On April Fools Day, a band named Lukas Graham with a lead singer named Lukas Graham, nee Forchhammer, will release a self-titled album in the States.
This is not a prank, but as I found out during a recent chat with the band, the guys sure do love to joke around.
“But ‘The Revolvers’ just sounded too 60’s,” Graham shot back when I inquired why the band uses his name instead of something different. He then offered a more serious explanation.
“I write the lyrics. I write the songs. It’s my experience as a human being on this planet Earth that is being portrayed on the record,” Graham said. “So, it’s natural that it’s my name.
“And, my name is prettier.”
Mark Falgren, Magnus Larsson and Kasper Daugaard compromise the rest of the band. Perhaps even in jest he had a point.
“We all get caught up in the live show,” Graham revealed regarding the emotions of his music. The band’s U.S. tour kicks off later this month and runs through the end of May. Most dates are sold out. “We have a lot of songs about my father and my family but also songs about having fun and being drunk in the morning and going to strip clubs or taking the world by storm.
“We can influence each other with our music and our expressions on stage to be three-and-a-half minutes in one emotional setting, and then switch it up completely in the next three-and-a-half minutes.”
The band mates, from Denmark, have known each other since high school and have never strayed through trials and triumphs.
“In a song on the album called ‘Happy Home,’ I wrote, ‘All my good friends, now they’ll last; the same ones that stood by me when my daddy passed,’ Graham told me. “After my father passed, we went straight back on tour and I had three of my very best friends there with me to back me up and to give me all the inspiration to write, ‘7 Years,’ ‘Funeral,’ ‘Don’t You Worry About Me.’”
The track “7 Years” is currently gaining steam at radio, breaking in to the top 20 on the pop airplay chart this week for the first time. Graham said in an interview with Official Charts that the song is about the past, present and future of his life. But as Graham sings about himself as a 7, 11 and 20 year-old and looks ahead to 30 (he’s currently 27), he ends the ballad by musing about what life might be like at 60. And he won’t go any further.
Because his father died three years ago, at 61. And until Lukas lives past it, he won’t believe it.
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