A Conversation with INVSN’s Dennis Lyxzen – HuffPost 11.4.13
Mike Ragogna: Hi Dennis. What part of the world are you in right now?
Dennis Lyxzen: I am in Stockholm, Sweden. I just came from the American embassy, to get my visa so I can make it to the States.
MR: Hey, please would you go the origin story of INVSN?
DL: Me and the drummer and the guitar player have been playing together for more than ten years now in various outfits and then a couple of years ago, we decided to change our name to INVSN and we released two record in Swedish in Sweden. Then we got signed to Razor & Tie when they heard the second record and then we recorded the third record, which is the first record to come out in English, and that’s the one we’re talking about. So it’s not that exciting of a story. It is what it is, a couple of friends playing music and recording records.
MR: Beyond the music, what joins all of you together?
DL: The thing that joins us together is that we’re all from a small town in the north of Sweden. We all used to play in punk and hardcore bands, and we’ve all just known each other from really far back. If you’re an artist and if you’re serious about playing music, you constantly want to evolve and constantly want to push your own limitations. Me and André the drummer and Anders have done a couple of records together, kind of punk stuff, and then the last thing we did was more post-punky and Anders and me took that to the full extent. We just wanted to try and see what we could do with it.
MR: What were your group’s musical inspirations?
DL: If you’re totally into music it’s not like there’s a certain band that inspires you to do a certain record, it’s usually a mixture of everything that you would ever listen to. If you listen to our record and you hear it and you know a thing about the musical history of pop culture for the last forty years, you’ll hear our references. But at the same time, it’s pretty free from trying to be another band or trying to sound like someone else. All of us grew up on punk rock so we just dove into all different subgenres and categories and most of us in the band were already record collectors and just loved music. It’s a very broad horizon on the stuff that we like and the stuff that inspires us.
MR: What’s the process when you guys get together? How do you create your music?
DL: Usually, when I write songs, it’s on the acoustic guitar and they’re very simple chord structures and melodies and vocals. Usually it’s our drummer André who write a lot of the music, he sits at home and writes on his computer but he writes really simple melodies and simple arrangements and he sends it to me and I’ll add vocals to it and kind of arrange the songs. Then we meet in the practice phase and Sara adds her part and Anders adds his part and we add the different layers to it. So it’s usually small ideas that we expand on together. I guess it’s the way a band does it, you have an idea and you expand it together. That’s usually how we do it.
MR: You have a video for “Down In The Shadows” plus you have a new single, “Distorted Heartbeat,” that premiered on MTV Hive. What’s the story behind the song?
DL: I’ve always been a restless, kind of crazy person, in a good way. Not all the time. So when I got into music as a young kid, it was a way to have an outlet for the insanity within. But when you’re a young kid, you’re like, “One day, I’m going to be like everyone else.” Things are going to straighten out and you’re going to be like a normal person and then you’re forty years old and you’re like, “Nah, it didn’t happen.” I guess the song is like, “You’ll grow up in the end, but the s**t that you carry with you is the s**t you’re going to carry with you for life.” Hopefully, your mistakes won’t be as many as when you’re young. But you’ll see the same mistakes when you make them, hopefully, fewer and farther between. Otherwise, you’re not going to grow up. [laughs]
MR: You start the album with “Number Sixty-One,” which is a nice way to kick off the project. Would you say that sort of encompasses the theme of the album?
DL: Not really. I think if you listen to the first two songs of the record, “Number Sixty-One” and then “Down In The Shadows,” I think that’s sort of a good representation of the two opposite poles of the record. “Sixty-One,” when we wrote it, was a very different song. We didn’t really expect it to be on the record, but then when people heard it, they were like, “This is great, it should be on the record!” It’s not a super-representative song of what we sound like or what we are, but I think with “Down In The Shadows,” those two compliment each other in a good way. If you hear those two songs, it’s like, “Okay, now I know what this band is about.” I think that’s a good thing.
MR: Love the song “Hate,” your song bullying. How do you feel about that topic?
DL: I grew up as a complete outsider. I think most of us in this band had similar experiences that draw us to punk rock music. For me, I think it’s important, as I said earlier, to find an outlet for that rage or that alienation that you feel when you’re a young kid. And music was definitely something that saved me from becoming a completely crazy person. Music also legitimized my insanity. “It’s okay if you’re a crazy person.” I just wanted to write a song about how when you grow up and you’re a young kid, there’s a s**tload of bullies, there’s a s**tload of people putting you down, and once you grow up and you become your own person, it’s not that bad. For me, that hatred towards the people that tried to put me down because of who I was made me strong and made me focused and made me start up the band and made me come into my own. So I think that in that sentiment, it’s kind of a basic song. I’m not a hateful person, I’m a pretty mellow guy. But if you have those sort of emotions, just embrace them and put something constructive into it instead of just hating.
MR: Dennis, what advice do you have for new artists?
DL: Get a real job? [laughs] It’s not worth it. No, the thing that I always do, try to stay true to what you want to accomplish. Find yourself an identity, find yourself an idea of what you want to represent and what you are as a band and a person and an artist. I think that’s important. Other people start a band because they want to become famous or they want to get girls. I think that’s kind of the wrong reason to start a band. I think if you want to start a band, if you want to play music, if you want to be an artist, find out what you want to represent, what you want to be, what you want the world to become because of you. I think that’s a good starting point. There are too many bands and too many artists that are just bad imitations of other artists. They just do it for the wrong reasons. That’s the advice that I would give, apart from “It’s not worth it.”
MR: [laughs] How do you envision INVSN about a year from now?
DL: I don’t know; it’s tricky because I’ve been doing this a long time. I put out my first record twenty years ago. There’s no guarantee for anything. You can have a f**king super solid record come out and nothing happens or you can be a crappy band and become the biggest band there ever was. I love the people that I play with, so hopefully, in a year, we’ll have toured and made a bunch of new sounds and will be working on the new record. That’s kind of the routine of things. Hopefully, this new record people will have been heard with an open mind and some people will be really excited about it. That’s all you can ask for.
MR: I took a look, you have a very packed touring schedule for the rest of the year.
DL: Yeah, it’s very good. I don’t mind touring.
MR: Excited about any first time destinations on the tour?
DL: Me, I’ve been everywhere already. I’ve done two thousand shows. The deal is I’m excited because we get to play these songs in English for the first time and the band gets to tour the States for the first time and that’s very exciting. I get to meet some of my friends in Chicago and New York and so on and so forth, but I’ve toured the States twenty-five times, I think. For me, the allure of, “I’m going to America!” is not really there. But there are two people in this band that have never even been to the States before and it’s their first world tour, so I’m very excited about that. It’s going to be an interesting adventure. I can’t f**king wait to get out and play these songs live, I’m excited about that!
MR: And you’re probably a month away from renting a Brooklyn apartment. Everyone gets one, you know.
DL: [laughs] We’ll see. I live in the sticks north of Sweden, so it’s a bit of a contrast to Brooklyn, and I like it up there, so we’ll see.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne