CAESARS PALACE - Love For The Streets LP

“We listened a lot to garage rock and psychedelia like the 13th Floor Elevators and Billy Childish and the Sonics and stuff like that, but also Sonic Youth and Pavement. In the beginning our sound was a little different from today. A lot rawer, but still with some great melodies somewhere underneath all those fuzzed out guitars. We didn’t have the organ at that stage, and since I’d just started to learn to play the guitar, I couldn’t play and sing at the same time, so there are none of those beautiful Beach Boys harmonies that we got to use later. But it’s still good stuff, and it’s not light years apart from what we’re doing now, just an earlier, more primitive version of what later became the Caesars' sound."

2002’s Love For The Streets brought the band relative stardom at home, selling Gold and securing the band a Swedish Grammy award for Album of the Year, as well as cementing their status as on of the country’s most influential and popular bands.

The track “Jerk It Out” was a ubiquitous minor hit, appearing on the radio and in more than a handful of TV shows, films and now an iPod ad. Comments Ahlund on the song’s fuzzy meaning, “It means to just let out some steam, freak out, let yourself go, get crazy etc. All that stuff. Don’t feel ashamed of your different and weird sides ‘cause they’re what makes you beautiful.”

As for the band’s hopes for this album, they are relatively simple. “I really wish that people would put the record on when they are having a house party with their friends and just scream and shout and dance to it. Let you freak flag fly!”, exclaims Ahlund. “Or that they put it on when they’re all alone and sad and when they broke up with their girlfriend. Or put it on in your car stereo and shout along with the lyrics. I wish people would put it on in their headphones and walk around on town feeling tough and cool listening to it. Or that it makes them want to kick their boyfriend out…or call him and make up. You know pretty much what I do with the records that I love best…”