A down-beat song written by Jonas a few years before the band was formed, it repeats the same chord progression throughout a soundscape of life pictures. Here’s how Jonas sees it:
“Playing my Telecaster in the studio, I looked at a drawing on the wall: My own rendition of my youngest daughter on her skateboard in a seaside town during one of our surfing holiday. I decided to try to capture the feeling of a summer night that doesn’t seem to end, but also a story of going through the ebb and flows of life. Of how staying on course and appreciating the moment will get you through. As the beat and chords came to me, the opening verse became a musical version of my drawing:
Little town hot night the boys are out it’s alright she don’t care riding her longboard just as loose as the breeze on her jeans
Riding her longboard just as loose as the breeze on her jeans
Out by the pier in the dark holding hands and holding on
He lost his friend late that week left the house hiding on a train
They take a box of wine to the park then she says don’t look back
We’re here in the dark hold my hand keep holding on
This demo of the rock anthem 2021 has it’s root back in – 2021. Jonas explains about the creation of the song:
“During the winter of 2021, I was – and guess we all were – thinking a lot about how to deal with was going on in the world. We were just coming out of the Corona endemic, feeling free again but at the same time also brutally reminded of our fragility. Also, hate and fascism have been rising more than ever before in my lifetime, dividing people and societies. Social media let’s us communicate with everyone instantly, but it also help extremists to spread hate and lies, threatening our democracies. Having witnessed he American president urging his crowd to attack the parliament was an unreal experience. So, I started writing a song about it. It opens by paraphrasing Rolling Stone’s Street Fighting Man “I hear the sound of marching feet, in the streets of broken glass”. The feeling of the raging crowd in your streets, tearing everything apart and attacking the innocent – like the krystalnacht in Germany in 1938, named after all the broken windows of jewish shops. The first chorus simply is “Like back in 1938”. Fascism grows like a virus. It’s so easy to share hate and pass it on. In 2020, a black man died in the custody of US Police, which started massive rioting in many American cities, further fuelling the conflict, that spred to the rest of the world. The last line of the 2. verse is his famous, dying word “I can’t breathe”
But I wanted this song to be about hope. How, no matter how desperate our lives seem, there’s always some light. Remembering my grand mother telling me about how terrible it was to see the German warplanes flying in the sky during the invasion of Denmark in 1940. How her and my granddad hold on the each other, believing that something good would happen one day. “Then, back in 1945, the war ended in the sun of the spring, and we had your dad”. She told me this story when I was a kid during the Cold War, wanting to tell me that the world goes on – and the sun always rises again.
So I made this the vehicle of my song: It’s being told by a father in the future, who talks to his son and explains how in a dark time, him and his wife took their masks off in the sun….”and then we had you”. The most important act of hope and perseverance: To have a child and let the times roll on.
With this message from the future, I thought it was fitting to finish my song with quoting Amanda Gorman who read her poem “The hill we climb” at the inauguration of Joe Biden as US President in 2022. The whole world watched as dogmatism and violence was defeated by peace and decency.
“There’s always light”
I hope my children one day will listen to this in the future.
