, physical, musical, spiritual distance between the daydream and the daydreamer. Right? The guy's voice is muffled and echoey and very, very, very, very far away. Look, we all love to jump online and fire off our cute little jokes about this sort of mellow, vaguely wistful, reluctantly hooky, excessively beach-oriented, instant nostalgia sort of indie rock. Okay, I personally love to jump online and joke about it.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  But I do think this song "Daydream" captures something important about this mid-to-late 2000s era and one of the most dominant indie pop sounds of that era. Or this song captures our collective, dorky, feeble, inevitably failed attempts to capture something, to capture some essential essence of our childhood and/or young adulthood, perhaps. Our rocky passage from the Doug Beats to the Queens Beats, perhaps. Our passage from being sad and young to being not so young and sad that we are no longer so young. And all we can do now is sing mellow, wistful, hooky, gorgeous, melancholy songs about our fading youth. And if you can't sing, then maybe just whistle.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 50th episode of 60 Songs That Explained the 90s, Cold and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing Young Folks by the Swedish indie pop trio Peter Bjorn & John from their 2006 album Writer's Block. I don't know that I'd ever watched the Young Folks video, which is animated with cartoon bubble dialogue and everyone bobbing their heads back and forth in a whimsical and childlike and slightly off-putting manner. There's a twee uncanny valley time warp quality here. The subtle and sublimely unsettling blending of the Doug beats and the Queen's beats continues.

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  We're all gonna die, but whatever. Ad break.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  All right. Real quick, I wanted to shout out Brooklyn Vegan, the great longstanding, super respected indie rock blog, Brooklyn Vegan, which got hit with mass layoffs recently alongside other great music publications, including Revolver, Goldmine, and my beloved Alternative Press magazine. Specifically, Brooklyn Vegan and those other places got hit with mass layoffs orchestrated by their parent company, something called Veeps. Veeps is owned by Live Nation, and Veeps was co-founded initially as some sort of ticketing platform by Joel and Benji Madden of the noted pop punk band Good Charlotte. I got

• 29:30Speaker 02

  nothing against that band personally or musically, but nonetheless, with apologies to all you Good Charlotte fans out there, the hypothetical Good Charlotte episode of this show is hereby canceled until those guys knock it off. Let me just observe politely that the 2002 Good Charlotte single, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," a top 20 pop hit in a medium catchy anthem of working class solidarity and perhaps even outright class warfare. This song sure hits different now that these bums are using their Live Nation-affiliated ticketing

• 30:10Speaker 02

  and media company to lay off humble, hardworking rock critics. Listen, we all have to get old and die, but we don't all have to become the man before we do it.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Knock it off. So, Young Folks, I'm reading all these interviews with the Swedish indie pop trio Peter Bjorn & John, and I really like these dudes a whole lot. I dig their vibe tremendously. Talking to The Guardian in 2018, Bjorn Jitling, bassist and producer Bjorn Jitling, he talks about how Peter Bjorn & John had already been a band for five years before Young Folks blew up. They'd made two full-length albums already, they jumped around label-wise, and they had enjoyed only modest success in Sweden. Whereas Young Folks was a quite destabilizingly massive global success. Bjorn says, quote, "Going

• 31:14Speaker 02

  platinum in multiple countries and fucking our shit up for a decade, that was not on our radar," end quote. The phrase "fucking up our shit for a decade" interests me. The implied positive and negative connotations of getting your shit fucked up for a decade, that interests me. Bjorn also says, talking about Young Folks, quote, "We don't even know how many copies it sold. On MySpace, it was played over 100 million times. We haven't got rich off it, but it's been good for business. It kickstarted my production career. In Rolling Stone recently, there was a list of the best songs of the century

• 31:54Speaker 02

  so far, and it's Beyoncé at number one, and then like 80 other songs, and then Young Folks. You can be proud of that for sure," end quote. I'm into these guys. In absolute sincerity, these guys seem like a great hang. Warm and sincere, but also cool and gently sarcastic. A proudly self-deprecating and refreshingly thirst-quenching, dry humor. So yeah, first thing to know, Peter Bjorn & John, not an overnight success. The drum kit you hear on Young Folks, the band apparently pulled those drums out of a dumpster near the makeshift homemade studio where Young Folks was recorded, or they got the drums

• 32:36Speaker 02

  off Craigslist, depending on which interview you read. This is not a cool, internationally famous rock band you were previously unaware of. No offense.

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  Okay, so here we have a song called "Matchmaker" from Peter Bjorn & John's debut EP, released in 2001 and called Forbidden Chords. I dig that this band's faster songs sound gently, pleasantly frantic, almost like they're cramming in as many lyrics and hooks as possible as quickly as possible. These dudes sound like they're trying to play this whole nearly three-minute song in just 20 seconds so they can run to catch a bus. Peter Bjorn & John, we got Peter Moren on guitar and vocals most of the time, Bjorn Jitling on bass and occasional vocals, Bjorn notably is also your primary producer for the first two albums at least, and John Erickson on drums and occasional vocals. Peter and Bjorn

• 33:48Speaker 02

  meet as teenagers in Vesteros in central Sweden. Talking to the great podcast, Life of the Record, in 2025, Peter says they met at a music high school sort of thing, and they started out as two dudes with guitars and a drum machine. They bond over guitar bands like the Stone Roses and slightly older, wordier, more punk and power pop oriented stuff like the Buzzcocks and The Jam and Elvis Costello, plus lo-fi 90s American indie rock Pavement and Yola Tengo and Elliott Smith and Sebado. All of that totally makes sense, but Elvis Costello makes extra sense. Maximum songcraft, maximum verbiage, maximum

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  nerdy, erudite swagger, maximum velocity. Here comes the chorus. Hurry!

