PHOTEX | - ~ Melodifestivalen Press: Interviews ~

As some of you know, Melodifestivalen started about two weeks ago. For those who don’t know what Melodifestivalen is, it’s Sweden’s biggest music competition, which is held every year for 6 weeks in February/March. The winner of the competition gets to represent Sweden in Eurovision Song Contest in May.

This year, I will be doing press for MuseLed Blog to do coverage of Melodifestivalen together with Jenevia. First week of Melfest was in Gothenburg, which we were in town for to do press. We had never done press for the competition before, so everything was new for us.

The week started off with a press event where all the press got to hear the songs for semi-final 1 for the first time.

During Thursday we had set up two interviews, one with Albin & Mattias and one with Robin Bengtsson. I have to admit, I was very nervous because I had no idea what to expect from the interviews and how things would be once I was going to take photos of them.

Our first interview was with Albin & Mattias. When they arrived at set, they told us Mattias was going to do a quick interview over the phone and asked us if that was okay. We had a time limit, but we were okay with it. As professionals, you just have to work with whatever that might happen. Things could change. While we were waiting on Mattias to finish his interview, we talked a bit to Albin and also took some photos of him.

Consider I haven’t had my external flash for that long, and have barely used one before: the pictures turned out quite well. The light and colours turned out better than expected. I’m actually impressed over myself.

The guys were a little bit concern about their English abilities but once we started the interview, everything just went smoothly. As I’ve been around supporting Mattias since he was in E.M.D, it was very fun to see how much more confident he is in the work he’s doing now compared to back then. His charisma and personality really glows more than before! It’s very nice to see!

I hadn't met Albin before this interview, but I must say he was such a nice person and the chemistry between him and Mattias is such fun to see!

If you are curious to see our interview with Albin & Mattias, make sure to check it out in the clip below. We talked with them about how they ended up working with each other, what their song "Rik" is really about and their participation in Melodifestivalen. Plus so much more!

The second interview was with Robin. I’ve been around supporting him since he was in Swedish Idol 2008, so I was very excited for him when I heard he was going to be in the competition!

It has been a while since Robin was in the spotlight like this. Back in 2008-2009, I think he was a bit more reserved and it feels like now, he's more confident and have a better idea on what he wants to do in his music career, which is great! In the interview, it was interesting to hear more about him as an artist and how he has been working.

See our interview with Robin down below, where we talked about him finally making it to the contests, the meaning of his song “Constellations Price” and his hopes regarding the contest.

The second interviews went very well as well. I got very impressed of Jenevia and her professionalism. Being in Sweden, I’m used to see one or two ways to do interviews and almost everyone is doing the exactly same thing. Jenevia had really made her research and had great questions that artists usually never really get to answer.

That Friday we had also set up a sit down interview with the composers and songwriters Linnea Deb, Joy Deb and Anton Malmberg Hård af Segerstad. This year they have written/co-written Ace Wilder’s song “Don’t Worry”, Molly Pettersson Hammar’s song “Hunger”, Isa’s song “I Will Wait” and Lisa Ajax’s song “My Heart Wants Me Dead”. They were also the ones behind Måns Zelmerlöw’s song “Hereos” who won Eurovision last year for Sweden. Reporters in Sweden don’t really interview the songwriter and the composers behind the songs, which is such a shame because often they are the ones who made the song as well as it is. Linnea, Joy and Anton were very friendly, fun and interesting to listen to. They had a lot of good things to say and Jenevia had questions for them to really talk about their work.

In our interview they talked about such as their musical background, how they ended up working with each other and their point of view on how things felt when they were waiting for the result of Eurovision Song Contest 2015.

More stories, pictures and videos will be coming soon! I had to divide the blog post into 4 (MAYBE 5) different ones because I have so much to tell, and too many pictures to share! These posts are a bit different from what I usually publish, but I hope you will enjoy them! You are more than welcome to give me feedback of what you think about our work, the stories or just anything else in the comments down below or at any of my social medias.

Thank you for reading! ~

Lizel Strömberg