Sarah Klang wrote a song to her unborn daughter, just months after discovering she was pregnant. ‘Mercedes’, the album’s title track and lead single (and also the name of Klang’s child) assures her daughter that she will forever be there for her. “You can always run to me,” Klang sings on the soaring synth-driven track that radiates with hope and optimism for her daughter’s future.
“As I mention in the first verse of the song, I’d been pregnant for nine weeks at the point of writing this song,” Klang laughs from her home in Gothenburg, Sweden. “I was going through a lot of different emotions after finding out I was to become a mother. I’d always wanted to be a mother – it was something I’d longed for since being a teenager, but I’m also a very neurotic person so of course started to feel very anxious from the get-go. Making music about what I was going through helped me to process it all.”
Indeed, making music in her teenage years is how Klang, who has won two Swedish Grammis awards to date, always processed changes in her life – like moving to the country and changing schools as a young girl. The experience had a profound impact on her life, not least because of how tough her school was – a place where bullying was rife. She says being an expectant mother took her squarely back to that period, recalling what she experienced in vivid detail after years of suppressing the memories.
“I hadn’t thought about any of that at all since it all happened”, Klang recalls. “And I thought I didn’t want to go back to there, ever,” she continues, remembering what a difficult a period it was in her life. “When my daughter arrived, I looked at how small and vulnerable she was and I thought, ‘in a few years time, she will be going to school.’ I started to wonder: ‘will she start to experience what I did?’ It was an overwhelming thought.”
Klang captures such feelings on the tender ‘It’s A Beautiful Dream’, a song about the vivid fever dreams and nightmares she had during her pregnancy. Having intense flashbacks to her youth, she sings through a cracked voice on the song about how she “had to keep going” back then, with little or no time to process what was happening to her. “It’s a song ultimately about accepting who you are and not feeling ashamed of yourself, of realising that it was a very dark time for me. It had quite a profound impact on me.”
Klang has always had a talent for autobiographical song writing, like on her acclaimed debut The Milky Way (2018) which won Best Album at the Swedish Grammis awards. It continued on Creamy Blue, her second album that earned another nomination for ‘Best Album’ and ‘Best Alternative Pop’ at the Grammis awards, and another nod for ‘European Album Of The Year’ at the IMPALA Awards. Her last album became her most well-received album to date, with Virgo winning a Swedish Grammy for Best Alternative Pop (it was also nominated for Best Album).
Her fourth album continues her steam-of-conscious storytelling style, but now with more candour as on the emotive ‘Halloween Costume’. On the track, Klang traces the roots of her mental health issues back to also being frequently abused by teenage boys at her middle school, in addition to being bullied. “When I get out of here, I’ll be a mad woman,” she recalls on the track.
“I had trauma and PTSD from my teenage years – something I didn’t realise for many years,” Klang explains. “After therapy I remembered that I genuinely thought I would go mad during that time in my adolescence,” she says, explaining how therapy has since helped her process what happened. “I had definitely blocked it all out but after therapy, I started to process it all in a way I had never done previously. At the time of it happening when I was young, music was what I used to cope. I would lose myself in songwriting and compositions, listening to dance, Americana and great nineties beats.”
Despite ‘Halloween Costumes’ challenging lyrical themes, musically, it’s bright Americana-pop, recalling Wilco and Sparklehorse and like many songs on the album, those nineties tracks that Klang grew up listening too. “I guess it’s about defiance in a way too,” Klang says. “About overcoming something as monumental as this. I started to feel a kindness towards myself that I hadn’t felt before, after years of blaming myself for what happened. I started to feel compassion towards my younger self. A lot of peace came as a result.”
Album standout ‘Belly Shots’ feels very much like the sound of Klang at peace, coming to terms with what happened to her. It recalls a wild period in her twenties of drinking and partying, and now making a conscious about turn from that as she enters her thirties. She imagines what her daughter will look like and envisions a different future. “When I close my eyes I can see her,” she sings on the affecting ballad.
“A lot of this song shows the consequences of not dealing with the trauma earlier I think,” Klang explains. “I was not taking care of myself, drinking too much and not sustaining relationships. I was still looking at my teenage self from the outside and I felt quite ashamed of myself until I realised what happened to me was a consequence of others. That realisation was life changing.”
Klang says ‘Belly Shots’ was the track also that starkly changed the musical direction of the album. “We’d recorded the album more or less remotely at that point, when we were still in and out of lockdown because of the pandemic,” she explains. “When that was over, we went back into the studio proper and recorded ‘Belly Shots’. The song felt completely different to the others we had made up until that point, so we decided to re-record the entire album in the image of this song. The album turned into something new and exciting entirely.”
This can be heard when Klang charts meeting her daughter for the first time on the hopeful ‘Magic Stone’. “It was an inextricable great love,” she laughs. “Seeing myself in her and also discovering myself through her. That became the topic of another song on the album, too ‘Hospital Window’, which is a song about how you give birth to yourself when you give birth to your child.” On that song, Klang emotively sings “the pain didn’t hurt me”, as the hurt of childbirth is alleviated by seeing her daughter for the first time.
As well as celebrating the beautiful moments of motherhood, Klang doesn’t shy away from writing about the challenges of motherhood too, as on ‘Worst Mom’, which recalls the music and vocals of artists like Karen-O and Feist. “I feel like the worst mom today…probably gonna cry all day,” she sings on the track. “It was important for me to show all the sides of motherhood,” Klang explains. “The good and the bad days. It was important to me to write about the challenges of pregnancy – like I was so ill during mine, more than I’d ever been in my entire life – and those days when you feel like a rubbish mother because you’re juggling so much. I think every mother can recognise that feeling.”
The song ‘Burger’ continues in this vein, she says, being about the first time she went on tour alone without her daughter. “What’s the point of this, something asked me, and I don’t know what to say”, she asks on a song that’s reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s gut-wrenching storytelling style when torn between two places. Wanting to make music but also wanting to be with her daughter made her question her choices, she says.
“It’s definitely stressful being away from my daughter,” Klang explains. “And working day-to-day, of course it’s harder balancing everything,” she adds, on the pressures of balancing motherhood and work in an industry that has historically done little to help working mothers. “In a way, it’s made me love what I do even more because now, this is my main job. Everything I make now goes towards providing for my daughter. Before, I’d balance music with other jobs and now I just concentrate on this. That focus has been really important for me I think, and has made me a better musician, I hope.”
The songs ‘Sunny Philadelphia’ explores the feeling of wanting it all – the career, the husband, the perfect family and home – while ‘Bridge’ looks at the realities more – of staying in the same place, of day-to-day life being sometimes very different from dreams – but none-the-less important or special. “Marrying up your dreams and realities can sometimes be hard,” Klang laughs. “But it was important for me to write about these realities so we can think about them in a different way.”
“I think I’ve learned a lot about myself making this album,” Klang continues. “Like how, since my teenage years, I’ve always made music to process things in a way I’ve never realised,” she says, remembering how she didn’t enjoy the academia of school, instead always writing, making music and setting up little tours with her friends. “It was always something very intense for me, and still is. I’ve always been really driven by it, and still am. I’ve realised more than ever that my music helps me to process what’s happening to me.”
Next, she is looking forward to touring and working with others she says, with her next album already in the works. “This is definitely my coming-of-age period,” Klang laughs. “I hope the songs will resonate and that is something my daughter can maybe one day listen to. Maybe it will help her, and other young girls too, giving them strength. This album is all about being kinder to your younger self, of forgiving yourself,” she continues, “and moving strongly into the future, with pride.”
