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"It's Impossible to Boil It Down to a Recipe" - David Myhr on the Pursuit of the Perfect Pop Melody

The Swedish power-pop craftsman and former Merrymakers frontman on chasing the perfect melody, unfinished ideas, collaboration, gear, and the persistence required to keep making music.

By Eugenia RoditisMusicngear Editor

There is no formula for the perfect pop melody. At least, that's what David Myhr has discovered after more than three decades of chasing one. From his years fronting The Merrymakers to his solo career, Myhr has built a life around melody, songwriting and the endless search for that elusive moment when a song simply clicks.

Now, with his third solo album, Everything Is All About You, arriving physically September 18 and digitally October 2 via Oglio Entertainment, Myhr continues that search with a remarkable cast of collaborators, moving between harmony-rich power pop, West Coast sounds, piano-driven songwriting and sophisticated orchestral pop.

We spoke with David about the mystery of melody, the art of collaboration, the gear behind the new album, sustaining a creative life in music and why sometimes you just have to keep going.

Eugenia Roditis, Musicngear: You've spent more than three decades chasing the perfect pop melody, from The Merrymakers to your solo work and now Everything Is All About You. Has your definition of a "great" melody changed with experience, or do you still recognize the magic of one in exactly the same way you did when you started?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a perfect melody and how to write one. I've even made an attempt at academic research in the field, studying my own chase for the perfect melody. My research question was, “Why are some ideas accepted and others discarded?” I spent years thinking about this question, documenting every moment of melody writing for the songs that were to become my second album, Lucky Day. I never finished the thesis, but my overall confusion only confirmed that there is no recipe.

You may talk about the importance of repetition, but on the other hand, there needs to be an element of surprise as well, because otherwise it gets boring and predictable. But of course we don’t want a melody that completely comes with surprises all the time because then it lacks direction. For any aspect of melody to work, it needs a little bit of the opposite as well. Contrast.

I would call “Here, There and Everywhere” a perfect melody with its wonderful leaps and big range. But then I love “Help!” just as much, which is very monotonous in the verses. But it becomes great because of the varying relationship to the underlying chords, which change all the time. And the monotony itself builds some kind of tension, longing for release in the form of a big leap, which eventually comes at the end with “won’t you pleeeease, please help me.”

So my conclusion is that there's a lot to navigate between to try to find the perfect balance. But as I said, it's impossible to boil down to a recipe.

As for the question of whether my definition of a “great” melody, if there ever was one, has changed, I think the answer is “no.” I love the same kind of melodies that I loved when I was young.

And now we’re only touching on melody. Then there’s also the relation to the lyric, and the arrangement, the performance, the production and the mix. It’s very easy to spend a lifetime doing this and still not have a clue!

Musicngear: You describe collecting small musical ideas until they eventually become songs, often with a piano nearby. Could you take us inside that process a little more? When an idea arrives, what makes you reach for a piano, a voice memo, an instrument or simply trust yourself to remember it?

Sometimes a melodic idea can arrive in the middle of anything when you’re out and about. As with my first single from this album, the main chorus hook, “Summer Summer Summer,” just came to me as I was opening the door at home. But the most common pattern for me, like for many others, is that melodies come to me while I'm strumming a guitar or playing a piano. And I tend to record myself because I don't want to miss out on a good idea; otherwise, I can definitely forget what I just did. Recording everything almost became an obsession when I was doing the research.

The process usually begins with a yearning to just play and sing something that I haven’t heard before. So, I sit down with a piano or guitar, and I start to play random chords and hum or sing a little tune over that I just make up on the spot. Using nonsense English. Just pure gibberish.

Sometimes the first few notes are promising and then I hit a roadblock. I don't know how to continue and I might go to another idea immediately. Or the other way around, I don't find anything interesting about what I sing during the first two minutes of improvising, but then I stumble into a section that catches my attention. The challenge for me is to find joy in the search and not just give up and go and have coffee.

After having sung and played an improvised melody that I'm not super excited about, I just leave it among the other hundreds (or more likely thousands) of voice memos that I’ve been collecting over the last 20-25 years. In the ’90s, it was microcassettes for a while, then MiniDisc, and now, of course, voice memos in the phone. I hardly find time to go through them. And the tunes are mixed up among thousands of various conversations or meetings that I’ve recorded.

But then the interesting thing is when a melody pops back into my head, reminding me of its existence. And that's when I know there is something about this little melodic idea worth exploring. So I might try to develop it on another day.

But most often I’m too lazy to do that, and too caught up with the family or my day job, or one of my many side hustles—writing commercial jingles for radio, playing Beatles or ABBA tribute shows. So I’ve found it’s smart to ask for help to finish ideas off. Because then it gets done.

