A bossa nova that refused to stay sad
The hi-hat is indecently cheerful. Under it, Nina Persson asks to be fooled, which is not the same thing as asking to be loved, though the chorus works hard to blur the two. Lovefool arrives dressed for a dance and carrying a smaller, meaner sentence in its pocket. The strings glitter. The voice stays light, almost helpful, as if the humiliation were a party trick she has agreed to perform. You can sing along before you notice you are volunteering for the trick.
Peter Svensson had the music first, a bossa nova he played on guitar while the band waited for a flight in 1995, after Life and before the record that would swallow them. Persson thought the tune beautiful and the chorus, love me, love me, say that you love me, too much of a cliché to survive on its own. She offset the sugar with the admission: fool me, go on and fool me. Their producer Tore Johansson, at Tambourine Studios in Malmö, would not leave the bossa alone. He put drummer Bengt Lagerberg on a disco beat, and the sadness lost its alibi. First Band on the Moon came out in 1996 with the song sitting on it like a guest who had brought a louder stereo than the hosts.
The first release did well enough in Europe and then seemed finished. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet put it back in circulation, and the United States caught a sugar rush the band had not ordered. Persson has described the track as a bit of a freak on the record, a sad story inside an upbeat horse, and the band as snobs who wanted to be a rock group and found themselves on morning television instead. She remembers hearing children sing it in the water on a holiday in the Philippines, which is a strange place to meet your own joke. The video, all saturated color and deadpan, sold the brightness and kept the calculation in the lyric, where the character knows the love on offer is fake and takes it anyway.
I thought it was beautiful, but found the chorus Love me, love me, say that you love me too cliched, so I tried to offset its sweetness by adding: Fool me, fool me, go on and fool me.
(Nina Persson, The Guardian, 2023)
What the disco beat concealed, and then revealed to anyone who stopped dancing, was the arithmetic. Better a counterfeit than nothing. The Cardigans had written that sentence quickly, in an airport, which Persson has noted is often how the largest songs arrive, before anyone has time to make them respectable. Johansson’s insistence on the beat did the rest. A slow confession would have been believed and forgotten. The trot made it a hit and a burden, and the band spent years trying to walk out from under the glitter without denying the craft inside it.
Heard now, away from the film and the shop speakers, Lovefool still sparkles, and the sparkle is the argument. The character is not naïve. She is negotiating. The fool in the title is a job she is willing to take, paid in a chorus everyone else gets to enjoy for free.
