Lorentz: “The goal of poetry is to win continuously”

The last time we saw each other, Lorentz Berger had recently announced that he would end his music career with one last record and one last concert. A kind of voluntary sorti, a year after he was accused in the summer of 2020 of having manipulated and exploited a former girlfriend when she was a minor. Lorentz denied the allegations. In the autumn of 2021, his interview answers were delayed and wordy.

When we now meet up in the center of Hökarängen, it may not be a miracle of energy that extends the hand, but the difference is still striking. Now he is happy, joking more.

– Last time I was in a conclusion, with all that entails. This is something new. It’s like when I started making music. There is an artistic re-ignition, he says.

– It’s more fun to start something new than to end something old, so to speak.

The farewell concert was planned to February but had to be postponed until May. Lorentz describes it as an emotional farewell.

– The audience helped me with the lines of text I did not remember and such. It got sad during the last song. That was the last time I talked to the audience. But I have done this closing concert now and can start a new era, it really is like that, he says.

The re-ignition springs from the lyrics. It started as a natural extension of his previous writing as an artist. He describes how the lyrics a few years ago began to take on a different expression, one to be read.

– So it comes from a playful place. I started writing a lot of different types of lyrics, but the poems felt like the most exciting and challenging. But it took a long time to write them out, you have to get over a little cowardice in the beginning, he says.

– It’s more naked. It’s the scary thing but also the reward. It’s straight from the head down on the paper. That’s how you get it, then you will be happy.

The result is “A dance the dead summer”, 47 stand-alone poems on about 60 pages, published by Frianke. Lorentz says that there is a forward movement in the poems, that he hopes that they will be able to convey a spark of life, something he himself feels when he reads poetry. It is not an obscure poem for an initiated circle, he says, but a poem written to reach many – preferably wider than his music.

– My music could be a bit narrow, I thought. Yes, it won some awards, but it did not win awards all the time. It won awards sometime. But with poetry, the goal is to win continuously, Lorentz says jokingly.

After six albums and two Grammy wins, it is now poetry that is Lorentz’s work. He reads Jorge Luis Borges and is inspired by Anna Achmatova, letting the poem take him forward. He describes the new form of expression as freer, more generous and with fewer rules.

– I focus a lot on the work. I’m happy about that. I feel good in my work, to have the next project going on all the time. Writing and reading is a good life. You stay busy, that’s good. It is my experience that creation makes life better in every way.

Who are you writing for?

– For posterity. No I’m joking. I may write to myself as a younger person, writing down what I myself had appreciated reading. If I were younger, I would have liked to have found this book and picked it up, says Lorentz.

– But the goal is to write a great poem. I write more for the art form itself than for a specific person. You go into a tradition and you have a responsibility towards the poem, you do not want to write a bad poem.

Great poem, it sounds like a big responsibility?

– Yes, it is something to strive for. Striving is the thing. You do not have to come forward, but the idea is to strive.

Lorentz answers hesitantly if he lacks his old art form. He still produces a little for others and says he still writes down possible samples when he hears them. Maybe he should learn piano or guitar, pick some melodies without playing Oasis at campfires: “There are many who are already good at it”.

But, he says:

– You have to have a little discipline. Now I’ve told you not to make music. If I get to choose between sitting in a studio or sitting and writing, I choose to sit and write, and let the future show if it feels exciting.

Ready on stage he probably is not. On the contrary, Lorentz hopes to be able to take with him what he has learned from playing live, into readings and performances. Recently, he performed a couple of his poems in P1 Kultur, and tentatively alternated between straighter readings and something that approached rap.

– It was my first time. But it should not sound like my rap, I want poetry to be separate from it. I’ll practice my reading. On the radio, I did not know I was going to read, so I offered it, he says.

The storm that blew around Lorentz in the summer of 2020 feels increasingly remote. Votes were then raised for him to be “canceled”. His music career has certainly been discontinued, but Lorentz remains and gets new attention. Did he think of it himself, that it became so?

– If I have reflected on it… I have thought that as long as I have something to contribute, books or artistic projects, it is fantastic if people think there is value in it coming out. Even though there are people who think it is wrong that books are released by me, he says.

Lorentz has previously said that everything he does is to some extent autofictional. The collection of poems, however, is an exception, he says. Although the content for that matter is not completely disconnected from his experience. This applies, among other things, to the collection’s first poem: “Note2Self”, whose last lines read:

Come back to the memory when you sat / And looked at dad / When he scrubbed potatoes / In the early autumn / You were so small then / It was September and the bluebells / Bowed / You carry it on to your son.

– It’s about maybe that’s the point. To come back to those childhood memories in a dark moment, the good. That you pass it on to your own children as a type of light, says Lorentz Berger.

Lorentz shuts down: “There is a strength in moving forward”