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  So Peter and Bjorn move to Stockholm, where all the action is in Sweden indie-rock-wise and maybe otherwise, and they audition a bunch of other insufficient drummers before they find John Erickson, a guy with a lot of jazz and metal and percussion ensemble experience, but no previous indie rock band experience. Peter Bjorn & John is a sneaky great band name. It is straightforward and, you know, literal, but Peter Bjorn & John also rolls delightfully off the tongue. It's modest, their band name is just their names, but also quietly proud and mythical in scope. These dudes are too cool to bother with a

• 35:36Speaker 02

  clever band name. It also implies a supreme level of confidence that nobody will ever leave this band. I'm into it. The trio's first album, also called Peter Bjorn & John, comes out in 2002. This song is called "I Don't Know What I Want Us To Do." I'm pretty sure he knows what he wants.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, he knows. Let's do ourselves a favor and not get super bogged down today in an attempt to precisely define indie rock as a musical style or cultural force or ethos. Feel free to consult the great critic and friend of the show, Chris Deville's wonderful 2025 book, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, if you desire a thoughtful and thorough history and taxonomy of the initially undergroundish rock bands and myriad baffling subgenres that defined the 2000s, for those of us with Pitchfork and Stereogum and Flux Blog and Brooklyn Vegan bookmarked. We'll be talking

• 36:48Speaker 02

  to Chris later. It will suffice for our purposes today to say that a song by three scruffy Swedish pop dudes that begins with the lion's decadent picture of you in the nude, sits on my shoulder, whispers in my ear, makes me feel prude, is very indie rock aesthetically. The prudeness, I mean, the hesitance, the ostensible uncertainty of the song title, "I Don't Know What I Want Us To Do." That's not how Van Halen or Limp Bizkit would have handled this topic, you know? Chorus, great high note here. You'll figure it out, bub.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  But what indie rock really means here from the very beginning of Peter Bjorn & John is that this band is a quite humble and homegrown and therefore thoroughly Swedish enterprise. This band's first two records are recorded in Stockholm studios and released on Swedish record labels. This self-titled album is put out by Beat That Records. Beat That exclamation point. Not every song on this first record sounds like the band is sprinting downhill the whole time, but my favorite songs here do sound like that. This one's called "Education Circle," and it concludes with Peter frantically expressing yet more hesitance and uncertainty before he sings the line, "But as this angry persona, I have

• 38:25Speaker 02

  no doubt," and then he stretches out the word "doubt" for 10 seconds. Dig the gasp when his breath finally gives out. Modest athleticism.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's about as close as these fellas are gonna get to wild and crazy bass toss energy. The second Peter Bjorn and John record comes out in 2004 and is called Falling Out. These guys aren't old by any stretch. At this point, they've barely exited their twenties at worst, but I am struck here by a palpable heaviness, a weariness, a faded daydream melancholia. This song is called Taylor Made and it features Peter singing, "I found out I'm grown up," in a very quiet, feeble, devastated voice, before he launches into a loud, boisterous chorus that ends with him singing, "Bring me back my youth."

• 40:01Speaker 02

  The "Be My Baby" drumbeat there, that drumbeat is a nice touch if we're talking about 2004 pop songs, chasing the eternal majesty of 1963 pop songs. And if we're talking about classic pop songs as a fountain of fading youth. You have every right to be suspicious and perhaps even annoyed when objectively young dudes start gassing on about how old they feel already. But this unpleasant paradoxical sensation of feeling ancient and washed even when you're objectively still young and vibrant, that's a huge part of the indie rock ethos

• 40:41Speaker 02

  as well. Youth isn't even wasted on the young in indie rock. Your youth is something you'll never get back, even while you still have it. The second Peter Bjorn and John record, Falling Out, also features a cover of a song from another young Swedish indie rock band. Here's the original from 1999. This song is called, um, yeah, it's called Teen Love.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Teen Love. Here we have a fellow young Swedish pop band called The Concretes, featuring on lead vocals one Victoria Bergman. Victoria is in her twenties, but Victoria also sings with a super appealing and distinctly adult sort of bone weariness. It is harder than it sounds to sing a deceptively dainty song called Teen Love while evoking both teen love and an older person's rapidly decaying, daydreaming memories of teen love. Try it sometime. Anyway, Peter Bjorn and John speed up Teen Love and rock it out a little bit.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, Peter Bjorn and John speed up this song, Teen Love, a little bit, and I dig the "I fall in love with you" backing vocals very much. They add a semi-frantic sort of immediacy, but it's the shaker there going the whole time that makes this version of Teen Love seem way, way faster. The shaker makes it feel like time is passing, like one's youth is passing by even faster. Anyway, Victoria Bergman's voice and also the shaker will be appearing again together real soon. Matter of fact, let's just do this now.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  The third Peter Bjorn and John record is released in 2006 and is called Writer's Block and features a song called Young Folks that blows up on MySpace and makes a ton of lists of best songs of the year and/or century and fucks this band shit up for a decade. That opening "doo-ba-doo-ba-doo-doo" drumbeat there is apparently a cheeky, humble tribute to Daft Punk, to the French blockbuster electronic music duo Daft Punk. On that great podcast, The Life of the Record, Peter Bjorn and John drummer John Erickson says, quote, "The opening fill of Young Folks, it's kind of an homage in a cartoonish, childish version of the intro

