For Model and Singer Carl Hjelm Sandqvist, a New Album Is a Way of Controlling the Narrative

For his part, Sandqvist says that Ferm “was very much the only person I could think of to help me out with this because he’s an artist himself, and he has a way of understanding sound and how to create emotions with them. When I sent him the songs, he called me back two days later and asked me in a very sensitive manner, ‘Are you okay?’ The sounds represent a chaotic state of mind.”

It’s easy to get lost in the Sturm und Drang of emotions on Power Ballads, but in fact this is a meticulously structured project. The songs have an order that constitutes an emotional journey through pain to a kind of release in the form of amnesia. In addition to using his voice to convey a range of emotions, the idea, explains Sandqvist, is that every track would go up a key. “This is a very musical, nerdy thing to mention, but the album starts in C major, and then it goes up and up and up and up with every song. I wanted to create this feeling of rebirth, like the character forgets everything that he has been through so he can wake up again and repeat the same mistake again, because that’s the whole idea of music, or a song, to me. A song never learns; it keeps on repeating its mistake.” When Sandqvist couldn’t hit the high notes, he had to find solutions, like deepening his voice. “You need limitations to build your idea.”

The narrator of this album is based on the god Asclepius, son of Apollo and Coronis (a mortal), while Sandqvist’s visual persona borrows from the stereotype of the crooner (a sort of clown). He became acquainted with Asclepius while reading a book that related psychoanalysis to Greek mythology/religion. “I really wanted to do something about this god figure,” the musician relates, “and then I started, like, looking at myself…[and] I realized that I couldn’t really make an album about Asclepius. I had to put it into a more human perspective.” Sandqvist was also influenced by recent heartbreak: “I was very sad at the time, and it was my way to keep my thoughts on something else.”

The visuals Sandqvist developed for the album are redolent of Las Vegas and smoke-fragranced polyester; Frank Sinatra impersonator territory. “For many years I’ve been playing around with this crooner idea, but I also like to look at it from a meta perspective,” notes Sandqvist. “I’m playing a guy who wants to play Frank Sinatra. It’s a pretty frail character…if you’re going to sing about heartbreak and also use your personal experiences in it, you have to make fun of the character as well give it some edge.” The masculine frailty Sandqvist works with here is a departure from the androgynous-to-femme look he was often asked to conjure when he was working as a model.

For many years, Sandqvist traveled the world as a fashion model at the same time that he was in a band. For a while the two remained separate, but then, he explains, “The two different narratives started sliding into each other.” He resisted this, not posting runway images on his Instagram, for example. Sandqvist is now ready for some level of total exposure. “I can’t ignore the fact that I’ve been working as a fashion model for half my life,” he says. “For me, it was always combined with me playing in a band. So brands were projecting their idea of me being a certain rock-and-roll personality and dressing me [as such], which really distorted my self-image and how I should be as a songwriter or a singer.” Power Ballads, he continues, “is my way of controlling the narrative. I want to blur the line between who people think I am and who I think I am. We’re wearing masks, and for me, it’s been important to be aware of this mask.”