How The Cardigans created the song "My Favorite Game"
“My Favourite Game” is a collaboration between Peter Svensson and Nina Persson, written for the Swedish band Cardigans. In 1998, the song was chosen as the debut single from the album Gran Turismo.
The History of the Creation and Meaning of the Song My Favourite Game by The Cardigans
The song's lyrical heroine is going through a difficult breakup and is trying in vain to either change her partner or save him from self-destruction. In essence, the song is about a woman driven to despair by the end of an affair. Her "favorite game" is love, in which she, unfortunately, fails.
The first verse of the song immediately makes it clear that the hero of the story is far from an ideal man, and describes his not-so-best attitude towards the heroine. The second verse reveals the woman's hopes that she will be able to change him for the better, re-educate him and make him a worthy person. The third verse is already a bitter admission of her naivety: she realizes that her attempts have failed, that it was impossible to change him. The idea of re-educating the "bad guy" turned out to be a mistake, and now the heroine is left with a broken heart.
Remarkably, even by the end of the song she continues to consider herself some kind of angel, despite her obvious poor choice of partner. She eventually comes to the conclusion that the whole situation was nothing more than a pointless experiment, an attempt to find an illusory sense of security.
The divine meaning of the song is that God gave a lost man a chance three times, after which He gave up trying to change him.
The Cardigans members later said that during the work on Gran Turismo, the atmosphere in the band was quite tense, and small conflicts often arose between them. Nina Persson, for example, recalled that her first reaction to the song “My Favourite Game” was outright rejection. She even admitted:
“When Peter first played it, I thought, 'This sounds like crap,' and I walked away.”
The music video for the song “My Favourite Game” immediately found itself at the center of a scandal after its release. Many European TV channels, including MTV UK, refused to broadcast the full version of the video and showed only an edited version, from which all scenes with car accidents and dangerous driving were cut out.
Interestingly, the director of the video, Jonas Åkerlund, foresaw potential censorship issues and prepared five different versions of the video with varying levels of violence and cruelty. MTV UK rejected most of them anyway, fearing that the video could provoke carjackings and accidents. As a result, the “softest” version, number five, was the one that was most frequently played on MTV UK.
The full, uncensored version of the video was shown only once on the official Cardigans website, four days before the single's release. In the US, music channels were much more lenient towards the video: many of them broadcast either the completely uncensored version or a version with minimal edits, where only individual scenes of accidents were removed.
Magnus Sveningsson, bassist of The Cardigans, recalled:
“We worked for the first time with the famous Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund. The video for “My Favorite Game” was shot in Barstow, California, right in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The song became a huge hit in Europe and brought us wide recognition through MTV rotation.”
“My Favourite Game” achieved considerable international success. It reached number one in Greece, number three in Sweden, and number fourteen in the UK. It also reached the top 40 in several other European countries and New Zealand.
Although the song failed to enter the main US Billboard Hot 100 chart and its radio counterpart, it reached number 16 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, which measures the popularity of songs in alternative rock.
Lyrics and translation of The Cardigans My Favorite Game
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