• 43:37Speaker 02

  for Robot Rock by Daft Punk, because that drum intro was extremely cool, we thought. We tried to recreate that, or I tried to do something similar, but at the same time, dorky and stupid," end quote. For your reference, Robot Rock by Daft Punk came out in 2005 and begins like this.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  That is extremely cool, actually. Robot Rock, that's the Daft Punk song that goes "brrr, wah, no, no, no, brr, brr, brr, wah, no, no, no, don't know," that one. So Young Folks begins with a version of that, or, according to John, the drummer, "something similar, but at the same time, dorky and stupid." There is a fundamental humility, a self-deprecation, a distinctly non-rock star type sheepishness, a vibrant and quite relatable aura of imminent defeat radiating off Young Folks and Writer's Block as a whole. You get that, "oh, we're just being dorky and stupid" vibe a lot in indie rock, and maybe you love that vibe

• 44:51Speaker 02

  and maybe it annoys you. Yes? "Oh, we're such dorks. We can never do anything as cool as doobie-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo." That sort of rock and roll swagger, but in apologetic scare quotes. In this musical universe, you get used to that aw shucks sort of vibe, or you learn to avoid it like the plague. But Peter Bjorn and John, at the precise moment they're making Young Folks, these dudes are coming by their humility and self-deprecation and imminent defeat, honestly. The band records this song and this whole album in a little apartment Bjorn's got set up because they can't afford studios anymore. They maybe found the drum kit in a Swedish dumpster. Talking to The Guardian in 2018, bassist

• 45:36Speaker 02

  and producer Bjorn Ytling says, quote, "Writer's Block was our third album. We'd been doing the rounds for about five years, trying to get a good slot at some weird festival in Stockholm, building the stage on our own, playing Chinese restaurants and as the opening act on tours for different bands. We probably would have quit if Young Folks hadn't become the hit that it did," end quote. And you can hear the ease, the resigned casualness, the utter lack of outside pressure that only comes when a rock band assumes basically nobody is listening and this is the end of the line.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  And so a line like, "Would you go along with someone like me?" could be an aspiring rock and roll singer talking to a historically indifferent listener, or it could be part of a slightly more intimate conversation. Young Folks is a conversation in a bar between a young man and a young lady, or crucially, a not-quite-as-young-any-more man and a not-quite-as-young-any-more lady. They are both a little older, a little wearier, a little wearier of possible new romantic connections, having been burned and disappointed and heartbroken so many times before. These two wounded, tentative lovebirds are surrounded

• 47:10Speaker 02

  by brighter, cheerier, more naive and hopeful younger folks, but who cares about them, right? I am torn. I can't decide between widening the musical scope here and aggressively narrowing the musical scope. Of course, you could take Young Folks as a prime example. Perhaps Young Folks is the prime example of mid-2000s bouncy, folksy, twee indie pop that mixes youthful frivolity with washed adult melancholia and mixes handcrafted, anti-commercial whimsy with increasingly big, wamppin', hyper-capitalist business. If you know Flux Blog, the great, longstanding,

• 47:51Speaker 02

  super-respected indie rock MP3 blog run by critic and journalist Matthew Perpetua, Matthew does these great, huge, deep playlists now, and he did a six-plus-hour, 124-song playlist called The Young Folks: Twee Indie 2004/2009. And one thing I genuinely appreciate about this musical and cultural vibe is you have to be in the mood for it, listening to all these songs, The Decemberists, The Go Team, The Juno Extended Universe. Listening to this playlist, most of the time, I was like, what a refreshing, buoyant, appealingly childlike approach to classic pop forms. But some of the time, it just sounded to

• 48:32Speaker 02

  me like 35-year-olds playing hopscotch, and I was like, you need to get a job. I will widen the scope just enough for three excellent songs off this playlist that both feed into and expand upon Young Folks. And it just so happens that the first song is called Lloyd, "I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken." It's the bassline here primarily.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  From their 2006 album, Let's Get Out of This Country, featuring string arrangements by Peter Bjorn and John's very own Bjorn Ytling, that's the phenomenal Scottish indie pop band Camera Obscura with Lloyd, comma, "I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken." There's a deft orchestral fullness to this song, a hugeness that somehow arises out of the daintiness. But yeah, mostly it's the bass going "doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo," that really does it for me. An all-time air bass song, Lloyd, "I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken." I can't whistle, and it makes me really mad.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I'm absolutely serious. Never been able to whistle. Been trying all my life.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  I just feel strongly that I've got the kind of personality where I should whistle a lot, but I can't. It pisses me off. Don't ever mention this to me if you meet me, the no-whistling thing. I mean it. Anyway, obviously, we need a whistling song.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Quit showing off, dude. From his 2005 album, Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs? That's singer-songwriter, Illinois legend, and jerky show-off whistler Andrew Bird with his song called "A Nervous Tick Motion of the Head to the Left." Not all of these twee indie pop songs have long, elaborate song titles, but many of them do. Andrew Bird, he's got more of an epic widescreen ostentatious lone spotlight spaghetti western sort of whistling style, whereas with Peter Bjorn and John, with Young Folks, the Young Folks whistling melody, you know, it's more like

