Recently I walked into a drugstore and I immediately stopped in my tracks when I heard a familiar sound playing over the speakers.
“Doot-doot … doot-doot-doot-doot …”
I felt a wave of excitement, more so than usual when I’m in a CVS.
“Dear, I fear we’re facing a problem …”
It’s funny how certain songs stick with you for years — for decades, even. “Lovefool,” by the Swedish pop-rock band the Cardigans, is one of those songs for me. It takes me back to a very specific time in my life: about 25 years ago, when I was a junior in high school and obsessed with “Lovefool.” I’d sing it in the school hallways, then go home and listen to it on cassette.
"Lovefool" was also at the heart of one of the most cringey moments of my junior year — or any other year of my life, for that matter. It took place at junior prom, when I sang the song in front of my date and a large group of friends in our high school gymnasium. It was quite a spectacle. A friend had requested “Lovefool,” and once the DJ began to play it, my ears perked up. I belted out the words from start to finish, dancing wildly, while standing in the middle of a circle of classmates. It was very much out of character for me — I was introverted and had no musical or dance talent to speak of — and it was not something I would ever do again. Such is the power of "Lovefool."
What can I say? I was in love with “Lovefool,” and I may have acted foolishly because of it.
I clearly wasn’t the only one who was smitten, given the song’s role in not one, but two hit albums released in 1996: the Cardigans’ “First Band on the Moon,” which debuted in the U.S. that September, and the soundtrack to the Leonardo DiCaprio-Claire Danes film “Romeo + Juliet,” which dropped less than two months later. Both albums went platinum (in the case of “Romeo + Juliet,” multiplatinum), in no small part because of the success of “Lovefool.”
Feeling nostalgic for that time in my life, I thought I’d turn back the clock and chat “Lovefool” with the musician who sang it: Cardigans frontwoman Nina Persson, who co-wrote “Lovefool” with bandmate Peter Svensson. She shared why the group initially considered it to be a “freak” of a song, one particular moment when she realized just how popular it had become worldwide, and what she thinks of it a quarter century later.
The story behind ‘Lovefool’
Though “Lovefool” is, without question, the most recognizable song from “First Band on the Moon” — especially in the U.S. — it didn’t exactly capture the vibe the Cardigans were going for at the time. The group was looking to move in a different direction, musically.
“We felt that ‘Lovefool’ was a bit of a freak of a song on that record. We wanted to go more in a rock, kind of a tougher identity,” Persson, 47, explained from Sweden during a conversation on Zoom.
The Cardigans viewed “Lovefool” as an extension of their previous album “Life,” which featured the single “Carnival.” In a way, “Carnival” was “Lovefool” before there was a “Lovefool,” with its chorus of, “Come on and love me now/ Come on and love me now.”
From the start, "Lovefool" was not what one would consider an edgy rock song.
“I remember we were writing it on tour. Peter actually presented the song to us in an airport lounge,” Persson recalled. “And then it was like a very mellow bossa nova — that's before we get the disco beat. So I remember we started to fiddle with it then and starting to sort of come up with some embryos of lyrics and stuff.”
Those lyrics became desperate pleas to “love me, love me,” “fool me, fool me” and “leave me, leave me.” “Lovefool” actually carries a pretty depressing message for a song that’s otherwise so cheery.
“I'd say it really has the thing where at a quick listen to it, it makes you feel really happy. But if you read the lyrics or isolate the lyrics, you would get a different — it's a nice Trojan horse in that way. It's like a sad story captured in a wooden horse of an upbeat, danceable, sunny tune,” Persson said.
