After a month of wanting to write about this artist, it’s finally here! For this post I got the amazing opportunity of interviewing the one and only, Sailor & I. The first time I heard of him was through an Âme remix to one of his songs —Turn Around— which then led me to listen to more of his music.

Sailor & I, a Swede artist –Alexander Sjodin– began playing music at the age of three. He grew up in a family that almost never played anything, however his curiosity for instruments was what initiated his passion for music. “My first strong musical movement was when I heard the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra performing on national television,” Sjodin says. The next day he went to the record store and grabbed the first two records from who he thought were the coolest convolutes: The Beastie Boys –Paul’s Boutique album– and Kiss –Destroyer album. “Those two records kind of opened up the doors into a new world to me, ” he says.

Even though his family never played anything, they owned both a piano and a guitar, which were also part of what started Sjodin’s curiousness for music. His parents always supported him and bought him all the instruments he asked for. “…soon my boy room had turned into a rehearsing room, a place where all the kids in the neighborhood started to hang out,” Sjodin says.

The sounds of the instruments became more than just a sound, it became the start of Sjodin’s career. “It was like a mirror to my inner emotions. So the music sort of became my best from very early in my life,” he says.

So as I asked him what the meaning behind Sailor & I was, he explained to me how it’s a metaphor. “Sailor & I… two wills inside a person that are fighting against one another. It is part of most peoples’ everyday lives. It’s interesting because there are times people do things they don’t want to do, but they can’t stop doing it for some reason,” Sjodin says.

Sailor & I gets inspired to write his music by his own life and the people around him. “I never plan to write a lyric, the whole songwriting process is really fast, like 5-15 minutes per song for lyrics and melody,” Sjodin says. He mentions how music comes very easy to him. He can be anywhere and might just get inspired by something around him that might lead him to write and record a song with his iPhone.

“What takes time is production, it’s a fucking mess because you have millions of options and parameters that affect how your song would sound like,” he says. Also mentioning how even using the exact same melody and lyrics but changing a sound on an instrument can turn out communicating a totally different thing.

Although my blog only covers a part of what was discussed with Sjodin, I would like to end it with his response to the question on the band’s plans of coming to the U.S. He said, unfortunately, that at this point Sailor & I still had no plans of coming to America. On t
he bright side, Sjodin did say, “Once we have a release on a U.S. label, we will put our focus there and start doing live shows.” Fingers crossed!

Check out Sailor & I’s Tough Love music video and the Âme remix that introduced me to his wonderful music.

For more info make sure to visit his Facebook, Soundcloud, and Twitter.