James Yorkston on collaborating with Nina Persson of the Cardigans: 'I felt I had some connection with her'

James Yorkston and Nina Persson PIC: Anna Drvnik

Fife’s fine folkster James Yorkston likes to change things up a little from project to project – but he keeps finding people he wants to work with again and again. His compromise when approaching Sweden’s Second Hand Orchestra to make a follow-up to their 2021 collaborative album The Wide, Wide River was to entertain the idea of a guest vocalist.

Orchestra leader and producer Karl-Jonas Winqvist is a similarly well connected musician with a ready list of collaborator contacts. And thus Yorkston found himself in a rehearsal studio with one of his fanboy favourites, Nina Persson from Swedish pop maestros The Cardigans, working on vocal arrangements for new album The Great White Sea Eagle.

“I always get embarrassed when I say this in interviews, but I loved one of her albums when I was younger,” he says, beaming in from his home in the East Neuk. “Pre-internet, me and my friends used to swap cassettes and one of them was a Cardigans album called Life. I thought we should ask Nina because I felt I had some connection with her... We both wear woolly hats.”

Persson, listening graciously from her Zoom box just outside Malmö, cannot claim an equivalent longstanding affinity. “James’s story is that I was asked if I wanted to sing with James and I said yes because I thought that it was James Blunt,” she says. “I had not heard James Yorkston’s music before but I loved it right away – which is more than I can say about James Blunt.”

Yorkston’s latest batch of gentle, charming and witty songs were written early in lockdown in his Cellardyke studio, overlooking the sea. “If I threw an apple core out the window it would land directly on the beach,” he says. “Of course I wouldn’t do anything like that…” For the first time, Yorkston wrote on piano. “These songs were just coming out, and it’s a luxurious place to be as a writer when there’s no struggle like that.”

As is their natural way, the Second Hand Orchestra fleshed out the song skeletons with arrangements improvised in the studio on cello, violin, harmonium, flugelhorn as well as bass, guitar and drums, then recorded live by the third or fourth run-through, capturing the moment.

“These guys are way more used to improvising than I am,” says Persson. “But I was totally trusting with the whole atmosphere because this group of people are amazing. Even if they have a great idea, they don’t just bombard it in. They’re very sensitive to what kind of instrumentation would lend itself to the song in question and also what it needs. I wouldn’t say necessarily less is more because there are times when everybody is absolutely blasting but there’s a beautiful choreography going on there with people stepping aside as much as they are stepping in.”

James Yorkston, Nina Persson and the Second Hand Orchestra PIC: Anna Drvnik

That same audio choreography applies to their live shows, as seen and heard at Summerhall during the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “My memory of it is that nobody plays the same thing twice,” says Yorkston. “We don’t have that much time to rehearse, so it all feels a bit wild. I never really learn the songs but when we’re all playing, everyone kind of knows what’s happening but there’s no one saying ‘you should do that riff, you should come in here’. There’s quite a few songs that Nina will be singing that sound so good that I stop singing and let her get on with it.”

In keeping with the flexible and spontaneous nature of the collaboration, Yorkston and Persson have also performed duo shows and played as a trio with Winqvist. However, the Orchestra will appear in full chamber effect for their show at Celtic Connections, which returns with a packed programme next month, following the Covid cautious iteration of 2022.

Both Yorkston and Persson are the first to admit that they made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed. “On a personal level it did me a lot of good not being on the road,” says Yorkston. “I was on the beach every day and there were no tourists, it was so lovely and quiet and peaceful.”

“I have so many reasons to believe that I was one of the very spared ones,” says Persson. “As a family we live in a small town. In Sweden, the kids could keep going to school all the way through so in a lot of ways we couldn’t have survived any better mentally.”

James Yorkston and Nina Persson recording with the Second Hand Orchestra

Persson also picked up an online teaching job at the start of the pandemic, leading Zoom classes in artistic development work at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory just across the Øresund in Copenhagen.

“I don’t teach music but I teach how to develop methods of working with music,” she says. “How to find your context as an artist, how to handle feedback, how to give it, how to take it, how we talk about music. It’s a great subject. I’m not an academically trained person but it was something that I could teach and understand, so I gained an opportunity which made me feel super useful and actually in more of a routine than I am usually.”

As to music-making, Persson is partial to a guest vocal, has released one solo album, Animal Heart, in 2014, and a couple of albums as A Camp with her husband Nathan Larson. More recently, she has got her gigging kicks in a covers trio, singing PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, Rufus Wainwright, Sparks “and also some Swedish stuff. It’s really fun to sing other people’s words when it rings to me. I pick and choose what I want to embody or channel but we were all over the map.”

Persson also still plays live with The Cardigans, who reformed a decade ago after a hiatus of six years. There has been no new music from the band since 2005 so there was a flutter of anticipation recently when rehearsal studio footage of the band surfaced online. Persson is quick to scotch speculation.

“I don’t know where it came from,” she says, “but one day it was just on the internet and people started calling us. There’s nothing I can tell you about that because nothing’s happening. The songwriter in the Cardigans is not interested in writing new music for The Cardigans so I can break it to you now that people can be sure that’s not going to happen.”

Yorkston, meanwhile, can’t stem the flow. He’s recently published a new novel, The Book of the Gaels, written a soundtrack for forthcoming feature film Satu – The Year of the Rabbit, is looking to record the next album for his world/jazz trio Yorkston Thorne Khan and will host his next round of touring Tae Sup Wi’ a Fifer events in the company of Rachel Sermanni, Radiohead’s Phil Selway and, he hopes, a certain Swedish pop star sharing a screen with him right now who coyly protests that “plans too far ahead in the future tend to make me feel trapped and anxious – but that might be an excuse because I don’t have any. To quote an old merch salesman of ours, I’ll say ‘my longterm plan is to get a white denim suit.’”

James Yorkston, Nina Persson and the Second Hand Orchestra play Drygate, Glasgow, 4 February as part of Celtic Connections. The Great White Sea Eagles is released by Domino on 13 January