MANDO MONDAYS (2014)

https://soundcloud.com/mando-mondays/1-introducion

…welcome to Mando Mondays…

oh hello everybody and welcome to Mando Mondays

my name is Gustaf Norén and i am from Mando Diao

first of all i´m going to try to explain to you all what Mando Monday is

Mando Monday is the link between you as ears and Mando Diao as voice

because the more i think about it the more i see Mando Diao as a voice

sometimes that voice creates melodies

and sometimes it creates stories

sometimes it creates images, videos, pictures

but also sometimes this voice is inhaling, taking in

sometimes Mando Diao is listening

and Mando Monday will be the exhale of our art

Mando Monday will be the day that we introduce you to another chapter or another page

and everything we create during the week we will give to you

wrapped up as a gift

i don´t know where this is gonna take us

maybe Mando Monday will go on forever

i hope so

i hope that this will be a continuing inhaling, exhaling

first time when we were introducing our music to others we couldn´t talk

we could only make noises or sounds from our mouth

maybe we were one year old

this way of introducing is called playing live, hm, yeah

and then we discovered the microphone

now the microphone is also a link between you and me

the microphone is the glue

and nowadays information rains down from the sky

and right now i´m in Stockholm talking to everybody

so the question is then should we still record violins?

yeah maybe we should, sometimes

i think Mando Diao will do albums

if that´s what you call the bunch of songs that you listen to in a row

but you can also make your own albums

because the information flows freely now

and you can gather your own raindrops

i like this way of consuming or inhaling information or raindrops

just opening my mouth and there it is

but Mando Mondays will be one way of telling our story

Mando Mondays will be our hand stretched out for anyone to take it

why we do it on a Monday

i don´t know, monday is our symbol of the beginning

mondays are page one

monday is kind of facing the future

and we also talked about giving you goods on monday

that will ease your days and that will grow on you

and that will make you dance on friday

wish you will also want the club to go up on a tuesday

Working Monday night, on the corner flipping hard
Made at least three thousand, on the Boulevard
I've been working graveyard, shifts every other weekend
Ain't got no fucking time to party on the weekend

Got the club going up on a Tuesday
Got yo girl in the cut and she choosy
Club going up on a Tuesday

that was one of my favourite songs at the moment

Club Going Up On A Tuesday by IloveMakkonnen, Atlanta boy

we´re gonna leave you with another little gift

there´s a picture we put on our social media

with someone holding a sign that says Mando Mondays

if you recognize where he´s at you can go to him

and he will give you tickets to Annexet, the show we´re gonna do in Stockholm in november

now take care everybody

easy with the alcohol, safe sex, we love you, bye

https://soundcloud.com/mando-mondays/mando-mondays2-j-a-m-m-i-n

…welcome to Mando Mondays…

what you gonna buy? my first question when i got some money. what you gonna buy…    i don´t know what i bought, but i know i don´t remember what i bought.

i remember my first song; i remember my first song i wrote with Björn, i remember my first song that i heard. i remember the first music i listened to.

first music i listened to was Bob Marley; when i was born 1st of february 81, Bob Marley was very sick. three months later, the 11th of may ­­81, he died. his cancer was all in his body, in every piece of his body. when they first found a tumor they wanted to remove his foot, but that meant he  couldn´t play football, and he couldn´t dance. but Bob Marley couldn´t live a life without playing football or dancing.

i recently listened to his song “Jammin´“, and i realized what i didn´t really understand at the time was what he was singing about.

but there is also something about the swedish language that makes it a little more difficult for us to think - especially in terms of jam and play. because as a kid when you play with toys we have a word called lek. but when you pick up a guitar we have a different word called spel. i don´t know - that fucks you up a bit because it´s the same thing.

Bob Marley is singing that jamming is a thing of the past; i think he´s referring to how you play with toys and i think he is comparing that to how he plays music, how he dances, how he plays football. but also how he makes love. i just thought it was so ironic.  

Bob Marley has blood and hands and dreadlocks. he´s dead, you know, his blood don´t flow no more, his feet ain´t dancing. Bob Marley, his flesh and blood don´t interest me. but his music is the closest thing that i have with god. i believe in god. i know god. i have a relationship with god. and my god is that music. you listen to that song "Jammin´", how they are singing, how they are playing. for me a Bob Marley melody is taking you and holding you like a little baby and breastfeeding you  – that´s a Bob Marley song to me. and mother is god also; and mother is music. maybe it was the connection i had with Bob Marley from such an early stage – that´s why i am connected so much to religion and god. because life was just created when i heard the melodies. but Bob Marley would never become a brand because Bob Marley is just an image of music for me .

other people have other images of music. some people wanna sell their image of music as the truth; some people have as a job to show others what is the truth about music. but their world are not big enough to think that other people have different images of music. and there are other truths. it is the same with religion also. they believe in one god and in one god only. but god is not a brand either.

