Gothenburg, Sweden · pop · singer-songwriter

Joel Alme

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Grand, string-lined Swedish pop delivered in a croon — the kind of songwriting that treats a chorus as a place to put everything.

Joel Alme was born in 1980 and grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he attended Schillerska gymnasiet. Before recording under his own name he was the lead singer of the band Spring in Paris, and has released a series of albums as a solo artist since the late 2000s.

He sings in English in a low, deliberate croon. His records lean on orchestral pop arrangements: strings, piano and reverb-heavy production, set against melodies with a clear debt to mid-century pop balladry. The songwriting tends toward the romantic and slightly theatrical rather than the conversational.

His debut album, A Master of Ceremonies, appeared on 22 April 2008, led by the single "Queen's Corner." A second album, Waiting for the Bells, followed in 2010, made possible in part by a grant from the Swedish Arts Council that let him record with a real strings orchestra and producer Mattias Glavå in a well-equipped studio.

In 2009 he reworked the lyrics of "A Young Summer's Youth" into Swedish as "Snart skiner Poseidon," a song still performed by a massed chorus of supporters before and after IFK Göteborg's home matches. In 2014, four songs from Waiting for the Bells appeared in the film Happy Christmas, where Anna Kendrick's character falls for his music; its director, Joe Swanberg, said nothing had sounded like that since Bob Dylan.

In 2015, Alme released Flyktligan, his first album recorded in Swedish rather than English. Most of its songs draw on his own background and upbringing in Gothenburg, marking a shift from the mid-century pop balladry of his English-language records toward more directly autobiographical material.

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popsinger-songwriter