• 51:13Speaker 02

  that's obviously a way more casual, offhand, "this is easy and I do it all the time" sort of whistling. God damn it. The Young Folks whistle was initially just a placeholder for the melody. The guys figured they'd replace that

• 51:30Speaker 02

  melody with a synthesizer or something, but then they realized the whistle was better. I'm so mad. I don't want to talk about whistling anymore.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  And finally, hey, remember when Isabel Campbell, formerly of twee Scottish indie pop giants Bell and Sebastian, and Mark Lanigan, he of righteous, bro-ish, American alt-rock gods Screaming Trees, not to mention Queens of the Stone Age? Remember when Isabel Campbell and Mark Lanigan made three full-length duet albums together and they fucking ruled, even though you would not necessarily assume that combination would fucking rule? I know what they just said lyrically, by the way. Never mind that now. From their first great duet album, released in 2006 and called Ballad of the Broken Seas, that song was called "Do You Wanna Come Walk With Me?" Parenthesis, "Do You Wanna?" Close parenthesis, "Come

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Walk With Me?" Question mark. All these songs have long titles. Young Folks is the shortest song title in this whole genre. Isabel Campbell's high, frail, wilting voice and Mark Lanigan's deep, rad, terrifying bass-ass voice, their voices work wonderfully together, even if together they sound like one of those heartwarming nature photographs of like a canary befriending a warthog. Like, you know, a photo of a submerged hippopotamus, barely visible, peering out of a swamp with a little bird on top of its head? That's the dynamic here. Rest in peace, Mark Lanigan. I love him and I fear him so much. So yeah, Young

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Folks is also a fraught, somewhat unlikely duet, albeit a less flagrantly odd couple-type duet. The little guitar amp squeak or whatever between her part and his part right here is my favorite part of the whole song.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  I dig that little squeak right in between there. I think that's a little bleep of electric guitar going "boing" right after she stops singing and right before he starts singing. I don't know why that "boing" is so important to me, but it exemplifies to me the total awkwardness and the genuine connection between them. Hey, it's our old friend Victoria Bergman. She of Swedish indie pop band The Concretes. That's Victoria of teen love fame, joining Peter Moran on Young Folks. The creakiness, the winsome imperfections of both their voices, the palpable, attainable, "go ahead and try this at home" achiness of both their vowels.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  I'm into it. And that creaky, achy imperfection is lyrically, thematically apt. Yes? Peter Moran, talking to The Guardian in 2018, Peter says, quote, "We weren't Young Folks at the time. We were all hitting 30 or 31 rather than 18 or 19. The song is about people feeling a bit burned out on relationships. And then you meet someone new in a bar, say, and think, maybe this could be something." End quote. Remember when 31 was old? I don't. Sing the chorus, you old fogies.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  The bongos are a vital element of Young Folks as well. The shakers, the bongos, the electric guitar. I think it's electric guitar going "boing" in the background, one sort of wobbly chord at a time. All vital elements. I'm paying attention to this Young Folks video for the first time ever. All the twee, hand-drawn-looking, youngish folks bobbing their heads back and forth like they're singing a song from a Sesame Street episode. And I'm wondering if this video fits the vibe of Young Folks a little too well. Yes? It's pretty easy to overdo "childlike" as an aesthetic. I overuse that word, "childlike",

• 56:12Speaker 02

  in my rock criticism. And usually, I mean "childlike" as like a qualified compliment, I guess. Like, it's a little cloying and I know I should know better than to really unguardedly like it, but I don't know better, actually, because I like it. But I do think Young Folks and the Writer's Block album as a whole, they really nail all the positive connotations of "childlike" while deftly avoiding any negative connotations. John Erickson, the drummer, talking to that podcast, Life of the Record. John mentions that while making this record, the band was super into the Langley Schools Music Project. Are you up on this? So in the mid-'70s, a bunch of elementary schools in British Columbia, that's

• 56:56Speaker 02

  in Canada, they got together and formed a sort of children's choir that covered big-shot rock and pop songs. And then the songs came out on CD in 2001, a CD called Innocence and Despair. And it became a called outsider music hit. Let's set aside for now the thorny implications of the term outsider music. Sometimes it's okay to just listen to '70s Canadian schoolchildren sing the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows." You know?

• 57:42Speaker 02

  So John Erickson, talking about the Langley Schools Music Project, John says, quote, "The sound of that album is so fantastic. I mean, you can hear the kids giving all their heart and also maybe a bit filled with shame or something." You know, in Sweden, we have this music school thing. So I think we felt really close to that vibe. You know, you play as a kid something that's a bit uncomfortable, but you do it. And you're maybe not the best musician because your music teacher just tells you to do this and do that. And that sound was something we wanted to recreate on Writer's Block, this kind of naive, almost playful, not-knowing-what-you're-doing style of playing. So I tried

• 58:26Speaker 02

  to play drums like it was the first time. Like, my music teacher had just taught me this cool, funky jazz-rock beat. And we played guitar and piano with one finger at a time, just trying to be kids, naive, not knowing what we're doing." End quote. Writer's Block, that title, by the way, does not refer to Writer's Block, the affliction where you're struggling to write. No, at the time, Peter Bjorn and John were living and working in a neighborhood, a block with lots of writers, musicians, and creative types. They lived on a writer's block. And I do think this album, in its entirety, masterfully conveys

