For Klara and Johanna Soderberg, the Swedish duo known as First Aid Kit, one of the biggest differences they felt in performing the songs of Leonard Cohen live, as opposed to their own material, was the need to get his lyrics just right. “You have a different kind of respect for it,” Klara says. “If I fuck up my own lyrics, who cares, we wrote it.”
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“You don’t fuck up on a Cohen lyric,” chimes in Johanna.
The two spoke to American Songwriter recently about Who By Fire, their just-released double-album capturing a performance at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden in March of 2017. Cohen had passed away only a few months before, and the sisters, like so many of his fans, were having a hard time coping with the loss.
“We were definitely in the midst of grieving his passing,” Klara remembers of that time period. “It was very emotional. I remember hearing about it and thinking I can’t deal with this just yet. We were going to our parents’ house, and I was like ‘I can’t listen to him yet.’ And I came in the door and I heard his voice. Our parents were playing his music and I started crying.”
First Aid Kit took it as fate when they were approached by the Stockholm Theatre and were asked if they had any ideas for a themed show with all of the theatre’s resources, including its actors and props, at their disposal. A Cohen tribute seemed a perfect idea to explore in that unique setting. “We wanted it to be big, because he deserved that,” Johanna says. “It wouldn’t have been right with just the two of us. We wanted to supersize the arrangements and highlight the melodies. Because when a lot of people think of Cohen, they think of the lyrics. But he was also a fantastic writer of melodies.”
The sisters also had the idea early on that the show would also include recitations of some of Cohen’s poems, which meant that just about everybody on stage would be somewhat out of their comfort zone. “It was great because we were trying to do something we’d never done, reciting the poems,” Johanna says. “And they were singing with us. We were on stage with these professional actors and actresses doing what they do, but then they also got to sing, which they thought was really scary, with us. It was a good balance. We all challenged ourselves.”
“I was really nervous, especially about the poetry stuff,” Klara concurs. “We both had moments where we alone on stage with just a spotlight, and here we are reciting the poetry. But I felt weirdly, I don’t know if confident is the world, it wasn’t even that. It felt so natural, because when we were performing the show, we were so in that mode.”
With the combination of the songs and the poems, and with no chit-chat in between, First Aid Kit and their collaborators created something more than a typical concert. In a way, it was both a narrative of a life’s journey and a celebration of all that Cohen represented as an artist. “We definitely thought about that more than we would for our own show,” Johanna says of the thematic progression. “It’s called Who By Fire because it’s about death. I think there’s a tension at the beginning, and then it builds and gets bigger and darker. And then at the end, there’s a light to it. We had to end with ‘So Long, Marianne’ and his letter to Marianne (Ihlen), because that’s such a beautiful story about the two of them and how she passed away right before him.”
“To us it was a funeral in a sense,” Klara agrees. “It was our way of saying farewell. It was extremely special.”
Even with First Aid Kit sharing the spotlight with so many others in Who By Fire, their a cappella rendering of “Bird On A Wire” stole the show. “At our shows, my favorite moments are always when we do a song a cappella or acoustic, like with ‘Ghost Town,” Johanna says. “I love toning it down. It forces the audience to listen and become uncomfortable, and I like that.”
The run-up to the show proved so chaotic that the Soderberg’s didn’t realize what they had until they listened back to the performance after the fact. “We were planning this when we were still in the studio doing Ruins in Portland, Oregon,” Johanna remembers. “So everyone was at the theatre in Sweden, and we were trying to schedule all this and knock the show together and it was really rough and stressed. We weren’t really enjoying the process as much as we liked. And I think we felt that way as well when we did the show, because we only had four days of rehearsal.”
“This (the album) was the first show. There are a lot of mistakes in it and you can tell. We didn’t want to remove the flaws. We wanted to keep them. We knew it was special, but it wasn’t until we listened back that we realized that everything really fell together perfectly. It was risky with so many people involved, but everyone brought their A-game and a lot of passion.”
Upon hearing it, First Aid Kit was just looking for the right time to showcase this performance with an album release. What better time than when people are starving for live music? “In a perfect world, everyone is listening to this record back-to-back on their vinyl,” Klara says. “Flip the record, turn down the lights, sit in the dark, drink some wine and just listen to this.”
While they’re anxious to see the reception it receives, First Aid Kit are extremely grateful for the experience. “It will always stand out to us,” Klara says. “We would love to do more things like this in the future where it’s not just a concert. You kind of feel like a kid again when you to get to play around and not just play music. There are a lot of different other songwriters that we like. But it’s hard to compare any songwriter to Leonard Cohen.”
Who By Fire falls into that rare category of essential live albums, as two master interpreters (and their capable friends) honor Cohen with a counterintuitive combination of sonority and irreverence that’s emblematic of his finest work. “He has the darkness, the political side and then almost a sarcastic, humorous side,” Johanna concludes. “And the sexual part, the spiritual. There are so many layers in his music. We loved him before we did this, but afterward, we were totally smitten. The more you dig into his work, the more you realize the genius.”
Photo Credit: Olof Ringmar
