INTERVIEW WITH BJÖRN STRID BY SAMMIE STAR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LINDA FLORIN
The music that defined rock in the 1970s and 1980s was a time of remarkable creativity and innovation. From punk to disco, new wave to heavy metal, it was an environment ripe for the cross-pollination of musical styles. The Night Flight Orchestra, which includes members from well-known bands Soilwork, Arch Enemy, and Mean Streak, is among the few in the new rock era that truly appreciates the magic and artistry of that era. Since their 2012 debut album, Internal Affairs, The Night Flight Orchestra has embraced the sounds of the 70s and 80s, taking listeners back to a time when music was created purely for the joy of it without any boundaries.
After the passing of guitarist David Andersson in 2022, The Night Flight Orchestra has learned to cope with the loss of one of the band’s most brilliant minds and talented guitarists. Now, 13 years after their first release touched our ears, the band has released its seventh studio album, Give Us the Moon.
“WE RETURNED TO THE SAME STUDIO WE HAD BEEN TO SO MANY TIMES BEFORE, TO FIND THE JOY IN THE MUSIC AGAIN AND TURN IT INTO SOMETHING CREATIVE AND POSITIVE.”
“This means a lot,” responds vocalist Björn Strid. “We’ve been through quite a journey with the passing of our guitarist, David Andersson, whom I founded the band with. That was really tough. We had to regroup and dig really deep. I had this conversation with David on his deathbed, and he needed to see a future of the band without him. It became a blessing. For him, it became very clear that we should continue without him. After he passed away, how do you move forward? That’s a lot to go through. So, we had to take our time. For the new album, we returned to the same studio we had been to so many times before, to find the joy in the music again and turn it into something creative and positive. We did, and we knew we needed to write something more uplifting and powerful, but we had to dig deep and David had a special way of writing. As songwriters, we had to tap into his world, take that inspiration with us, and widen that palette when we wrote this new album. It was a big challenge, but something amazing happened, and I don’t think we could have done a better job with this new album. We have gotten to the other side, and it’s a great feeling. We were saying after everything we had gone through, ‘Now give us the moon, William.’ That became the saying, and it then became the official title of the album.”
It is evident from the production to the instrumental delivery that a richer and more distinct sound has emerged with the presence of Give Us the Moon. “With Aeromantic and Aeromantic II, with all of our music, we always had this deep melancholic element throughout our albums, and that has always been inspiring to us. Somehow, people have always thought of us as a happy disco band,” he laughs. “It’s very multilayered, it’s been very inspiring and cool to see a world that has so many complex arrangements, but somehow, it spoke very directly to people. That has been more inspiring to us more than anything. We like to surprise ourselves and the listeners because we like to move between genres with this band, like bands used to do in the 70s and 80s and no one really batted an eye. You had bands that had reggae songs then a seven minute progressive piece, and no one really reacted. It was just music.”
“WE LIKE TO SURPRISE OURSELVES AND THE LISTENERS BECAUSE WE LIKE TO MOVE BETWEEN GENRES WITH THIS BAND“
“That is really inspiring to us, and also writing music that is quite cinematic with all these pictures. It’s like we are creating soundtrack for a roadtrip. It might seem quite shallow, but it’s a very multilayered roadtrip. Those are the things that really inspired us for this record. It felt the same, yet deeper somehow. It really proved to ourselves that we could do whatever we want. This band is like a haven, an anything goes band. You ask yourself, ‘Can we really do this?’ Of course, we can. It doesn’t mean that everything turns out fantastic, but it’s a great start, and things come out from that. Some of us coming from the metal world, we feel like you’re a little bit in a cage, which sometimes is good. I like being in a cage. There is a lot of things you can do with metal, but when you want to do other things, I want to go crazy and try different things, but still be very focused in what we are doing. That is the general feel of this album. Everything is more focused. It’s an over-the-top band, but it’s’ not a show-off band,” he smiles.
Give Us the Moon explores a multitude of real-life experiences. The Night Flight Orchestra embarks on a new chapter, journeying through themes of romance and the challenges of being trapped in toxic environments. While the band is known for crafting stories set against lush instrumental backdrops, this album represents more than just a fresh start for the band.
“There is a bunch of real-life stories. For example, ‘Paloma’ is a about a really good friend of my wife and I’s, who is a flight stewardess. She started dating a pilot who was not so nice and treated her bad. She kept going back to him, and we got really frustrated. I finally decided to write a song about it. I wanted to write her liberation soundtrack. We were flying home from Alicante in Spain, and on that flight, there was a stewardess named Paloma. I told myself, ‘That’s the name. I’m going to write that story.’ I wrote all those lyrics to that song on the way home and the music around it. They are no longer together. I don’t know if the song had anything to do with it, but I would like to think so,” laughs Strid. “It’s a great story, and there are a lot of those like that on the album. When you have somebody close that is returning to someone that is not treating them well, you’ve seen it so many times before, you have to write a song about it. There is also a twin song on the album called ‘Stewardess, Empress, Hot Mess (and the Captain of Pain),’ which tells the story of that Captain she was dating. That became the epic song, the album closer. ‘Runaways’ is about me living in Toronto for four years. I moved back in 2015, but I haven’t been back much since then. I felt like I had to make up with the city because it’s one I really loved. Unfortunately, it was one that was quite destructive, so I felt like I had to go back and make things right and that became the subject of that song. ‘A Paris Point of View’ talks about a couple that goes to Paris, a city of love and light, to fix their relationship, but it doesn’t work out. It’s quite tragic in that sense. It has a little bit of dark humor running through it. There is a lot of that on this album—some of it fiction, some of it taken from real life.”
