Instead, Wästberg began using the university’s practise spaces to play drums, enrolled in various classical composition courses, and began widening his listening habits, delving into the work of John Cage as well a variety of African artists, including Oumou Sangaré, Thomas Mapfumo and Danyèl Waro. And now, all of a sudden I didn’t want to practise saxophone.” At 17, I had heard D'Angelo's Voodoo and my mind was blown, but I thought jazz was the thing to do. “I had reached a point where I could play all these complicated things and I was a young, promising sax player, but just began to feel pointless.
“I suddenly felt like, why am I doing this?” he recalls. It was mid-way through these studies that Wästberg had an epiphany. At 18 he won a place at one of Sweden’s most prestigious folkhögskola, and subsequently went on to study jazz at university in Gothenburg.
#Waro mymind professional#
He took up cello at the age of eight, before swapping it for saxophone two years later and - showing instant promise - he began practising avidly, aspiring to be a professional jazz musician like his hero Charlie Parker. Born in Frillesås - a tiny village on the west coast of Sweden - Wästberg displayed a keen interest in music from a young age, soaking up classic records by Stevie Wonder, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin via his parents. Marathon feels an apt description of his journey to this point. As he puts it himself on the arrestingly autobiographical ‘One Day’, “Ran a marathon to make it here, waited all my life for this: I’ll take the risk to get the chance.” And yet, for all the heartache that comes with being cruelly confronted with one’s own mortality, the prevailing impression Wästberg leaves listeners with is one of hope, resulting in a collection that is life-affirming in the very truest sense. Meditating on love, growth, self-acceptance, forgiveness, mortality and the passing of time, Let the Morning Come contains Wästberg’s most candid writing to date.
This dichotomy lies at the heart of his beautifully bittersweet third LP. I just got this very intense feeling of being alive.” “But at the same time it was like all the other worries I carried suddenly didn't matter. “At first I got very sad and scared,” the 39-year-old says today of the devastating diagnosis, speaking from his home in Gothenburg. Tests revealed he carried the gene for a rare, hereditary condition causing multiple strokes. When the tour was cancelled due to COVID, he decided to channel all his energies into writing new music instead, but in August of that year he received some life-changing news. Still riding high from the release of his second album as sir Was - 2019’s Holding on to a Dream - the Swedish multi-instrumentalist was booked to open for Little Dragon across Europe and the US. 2020 was supposed to be Joel Wästberg’s big year.
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