In the least surprising reveal ever, SVT announced today that the last joker is...E.M.D. Gasps all around, I'm sure.
And get this: the performer of previously announced track "Higher" is...Star Pilots! Goodness. Who'd have guessed?
The actual bits of news that came out of this are the title and composers of E.M.D.'s track and (sort of) the composition of Star Pilots.
E.M.D.'s song is called "Baby Goodbye" (if reusing tracks wasn't forbidden, they should've reused the Friday Hill song of the same name) and is written by the group and Oscar Görres, who often works with Danny and who I think is a friend of his. I usually associate Oscar with up-tempo dance-influenced songs in the past (Danny's "Hey (I've Been Feeling Kind of Lonely" and "Blue" [as well as the will-we-ever-get-to-hear-more-than-a-clip "Alive"], The Provider's "Wanna Feel Real," producer on Monrose's "Hit 'n' Run," Donal Skehan's "Double Cross My Heart," Loveshy's "Mr. Gorgeous"), but given that this is a song for E.M.D., I don't think we should expect that kind of production. The up-tempo strings-and-piano-featuring "Give Me Some Time," an E.M.D. song written by Oscar, is maybe more representative of what we should expect (for the record, I really like "Give Me Some Time" and think that's one of the album's better songs, but it's not a smash single sort of track). Then again...maybe not. Do I dare get my hopes up? The songwriters describe the song as up-tempo and--well, heck, let's italicize this--not a typical E.M.D. track. Could the group finally live up to the brilliance that a boy band from Sweden should theoretically be? The description also says it's a track that would go over well in Europe. Obviously you always have to take these songwriter descriptions with a lot of salt, but they've basically just said there exactly what they needed to say to get me excited about the group again.
Schlagerprofilerna reports that a last minute decision was made by the group to go with "Baby Goodbye" as opposed to a song penned by Jörgen Elofsson called "Saturday Night."
As for the other real question--who the members of Star Pilots would actually be--well, the group is playing coy and not releasing actual names. The four members are instead going by M-38, M-31, J-21, and J38. J38 is (as reported by Gylleneskor) Johan Becker, the singer on the Star Pilots tracks so far. The group's answers to the usual profile questions really work the whole Top Gun/'80's/pilots angle, but the description of "Higher" as an uplifting kick of energy with one foot in the '80's and the other in the here and now, a radio hit with a club feeling and an international sound, is exactly what I wanted to hear.
