We know that most people think that TDR has always been a bit biased towards Per, but this is actually not true. The point is that Per is by far the more active and talkative part of the duo, so most stories or interviews you have read here were about Per. Well, this is going to change now for a while. Sorry, Per. As a long time follower of Roxette you may have come across the news that Marie Fredriksson will celebrate her 60th birthday on May 30 this year. So we as a team gathered and made up our minds about how to celebrate this anniversary in a way that does justice to Marie’s long music career. Several ideas had been developed and then discarded again for various reasons. We think the best idea by far survived. Now that your social media streams mostly consist of old Roxette videos and new Gessle tour anouncements, we thought it’s about time to give them a different spin and fill Facebook with what has sadly been more than only a bit underrepresented: Marie’s own music. Her songs, solo albums that she has written before, during and inbetween Roxette tours, pieces which show a different side of Marie. In Roxette, she was the power queen, tight tops, screamy hairdos. As a solo artist, she showed another side of herself. A more fragile, vulnerable side, sometimes even involving events of her personal life. There were ballads, there were songs full of tears, of hope and joy. Not two of her solo albums were similar, she has changed her style over the years, especially after her comeback when she had fought her cancer. 

So what we did here was to collect all of Marie’s songs available on Spotify, including all her solo albums and all the singles thereof. This made for a playlist of about 120 fine songs. Each of us (and we are proud to say that this, after many years, has really been a project again where all of the current team participated) then gave points to each song: 1 for “okay”, 10 for “great”. In the end and after having listened to all these songs again we had a list of songs that we liked the most. Sure, some of us liked other songs than others. Tastes differ. There were songs that really got both devastating and enchanting votes at the same time. And there were songs we all could agree on that they should be played more. And this is what we are going to do from tomorrow on.

Tomorrow, we’ll start our very personal music countdown only consisting of Marie’s best songs. Every day you will find another song in your Facebook stream. We begin with what we consider the 60th-best song of them and go through them day by day until we present you TDR’s absolute favourite song, the #1 so to speak, exactly on Marie’s birthday on May 30. This will also be the day when we will publish all the songs as a Spotify playlist for you to listen and recap. So please follow us on our journey through Marie’s career, feel free to share with us your thoughts and memories, we are looking forward to them.