For instance, with three of the songs on this new album, I presented the initial unfinished melodic embryos in search for continuation to Brad Jones when he happened to be in Stockholm. And in that one session in my studio that lasted for just an hour and a half, he helped me to finish off three melodies. He made it seem very easy to find how they should continue or exactly what complementary melody was needed to contrast with my main melody. Like the beautiful B-part of “Crystal Is Thinking of Something.” The other two were “Someday Soon” and the title track, “Everything Is All About You.”

Sometimes it went so fast that we were laughing at it ourselves. At the end of one of the quick demos we made that day, Brad is saying laughingly at the end: “It’s too easy!”

The challenge for me is to find joy in the search and not just give up and go and have coffee

Musicngear: There's an unusually rich network of collaborators on this album, from Bill DeMain and Brad Jones to Frankie Siragusa, Iain Hornal, Linus of Hollywood and Andreas Dahlbäck. How do you know when a song needs another person's creative fingerprint rather than another hour of your own work? And how do you protect the original spark while allowing collaborators to reshape it?

Well, the way I know if a song needs another person's creative fingerprint is because I wasn't able to finish it myself.

I kind of got used to the idea of co-writing already with The Merrymakers. I was never a guy who sat at home finishing off loads of complete songs with both melody and full lyrics. It happened a few times, but most of the time I just threw melodic ideas into the fire. And then Anders and Peter helped me to pick out which ideas were worth pursuing and which were not. They did the same, and we helped each other to complete melodic and lyrical ideas from each other. I got spoiled in that sense.

But after Peter quit, and when Anders and I weren't inspiring each other anymore, I felt a bit locked into our relationship as a band. But as soon as we went our separate ways, I was able to ask anyone for help. And it was a very liberating thing.

When the idea of a co-writing trip to New York, LA and Nashville came up for my second album, I made some really wonderful connections. And it left me with a taste for more collaborations.

I would be hesitant to write with people if they always felt inclined to change my original idea a lot. But that hasn't been the case. When Bill DeMain has written lyrics for me, he has kept the melody intact. In that sense, the initial spark is preserved. And when Brad has helped me to finish off melodies, he's also been making the melody more complete by adding sections rather than changing mine.

Although he has indeed helped me to realize that nothing is sacred. For my song “Jealous Sun,” as a producer, he cut off my whole verse and suggested that the pre-chorus should be the verse instead. And it worked!

Musicngear: What were the essential instruments, recording equipment, software, microphones, keyboards or other pieces of gear behind Everything Is All About You? Were there any particular pieces of gear that unexpectedly shaped the sound of a song or became indispensable during the recording process?

I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to ask about which gear was used. And of course, given the name of this publication, I feel a bit ashamed about it. It's like when I was interviewed by a podcast called Guitar Geeks here in Sweden and we talked about lots of things. But when it came to my pedalboard, I hardly knew the names of my own pedals!

It's true that I've been a music producer and a studio owner and have been teaching sound engineering, but I'm less and less interested in being an expert in that area. There are so many other people who are much more interested and devoted. I can’t tell the difference between a good mic and a bad mic. I just ask them which one I should use.

In my own studio, where I make overdubs, I use Logic as my DAW. I’ve been using it since the ’90s and I have a UA Apollo Twin and a Neumann TLM-107 with a Chandler preamp.

But when it comes to recording drums and the basic tracks, I prefer to leave all those decisions to my collaborators who are “real” studio owners. Like Andreas Dahlbäck at Durango Recording, my co-producer here in Stockholm, who also plays the drums. And Brad Jones at his Alex the Great Recording in Nashville. Or Frankie Siragusa at the LAB Studios in LA, who added a lot of instruments. They would answer this question much better in detail than me.

Musicngear: "Doodlebug", "Continental Drifter", "Someday Soon" and the title track all inhabit very different emotional and musical spaces, yet the album still feels unmistakably like you. When you're sequencing a record like this, how much do you think about creating a musical world or narrative across the songs rather than treating each track as its own universe?

I don't think too much about creating a musical world or narrative. I don't think in terms of themes or uniting sounds for the whole album. I'm more of a song-by-song guy in that I want to find the right way to shape each song and give it the best clothes that it can get in the production.

So in that sense I treat each track as its own universe, because I've learned from the artists that I love, whether it's Paul McCartney or David Bowie or Jeff Lynne, that in the end, although the music can sound a zillion different ways and vary in styles and genre on the same album, it's still the same voice, it still comes from the same originator. So in the end it automatically creates a musical world by itself.

“Continental Drifter” is a good example. It came as a surprise even to me that I was suddenly writing something that sounds like an attempt at writing an American Songbook standard.

