Dog day afternoon

>> Gothenburg’s El Perro del Mar
puts the “me” in melancholy

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

One afternoon in the summer of 2004, a well-armed New Brunswick man was about to open fire on unsuspecting strangers in a Toronto park, when a dog intervened. This “friendly dog,” according to the animal lover and would-be mass murderer, humanized the people in his midst, forcing him to let them live. Clearly, this was a different calibre of dog than the cold-blooded canine who advised the Son of Sam to kill six New Yorkers in the late ’70s. The Toronto dog has more in common with the stray that saved Sarah Assbring.

A year prior to the Toronto incident, Assbring was sitting on a beach in Spain. Although she’d been playing and writing music since childhood, and sang with choirs and worked reception for the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, she hadn’t produced a note of her own in years. Solitary and despondent, she noticed a dog approaching her from the shore. She spotted it every day for the duration of her vacation, and somehow her songwriting muse returned with this dog of the sea—el perro del mar, in Spanish.

Back in Sweden, she was out from under depression and back at creative work, but her debut album is hardly happy. Its classic pop sensibility, recalling the work of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson and the Brill Building songwriters, is countered by its slow pacing and thoroughly bittersweet vocals.

“There’s less room for nuance when music is completely happy or completely sad,” she says. “Melancholy appeals to people because it’s an emotion that’s not black and white, and as a result it’s probably more real. I would say it’s the fuel for my songwriting.”

Assbring is nearing the end of her world tour, and preparing the next El Perro del Mar album. Whereas she played all the instruments on her debut, the follow-up will feature an orchestra. Not the Gothenburg orchestra, mind you, for whom she’s still sporadically employed.

“Being a solo artist, you can become self-centred, so it’s important to have a very normal job to go back to,” she explains. And if her ego ever threatens to overwhelm, she’s got a pooch to keep her grounded.