“Most of the music I still hold dearest is from the ‘90s,” says Nina Persson. “I’ve continued to find new music that I love, but my formative years were then, so the stuff that sort of honed my taste and ended up being what gave me courage to make my own music, that’s all ‘90s stuff.”
The Cardigans’ lead singer and lyricist is speaking from her home in Sweden, framed by a neatly curated wall of artwork and an impressivelooking floor-to-ceiling library of books in a low-lit study. It’s an apt setting for the 49-year-old to reflect on a decade of massive personal significance, and apt timing as well. “There’s been some years when it was a little embarrassing to admit it, and I tried to suppress it, but now it’s totally streetwise to have nostalgia for the ‘90s,” she says. “I’ve been working as a teacher at a conservatory to people who are totally romanticizing the ‘90s. And now my teenage kid is all about ‘90s bands and stuff. People want to talk about it.”
Personal significance for Persson also encompasses the professional, of course. The ‘90s saw The Cardigans form in the lakeside city of Jönköping in 1992 with guitarist and primary songwriter Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, and keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and earn international stardom and critical acclaim for the their unique brand of intelligent pop songcraft, which often combined dizzying compositions and complex arrangements with a growing command of the studio that by decade’s end had produced two albums worthy of masterwork distinction and a hit-for-all-time.
Persson, whose breathy and sweet—but tough—soprano could lift any song, is the band’s most recognizable member, and while singers often are the focal point of attention, female singers in the ‘90s had little choice but to
