Feature: Koala Bar Decodes “Lions”
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind "Lions" and the story it tells?
The inspiration to the lyrics initially comes from watching relationships around you and to look further than the eye can see. We are all experts in hiding and masking all of our shortcomings to each other. The song is about two parallel perspectives. One is about supporting someone who’s at rock bottom and at the same time trying to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing. The other one is about being the black sheep in a context and experiencing that you can’t live up to the high standards of your environment. Then in the end it’s about tolerance and respect towards yourself. The phrase ”gather the lions here, I wanna feel their weight” is supposed to symbolize this.
How did you work with the producer or engineers to bring your vision for this song to life?
For the first time, we worked with the producer Leon den Engelsen, who actually co-wrote this song with us. This song has had a lot of different shapes and forms but when we started working with Leon we wanted the song to be organic, unique and different from our previous work. And he had all the right tools to help us take the song to where we wanted it.
What impact do you hope "Lions" will have on your audience?
Lyric-wise it’s a song that’s introspective and hopefully makes you reflect on how we all see and talk to each other.
Musically we hope this song will reach out to our audience displaying a different side of Koala Bar creatively. We hope that people give it a couple of listens before they judge it. It has a lot of different and unique elements in it that you don't always register within the first listen.
Can you tell us more about you as a band?
We are a band from Malmö, formed around 2015 by Jonatan (guitar, vocals) and Axel (guitar, vocals). A couple of years ago Petter joined on bass/synth and Olof on drums/synth.
We are an indie band but we like to experiment a lot with different genres and sounds. All of us listen to a lot of different artists/bands and we combine them in our sound. Hopefully that makes us kind of weird and unique!
How do you approach collaborations with other musicians and maintain creative synergy?
We try to be more open minded now than we were before. On our new songs we collaborate with our producer Leon and he has influenced our songs a lot with his sound and ideas.
We like it more this way because we think our music gains a lot from it. It makes it possible to make our songs “evolve” more than if it's “just” us writing.