• 59:06Speaker 02

  a lack of total mastery. These songs are diamonds formed by a total lack of pressure. These songs could get quite loud and huge and anthemic and maximalist, but it's the sort of maximalism that sounds like giant, careful, thoughtful stacks of naive minimalism. This is a career-making album by a band convinced their career was over. There's tremendous ambition here, but no expectation of success, no pompousness, no excess. Because as we've established, excess ain't rebellion.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  My favorite song on Writer's Block is called "Up Against the Wall." It's three short verses and still somehow seven minutes long. It keeps building, it keeps mutating, it keeps surviving. The super busy drum machine melding with, but never quite overpowering, the very simple, more human sounding drumbeat. That's what really does it for me. Very few conventional drum kit cymbals on Writer's Block, the album, partly as an aesthetic choice, partly because the band only had a couple of microphones to record with, and cymbals generally make too much noise. That's a semi-technical reason I love this

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  song, "Up Against the Wall." A sentimental reason I love this song is that it builds and mutates and deepens and brightens and darkens and seems like it'll legitimately never end. Just like, you know, youth.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  This is another song I love on Writer's Block, the first real song. It's called "The Objects of My Affection." The lyrics here are very effectively ever so lightly clunky, to the point where I'd never quite grasped them. And the question is, was I more alive than than I am now? These are early 30-somethings waxing nostalgic about, what, their early 20s? They're waxing nostalgic for like 30 seconds ago. It ought to be annoying, but unearned, shame-based, way-too-early nostalgia can be the most powerful kind. But you gotta sing the last line, too, right? Don't ever forget the last line. And the question is,

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  was I more alive than than I am now? I happily have to disagree.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  I love that part. Again, I had not 100% grasped that that part goes, "I laugh more often now, I cry more often now, I am more me." But I love that part even more now, and I may even believe it. I really love this whole record, but "Young Folks" unavoidably overshadows the rest of this record, and really the rest of Peter Bjorn and John's now-quite-extensive oeuvre. This band has made nine full-length albums to date, most recently "Endless Dream" in 2020. But when these fellas are touring the 20th anniversary of Writer's Block this fall, the crowd will perk up when they play "Young Folks," and

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  there's no getting around it. This is the sort of unexpected hit song that both permanently makes your career and fucks your shit up. Talking to DIY Magazine in 2011, Peter Moran says, quote, "I'm eternally grateful for that song, as it changed our career for the better forever. Now we just have to deal with its legacy. Of course, there are nights when I don't feel like singing it, especially as it doesn't really fit in with some of the other stuff. But you just do your acting bits and put on the autopilot. It will always be a great song." End quote. Trust me, though, "Young Folks" will still

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  sound divine regardless, even if the band's on autopilot. You cannot whistle through gritted teeth. Not that I would know.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

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• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  We are thrilled to be joined once again by Chris Deville, author of the fantastic 2025 book "Such Great Heights," called and the complete cultural history of the indie rock explosion. He is also Stereogum's managing editor and a Hall of Fame Ohioan, in my opinion. Chris, it's awesome to talk to you again.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  It's great to be here. Thanks for having me back.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Of course. Chris, you recently wrote a great Stereogum piece about the 20th anniversary of Peter Bjorn and John's Writer's Block album, and you called it "a tipping point in the gentrification of indie rock." What do you mean by that? Because that that that sounds bad.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know how it sounds. It's not good, but it's not necessarily their fault either. It's like they made this just-about-perfect pop-rock album, and it happened to be exactly what companies who wanted to get a hip indie sound in their ads were looking for. Like, I wrote in my retrospective, the article you just talked about, every time the whistling hook from "Young Folks" would breeze down a block, a city block, a microbrewery, and

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  a Whole Foods would just spring up. It just it just sounded like this very commercial, friendly version of indie. And I mean, that's like, that's what the book "Such Great Heights" was kind of about, was like the gentrification of indie, or like how indie rock went pop. And so it's like, you have to think about, this album is arriving into the context of, like, iPod ads and coming off of the OC and Garden State and Grey's Anatomy, and this was a time when Pitchfork was launching its music festival and starting to get a

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  lot more mainstream attention. And like blogs were, you know, they had been kind of the hot thing for a couple of years. And so like, there was all this kind of mainstream interest in this idea of indie rock. And I feel like it was a different flavor of underground rock kind of bubbling up than we had maybe 15 years earlier with Nirvana. It's like, maybe a little bit cuter, and cleaner, and more commercial-friendly. And so like, to me, Writer's Block really embodied that shift. It sounds like a step further down a path

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  to me. And so like, I listened back to it, and I love it. Like, I was actually stunned when I revisited it for the article. I was like, wow, this holds up. But I also just can't shake that sort of context that it's like, I'm hearing this genre morphing before my ears.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  Right. The timelines don't exactly match up, but hearing you, it sounds like Vampire Weekend.

