Johan Bengtsson is the bassist for Swedish band The Sounds. The group released their third album, Crossing the Rubicon, in June. The band proudly states that their latest album was produced on their own without the help of a record label. Right now the band is on a headlining tour, which includes a performance at the Sunshine Theater on Thursday at 7 p.m.
Daily Lobo: What are The Sounds up to right now, and how is the tour going?
Johan Bengtsson: The tour is going well, I think. It’s good to be headlining again. We were on the No Doubt Tour, and now we’re doing our own tour, which is fun, because we are coming back to a lot of those places.
DL: The Sounds have become pretty popular in the past few years, so how is that treating you guys?
JB: I don’t feel like we exploded totally yet, not like stardom overnight, but we’re definitely doing well. We’re fortunate enough to be able to go on a big tour like this. If you compare us with other Swedish bands, there is only a handful of them that can tour America, and I don’t think any other Swedish band at this point is doing an extensive tour like this. It feels that we’re in a good place.
DL: Can you say a little bit about how this album differs from your other albums?
JB: I think with this album, we wanted to do a real album, and I think we accomplished that. Most people these days are doing the whole iTunes thing, where you can just download a song instead of an album. But we felt like the two previous albums we had were more song-based, but this time we wanted to do a full album, and we are very proud of it. I guess the two previous albums were more party-based, and I think we’ve grown as songwriters for each album, and you can totally see the development of a band if you listen to three albums back-to-back. From the first album, we were straight out of high school and forming a band. We wanted to drive around and party and get drunk. And in the second album, it was more like realizing that we were actually doing something, and we talk a lot about being away from our families and being on tour all the time but still having the party life. And if you listen to the third album, it’s the band growing up, and we’re in this for real.
DL: What are some of the differences you notice between playing shows in the U.S. and in Europe?
JB: I have a hard time generalizing America as one thing, because it is so big, and it’s really different from the coasts to the midcountry. When we tour Europe we tour different countries, and it’s obviously different, and I feel the same thing here. Boston is different from El Paso. You can see a lot of this
country. It’s not like you’re a Swedish tourist and you go to New York for a week. You really dig down deep and get to see a lot of stuff, so it’s fun.
DL: Have you ever been to Albuquerque before?
JB: When we played with No Doubt, it was a really cool venue in the middle of a desert town. I think I went to some after party at a house, and it was a bubble Jacuzzi party. On our last run we stopped here on our day off, and it was some good times.
DL: Where did you get the name for the latest CD?
JB: It was actually the drummer who came up with the name. It originates from a whole mess we were in last summer. We were ready to go into the studio early (in the) summer, and we didn’t get in until the fall, because we had some legal issues because we were getting out of a label. It’s a long, kind of boring story, but Sweden was our mother label and we weren’t happy with the whole situation around the world. It took us a long time, but we got out of the contract, and we put it out ourselves, and during that period we would get offers from really major labels who wanted to give us really long recording contracts. And we were in a pathway — we could either do it ourselves or we could go with the major label road and get stuck in the system. So we took the leap to go down that first road.
Box:
Tickets $15 at SunshineTheaterLive.com
Thursday, 7:00 p.m.
Sunshine Theater
120 Central Ave. S.W.