child im with you all of the time

when a shadow falls i´m with you

when you´re down

when a shadow falls im with you

by your side till the end of time

i´d die for you so dont cry

i´m with you

this week we will give you a video that we shot in Japan with a friend of ours, called Tim Erem, fantastic director, and he shot a trilogy: first Black Saturday and Sweet Wet Dreams, and this is the third part. and this video was kind of the first images put to Aelita and its sound. and the video was shot in Tokio capturing the feeling of the people after the last train has left the station. and you see people have the same look in their eyes as sometimes when you go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they´re sitting there and they have a baby in their lap and they are maybe eating fleas from the baby´s head, and they look out in the air and they look at absolutely nothing. it is like a vacuum in their head; this moment is a very beautiful moment - you don´t feel bad, you don´t feel good. you are in the twilight zone of feelings. if you hold on to that feeling, if you stretch it out and if you put music to it - at least for me, i am in church.

till next monday

bless

 https://soundcloud.com/mando-mondays/3-love-last-forever

so we´ve been writing this song called Love Last Forever and we wrote it to smooth the athletes; we wanted the music to be the massage after the workout.  we dont wanna boost the workout, we don´t wanna boost the training - we wanna ease the training. pushing yourself to the absolute limit for no reason is poetry.

i tell you the worst thing with sports for me is the of course is nationalism. i don´t like nations, i don´t want any nations at all; i think nations are a thing of the past. i hope so. but this is not only sports where we have this nationalism: i read every day in the newspaper how proud people are to be swedish, because the swedish musisician got very good grades by someone with great power; someone with power gave someone from your country good grades in music and you feel pride. but be careful with that pride because that pride can easily lead to violence.  don´t let that pride hold your head up while you walk in the streets.

it´s the system that´s fucked up. it goes deep - never blame an individual; never blame an athlete for taking drugs to become better; never blame a journalist for being proud of a music when they´re living in a world that´s dividing everybody into nations and musicstyles. it´s complicated to blame the system. first of all you have to know the system, and the system is not you - you are an individual. you understand how you work;  a system is more complicated. it´s easier to critizise Kim Kardashian or Vladimir Putin or Patrick Modiano.

every day they wake up and breathe that system´s air. every day  i wake up in Sweden - this is not Sweden! it looks exactly the same as Finland and Russia and Japan, i dont know. the people behave the same. someone told me this was Sweden when i was born - I got it in my pass - this Sweden, you are part of the swedish culture.

and everything, all this information about me if you think twice you know it is bullshit, it makes no sense, i am not swedish, stop calling me that.

but you want answers; you want answers to your questions. and that i´m sorry about; i´m sorry that Mando Diao doesn´t give any anwers.  the past i don´t know, five, six, seven years we´ve been getting so many questions. what is this? what are you doing?n why are you doing this? and we have no ansers, you know. what style are you? i have no answer. what country are you born in? i have no answers. it´s more complicated thatn that.

everybody wants a nice big fat answer.

so i have big baggy clothes out from the ghetto, i smoke weed, i drink Hennessy, i´m hiphop. or maybe i´m skinny, tattooed, black dyed hair, plays electric guitar, cigarette in my mouth, drink a lot of Jack Daniels. or maybe i´m indie. maybe i´m upper class kid from a cool town, they get the best grades by all the music teachers in the world.

maybe the only thing we wanna do is make you think a little little harder so you and me together can change the system.  it´s not gonna take an album, it´s not gonna take a song, it´s not gonna take a band. it´ll probably take 500 years of culture that asks you questions and not giving you answers.

but it feels so good to sit down in that couch in that big fat couch full of answers. i know, that´s why we love religion. we love just devoting ourselves to something that we know is right.

so me and Björn are gonna do anexception with this song. we´re gonna tell youthe only answer we know and we´re gonna sing it to you when you´re gonna sit back in this wonderful big ass couch and watch athletes pushing it to the limit.

Our love last forever

Our love last forever

Forever

That´s Maxida Märak upcoming artist, it´s gonna be huge

https://soundcloud.com/mando-mondays/4-shoutoutmonday

shout out Monday

shout out Mondays of you

how you doin out there? hope you´re fine

shoutout for latin music

shoutout to …

shoutout to …

shoutout to bossanova

shoutout to salsa

shoutout to samba

shoutout to reggae

shoutout to song

shoutout to Argentina Chile Ecuador Honduras Nicaragua Peru Uruguay

shoutout to lambada

shoutout to West India

shoutout to …

shoutout to San Vincent

shoutout to …

…

shoutout to him

shoutout to …

fuckin´…. that´s what it is

shoutout to fucking

shoutout to all the poets

taking one word putting another one behind and all of a sudden you´re in heaven

shoutout to free culture

shoutout to storytelling

you got something to say put it on the internet

i will take it i will flip it around and i will give something to it

shoutout to african music

i´ve been listening to african music since i was a baby

shoutout to the rastas

shoutout to mixing

this is how we write music all the time

we get some beat some inspiration from someone else and suddenly here it is

shoutout to women

shoutout to love

shoutout to ..

shoutout to fuck

shoutout to children

shoutout to children

shoutout to children

shoutout to children

shoutout to dancing

shoutout to god the invisible being