• 1:08:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Like, when I when I think about the moment when, like, you know, the commercial side of the music business really got a hold of indie rock, that was when, you know, Vampire Weekend was in every ad. That's the way it seemed to me. Like, they they went on Stephen Colbert with the Black Keys and like made jokes about it, you know, how commercial, how ad-friendly this music had inadvertently became.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Right. And this is like the precursor to Vampire Weekend in terms of like, so many songs from this album were in advertisements. And it wasn't just "Young Folks." Like, I feel like it was like four, five, six songs were all featured. And I may be misremembering it, but I just feel like it wasn't just that "Young Folks" sort of took over the world. It's like, so many songs from the album were kind of creeping in everywhere.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I love this album, too, in its entirety. I totally agree with you. In your piece, you said that it politely bangs, which is a very enticing phrase to me. How does one bang politely?

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  It's just very Swedish. It's like, it's got this kind of fey, cutesy, mild-mannered element to it that I associate with like Jens Lekman and some of the other sort of indie pop artists from. But at the same time, Sweden is is Robyn and ABBA and Max Martin. And a lot of this album has that studio-precise quality to it, too, even though like, there's still a rock band on the album, and some of the songs like really rock, and there's, they know when to let a little bit of noise and chaos come into it. But yeah, so it's

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  kind of like, it's it's caught in the balance between the more sort of primitive, cutesy side of Swedish music and the very like professionalized side of it.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's hard to talk about this band without using words like politely or quirky or twee. I think adorkable shows up in your article, and maybe that's a word best left to history. Like, these words can be selling points, or they can be insults, depending on who's using them. Like, where are you personally on twee as like a musical descriptor or a lifestyle?

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  I feel like I'm definitely not anti-twee, but twee, to me, is that it's best when it's kind of raw and unkempt and lo-fi. When I think about like...

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  You know, like Beat Happening, or like Sarah Records, or some of the more like underground type twee stuff. The cleaner and more professionalized it gets, the more cloying it tends to become. And so, the, the ability to pull off something that's kind of twee, but at the same time, is good, and, and is like professionally good, but is just like enjoyable. Like, the ability to do something that's twee, but is slick and, yeah, it's, it's just like, to me, that's part of what is the charm of this album, is that they're able

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  to be twee and take it in that kind of more cloying direction, but it never strikes me as cloying, like, it's, it's never overbearing.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was a case where reading about how they made the album really enhanced the album for me, like, just to understand it, they had put out two albums that hadn't really done anything. They figured they were gonna break up if this one didn't work. They're in like, an apartment, you know, they're getting drums out of the trash, or off Craigslist, or whatever, like, the, the dichotomy between like, just thinking this is the end and making an album for them, but it turns out to be an album, as you say, that is exactly what, you know, every advertiser, you know, and every commercial interest was looking for at that point. Like, it's very cool that they sort of accidentally stumbled into doing the exact thing, you know, that the indie rock world needed to hear at that moment.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it is kind of a surprise, like, I, I haven't dug deep into the making of the album, like, I, it sounds like maybe you do in, in the first half of this episode, but like, it is interesting that like, it was kind of their last ditch effort, and it, it really worked out.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  I, Young Folks comes up briefly in your book, you know, you mentioned, Young Folks was apparently the opening song in the pilot of Gossip Girl.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Which does not actually make any, I, I thought they were much meaner people. I never imagined those people listening to Peter Bjorn and John, I guess I should watch the show, but like, where does Young Folks fit into the larger history of indie rock for you? Are we closer to the end at this point than the beginning of the arc you're tracing in this book?

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  In the book? Well, okay, so the book is very like, focused on the 21st century. Um, I mean, it's certainly nowhere near the beginning of the arc of indie rock in general. Like, I mean, some people would probably say indie rock peaked in the 80s and 90s, and by the time I got to it, when I was a high schooler, Y2K, it's like, oh, it was already over.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  We missed it, yes.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, the, the, uh, so the blog era, or whatever, I don't know, as someone who writes about indie rock every day at Stereogum, I prefer to think that it's still like, alive and well in some capacity, uh, it's like, any genre kind of waxes and wanes, and you go through cycles of moving in and out of the mainstream, uh, but like, it definitely feels like, uh, right in the middle of the arc that I'm tracing in the book, where it's kind of going from, it sort of morphing into this form of pop music, and I, I feel like

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  we've, we've cycled back out of that to some extent, like, I feel like you do, i- it's become a more underground phenomenon again, and, not that it's like, every single indie band is underground, cause like, obviously you had this huge Geese thing last year, and like, Phoebe Bridgers, yeah, right, and Phoebe Bridgers is back and bigger than ever, and like, it's like, not everything from the world of indie is like, separate from the world of pop, or anything like that, uh, but, I don't know, it just feels like, sort of a lot of the infrastructure around indie is not what it used to be, and so, it, it

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  kind of, almost by default, has had to become more of an underground thing again, and now whether that surge is back up again, or whether it becomes something like jazz, where it's like, you know, jazz never died, man, but it's like, okay, well, it's not really exactly part of the mainstream menu either, like, it's very much a niche thing, so, whether it stays niche, or whether it, uh, you know, kind of has another cycle of, of mainstream adoption, remains to be seen, but it's also like, nobody even really knows what indie even means anymore, cause it's like, you got Sombra, who is very obviously a pop star, coming out and saying like, yeah, I make indie music.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that guy, that guy is nuts, that's, that's the least indie-looking guy I have ever seen in my entire life, I just, I just will not accept that, I don't want to be a gatekeeper, but that's absurd, honestly. Um, I wanted to talk to you about Up Against the Wall, which is definitely my favorite song of theirs on Writer's Block, like, you, you talk about the momentum, the emotion, the euphoria of this song, this is a song, it's like, seven minutes long, and I wish it were 45 minutes long, like, what clicks for this band, as a whole, on this album, and on this song in particular?