I sent it to Andreas, and he said: “Well, it's a nice melody, but you can't have it on the album; it sounds more like a Christmas song.”

And for a while I thought the same, but then I thought, what the heck… If The Beatles could have “Helter Skelter” and “Honey Pie” only three tracks from each other on the White Album in ’68, then I can throw in a little jazzy song on my pop record too in 2026. Nothing dramatic about that.

So, instead of a “big idea,” an album for me is more like: “Here are the songs I finished over the last few years.”

But then again, when the songs are done, I do put thought behind the actual sequencing.

In the case of this album, and also on my last one, Lucky Day, I let Andrew, the label guy at Lojinx, who released my first two albums, have a go at it. He's great at those things.

It was his idea to start the album with the phrase “and in the beginning” (opening line of “Say Yes”) and put the song “Finally” last. Now it seems obvious, but I might not have thought about that.

What I noticed is that Side A on the LP is generally a little bit more uptempo, and that the second side is more laid back. It made me a bit worried at first that Side B might be lacking energy, but then I thought maybe it's a nice thing.

The most difficult thing, I think, is just to keep at it, to just keep going... to look inside and feel: do I want to do this? Yes, I love this process of making and expressing myself through music

Musicngear: You’ve worked across very different parts of the music industry, from The Merrymakers and international touring to producing and songwriting for Japanese pop artists and building your solo career. Looking back with all that experience behind you, what has been the most difficult thing to learn about sustaining a creative life in music, and what would you tell an established artist who is trying to keep evolving without losing the part of themselves that made them want to create in the first place?

The most difficult thing, I think, is just to keep at it, to just keep going, to not become too depressed when things are not going the way you want them to go, when people are not appreciating what you do, when you don't reach the number of listeners that you would have loved to, etc. But instead, to look inside and feel: do I want to do this? Yes, I love this process of making and expressing myself through music.

There are many days and nights where I spend endless hours on comping and editing a lead vocal, or sending a list of 18 requests to my mixing engineer Marcus on the third mix of a song when I think, “Why am I doing this?”

Not to mention all the work afterwards. Artwork, content, promotion, etc. If I got paid for each hour I put into this, I would be filthy rich, but instead I'm losing money. But still, I find it worth it.

So, my experience is that you have to be enormously persistent. As for why I want to create in the first place, I come to think of a quote by Max Martin where he says that when you sit in the studio and play it through speakers when it’s done, and it’s awesome. That’s total happiness for him.

When you’re satisfied with what you’ve done, it’s those moments that are the biggest for him, no matter if the song becomes a hit or not. In his case, it most often is, but I can relate to that feeling. It’s a moment of bliss.

Musicngear: You’ve said that your music isn’t intended as therapy or as a way of processing your life, but rather as something that can take the listener somewhere else. If you could build a completely fictional place that existed only inside a piece of music, what would it look and sound like?

Interesting question, but way too difficult for me to answer. When I say I want to be taken somewhere else when I listen to music, I don't see that place in front of my eyes. It’s true that if I put on a Stones record from the ’60s, I might, in my mind, be taken to Soho in 1966, hanging with The Beatles and The Kinks.

But other times it takes me to a fictional place that I can't envision. It's just a feeling that it takes me out of my everyday routine and gives me that larger-than-life feeling. So, I’m afraid I’m not able to build that fictional place. The listener has to build it for him or herself.

Musicngear: Let’s imagine you wake up tomorrow and discover that you’ve been given access to one legendary studio for a single day, with any musician in history available to join you. Where are you recording, and who walks through the door?

I’m going to try to avoid the obvious, predictable answers having to do with Abbey Road, where I've actually recorded, and being joined by Paul McCartney, who I actually have met, although the meeting lasted only a handshake.

If I were joining a band while recording their own stuff, it would be the Swiss casino while Deep Purple were recording “Highway Star.” Just because of the incredible energy and sheer joy of playing music together.

But if I had the opportunity to have my own song recorded, I wouldn't mind showing up at Trident Studio around 1971 with its legendary C. Bechstein concert grand piano, famous from “Hey Jude,” “Life on Mars?” and “Your Song.”

That’s where I’d be recording, and it’d be really great if Elton John and David Bowie would walk in and help me with some backing vocals!

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David Myhr’s third solo album, Everything Is All About You, will be released physically on September 18 and digitally on October 2 via Oglio Entertainment. Pre-order here

About Eugenia Roditis

Eugenia's passion for music was ignited from an early age as she grew up in a family of musicians. She loves attending concerts and festivals, while constantly seeking fresh and exciting new artists across diverse genres. Eugenia joined the MusicnGear team in 2012.

Contact Eugenia Roditis at eugenia.roditis@kinkl.com

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