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, that is maybe my favorite as well.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  All right, good.

• 1:16:47Speaker 04

  It is, I mean, like, there's a lot of contenders for favorite on this album, to be honest, I think that song, what's so awesome about it is, the song has this really, like, profound emotional core to it, on one hand, it's like, there's a lot of, you can hear the passion in it, but it's also this kind of fine-tuned machine, also, uh, it's like, you got ingredients coming in and out, like, different guitar parts, it's, you have one guitar part, and it disappears, and then a different guitar part, and then eventually they're both in there, and, uh, it, it, it almost is like, uh, like an LCD Sound System

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  song, or something, with like, all the little moving parts coming in and out, and so, uh, yeah, I don't know, it's, it's this sort of technical marvel, but, the, the technical side of it doesn't obscure the sort of emotional core of it, and so, just the way that they're able to build that up so masterfully over the course of, what, like, seven minutes, uh, it's, it's just incredibly well done, and it shows how much range they have, because it is nothing like Young Folks, like, it's so far from kind of the lighthearted whimsy of Young Folks.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. The Objects of My Affection, like, the first real song is another one that I really love, which, it's, I was curious how you feel about this record and its relationship to nostalgia, like, I never really looked at the lyrics to The Objects of My Affection really closely, but like, and the question is, am I more alive then than I am now, you know, but then they decide that they're happier, and they're freer, and they're, they're more themselves now, is like, 30-somethings than they were as 20-somethings, like, does listening to this album now make you look primarily like, backward or forward?

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like it has to be backward, right? Like, it just, it feels so, so much like a relic of its era, like, it, it feels so locked to its time, but, but revisiting that song, you know, 20 years after first hearing it, uh, it definitely is cause for, for contemplation, you know, like, you, you hear those lyrics, and inevitably, you start thinking about the same question for yourself, like, am I more alive now, here in my 40s than I was in my 20s?

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  40s is different, 30s versus 20s, there's an argument, I don't feel more alive now, Chris, I'm just gonna level with you, I feel alive, but just in a, in a different way, yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that's, uh, hopefully, the next book, honestly, is talking, talking about being a washed dad in the context of indie rock, and, uh,

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  But, uh, yeah, I don't know, I think it's, if anything, that lyric makes you start to think about, like, okay, well, like, what, you know, where do I stand now, and like, you know, where, where am I headed? So, there is a forward-thinking aspect to it, so that, I think that's a very thoughtful question from you, but, uh, definitely, at least, on immediate impact, it's like, oh damn, like, uh, I'm spiraling into the past right now.

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Right, I'm back at the Williamsburg waterfront, or wherever, you didn't have to be there, it's fine, it's, you could've just read about it, it's the same thing.

• 1:20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like I was there from all of the, like, you know, there's been so much, so many histories of the Williamsburg waterfront, but, uh,

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  We tried, we tried to make it a thing, we tried to get FOMO going for the rest of the country, it was just, it was a psy-op, just like Geese, the Williamsburg waterfront pool parties were a psy-op, in a way. I, very famously, both Kanye West and Drake jumped on a Peter Bjorn and John song, like, in a remix, or a sample, like, and this is around 2006, like, this is, these guys are a little different than Drake and Kanye than they are now, but like, what made this band's music so attractive, you know, to some of the biggest, you know, coolest rappers at the time? Are they just jumping on whatever seems cool with indie, or is there some quality to this music that like, makes Drake, you know, just have to get involved?

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  I, I don't think that, oh, Drake is an interesting one, because like, he had Leaky Lee on, uh,

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  On his mixtape two, and so, it's like, he's kind of double-dipping on the Swedish

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  He knows.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  Thing, uh, but like, to me, uh, Kanye, I mean, so, it, it kind of comes back to Kanye is this sort of ultimate hipster character, and like, uh, you know, like, some of the avatars of hipsterdom from the 2000s, like, you know, Vice guy, who's Proud Boys guy now, or whatever, like, he's obviously gone on, uh, a journey, but, uh, at the time, it's like,

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  Hip hop, I feel like was kind of remade in Kanye's image. You had the famous sort of Kanye versus 50 Cent sales battle and all that. It was like the passing of the torch or something. And so you had a lot of rappers, like blog rappers that were coming up kind of in Kanye's image. And Drake was one of them, certainly. But you got like Kid Cudi, you got Childish Gambino, you got all these rappers that are getting popular on the blogs, like the rap blogs, who are jumping on indie songs. Because I think there's a lot of spillover between the indie blogs

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  and the rap blogs in terms of readership. And so, but I think it, you know, it traces back to Kanye, like he's, he was always trying to have like the cool avant garde thing. Not that, I don't think anybody would call Peter Bjorn and John avant garde, but like, sort of like whatever, whatever that you write, right? Exactly. Like the buzzy new thing. You know, he's, he's putting Daft Punk in his songs and all that stuff. So yeah, I think, I think it had to do with like,

• 1:23:15Speaker 04

  it wasn't necessarily specific to Peter Bjorn and John. It happened that they ended up on both of those guys' albums. But you have like, people sampling Grizzly Bear, people sampling NGMT. And it's like, that was kind of the wave there for a minute. And so I guess kind of Peter Bjorn and John were caught up in that wave. But they, they actually performed onstage with Kanye, right?

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  They did, they did. I think in Europe somewhere, like Kanye made fun of them for not being able to whistle. I think there was a whistling issue. I think they really, I think that Peter Bjorn and John really had to work to whistle live, you know, to do young folks justice. And Kanye was clowning their inability to whistle onstage. So they, they had a rapport of sorts live, I guess. Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  Okay, cool. I've never seen the footage. I need to load it up.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can, you can go find that on Gorilla Versus Bear or something, maybe, presumably. I, even after everything we've said, like, why did young folks specifically blow up this huge, right? Like, I, I, it's just so far ahead of anything else that Peter Bjorn and John have done, you know, there's, was a lot of music that sounded like this in 2006. But like, this one song, as you say, sort of broke out in terms of being everywhere you looked, in terms of standing in, you know, for this, this era of indie. Like, what is it about this song? Is it just the whistling? Or what makes this song the one everyone gravitated toward?

• 1:24:54Speaker 04

  I really think it is the whistling. Like, now, I'm not saying I think that the song is like, being propped up by the whistling or something. Like, I think it's an excellent song. I think every part of the song works. It's like, you know, the, the interplay between the guy and the girl vocals. And like, even the, you know, certainly drumbeat is like, you know, it's really got a skip in its step. The, the bongos that they bring in, like, it's like, so much, there are so many cool things happening on the song. And it's got this kind of dreamy, romantic quality to it. And

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  it really, even though it says, we don't care about the young folks, and we don't care about the old folks, it's like, it, there is a usefulness to it. But I think that the whistling, that's like, that's what sets the song apart. That's what draws you in. That's part of what makes it seem probably more twee than it would otherwise. Also, so, yeah, I think without the whistling, it's like, what even is the song without the whistling? Even though, I think, I just made the argument that it has all these great ingredients going into a unified whole. But it's like, you take away the whistling, and I think it's a far lesser song. And it certainly doesn't grab people's attention like it did.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the other thing that was interesting to me is, in interviews, Peter Bjorn and John had made clear, like I said, that like, they were, they were gonna break up if this album wasn't a success. Like, this song, this one song, is like a career making song. They have like nine albums now, that like, they tour all the time. But they don't necessarily love playing young folks live. And it sort of bums them out, you know, when they get the sense that like, a crowd just wants to hear young folks, right? Like, do you believe in the idea of a fluky kind of hit song as like an albatross? Or at least a mild annoyance to a band? And does young folks sort of qualify as that kind of song for Peter Bjorn and John?

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, like, I'm a Radiohead fanboy. So like, I'm very experienced with like, the idea of a band that, that disdains their, their breakthrough hit. I mean, they, they're kind of, they're a certainly different case where they ended up far more acclaimed. And nobody really gets too mad that they don't play Creep anymore. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think I understand it from a band's perspective, where it's like,

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  we, we wrote all these other great songs. And like, why doesn't anybody care about that? Like, I think that that, I can see why it would bother them. But at the same time, like, I feel like I've read some band interviews where, with people who have like, the one off hit. And they're just like, I'm just grateful. Like, I'm grateful that people are excited to, to hear something that I did. So I think that like, if you have a level of humility about it, like, it can be fun, instead of being an albatross. But, you know, I guess, I think they were happy that I said in the article that the rest of the album was good, too. Like, they, they're on

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  Instagram, they were jumping in my comments, being like, thank you. It was kind of, it was kind of weird, because it's, I felt like, I'm also saying that your album is like, the sound of indie gentrification. So like, it was, I was kind of surprised.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  You did say that. Right, yeah.

• 1:28:42Speaker 04

  I was surprised that they were so, like, uniformly, like, positive in their response to the piece. Because it was like, it didn't feel like, I, I felt like I was kind of heaping praise on them while also being like, but there's this kind of like, context that I can't escape, that like, haunts me a lot, listen to it. So yeah, I don't know. I think that they were happy, just that somebody was acknowledging that the rest of the album is really good. Because like, 10, we did this 10 years ago, like, when it turned 10. And I, I wrote an article that was just about young folks specifically. Because, because of my thought at the time was like, I

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  don't know if anybody remembers this album, but they remember the song undoubtedly. And so another 10 years went by. And I was like, man, this album is too good for me to not write something about it.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. I really love the idea that you're bros now with Peter Bjorn and John. I really do, I really do think that you guys would get a lot. I think you made clear that the indie gentrification was not their fault. That it was sort of an inadvertent byproduct. But like, they made a great record, and they can't help it. I did, you guys should hang out. You guys should totally hang out. I think you would really.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  You know, if they want to fly me to Sweden, I'm down.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  There we go. Yes.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  I've never been to Scandinavia, so let's make it happen.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Let's hope they're listening. I thank you so much for this, Chris. It's wonderful.

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me on, Rob.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Thanks very much to our guest this week, Chris Deville. Thanks to our producers, Chris Sutton, Justin Sayles, Juliana Rest, and Olivia Creary. Animations and graphics by Chris Calliton. Special thanks to Cole Kutchner, and thanks to you for listening. And now, let's all go listen to Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John. We'll see you next week.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

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