I have fallen in with what you might call a cabaret act: a singer with piano and bass accompaniment, plus a trombonist and me providing assorted brassy and electronic doodles. This band is tons of fun, and after a rehearsal one recent sunny winter day — rare, but not unheard of here! — the singer, Joel, asks if I would like to join him and his friend Isobel for a beer in nearby Jarntorget, a busy, beautiful old square and a hub for trams, bars, and restaurants on the edge of Gothenburg’s “old town” area.  

Isobel is a trip. Seemingly without a real office anywhere, she holds office hours in the cafe, fielding phone calls and drop-by meetings with other movers and shakers while we hang out. Born in a South American prison to a revolutionary mother, she has taken a wildly circuitous path to her current place in the world overseeing the renovation and conversion of several beautiful antique buildings into performance and studio spaces.

We hop on the tram to her latest project, the Gathenhielmska House: at the heart of the bohemian artist district Majorna, it was the eighteenth-century home of two rich pirates who befriended the king of Sweden and acquired from him a license to freely seize foreign shipping in the area. Built in 1740 by ship’s carpenters, the house has a ruggedly nautical interior. With a wild rap that amazingly seems to go down well in official meetings, Isobel explains to us why the current underground arts scene is the legitimate heir to the tradition begun by these pirates: like them, we represent our city’s rebellious and international nature.

At the tender age of seventy, it finally became clear that if I were ever going to experience my long-held fantasy of an artist’s life in Europe, there was no time like the present. One might better say “no time BUT the present” — after two heart attacks and a minor stroke in recent years, I’ve joked with antique friends that we are now playing in the sudden-death overtime period. It may sound morbid, but there is something positive about reaching the time in life when your future is unavoidably short. So this becomes an immediate matter: What is worth doing, and what isn’t? No longer an abstraction, the question sparks another, equally pressing: Can one actually grab ahold of one’s life and do something totally different with it?

I still can’t say how I came to the point where the idea of basically flushing my entire life seemed reasonable. California’s response to the pandemic helped, leading as it did to the complete shutdown of my own lifeline, the Bay Area’s improvised music scene. In the heart of the pandemic, there were months, then years, when I only ever saw five people in person. But this was simply the intensification of the trend my introverted life had been following. The circle shrank until, dramatic as it sounds, the choice between leaving and staying began to feel like choosing between life and death. If I stayed in my comfortable house in Albany nothing new would ever happen, except for gradually finding more and more jars I couldn’t open.

Gothenburg, Sweden, has been a node point in my life for nearly twenty years, since my film Noisy People was selected for the Gothenburg Film Festival in 2008. This was a seriously big deal for me. A complete amateur, I made this documentary about music in San Francisco essentially by myself, by far the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken (years of work!), and it was good; I’m very proud of it. The Gothenburg Film Festival is the biggest in Scandinavia — at one point my film was in a local multiplex with Werner Herzog’s latest playing next door. So yeah, this giant dopamine hit did make me love Gothenburg right away. Didn’t Jerry Lewis move to France for much the same reason?  

My moment as a would-be international film celebrity was, uh, fleeting. But around that time I met two anchoring friends, Gothenburg University music professors Palle Dahlstedt and Per Anders Nilsson. They had carved out a fundable — and indeed, well-funded — regime of artistic research closely mirroring what I had been scrambling to pursue from my more marginal and intermittent toeholds in academia: the use of computers as creative partners in the development of new musical performance practices. We all saw our shared direction, and many opportunities for collaboration arose over the years, eventually leading me to spend the fall semester of 2016 teaching at GU. I gradually developed connections with the city’s non-academic bohemian cultural scene, an urban world of actors, musicians, dancers, poets, performance artists, and so on. One night in 2021, after being led to an amazingly eclectic performance with Senegalese kora players, an Indian drone guitarist, and a French latter-day troubadour singing fourteenth-century Provençal tunes (accompanied by a beat box), I was headed home at two a.m. when I ran into folks I knew on the tram, photographers dedicated to documenting local culture. As they somewhat drunkenly undertook the task of cluing me into the Gothenburg metal scene, the thought popped into my head: “I could live here.”

That thought took up residence and wouldn’t go away. Back in Albany in early 2022, I finally completed the task I had begun thirty years ago: getting, courtesy of an Irish grandmother, my Irish (and thus EU) passport. I spent that year watching every Swedish TV show available, graduating from English to Swedish subtitles, and holding Swedish conversation sessions with my Finnish neighbor and her American husband. I found a friend to rent my house, and miraculously chanced upon a sublet in Gothenburg through an Italian acquaintance who was checking out a possible job back home. This was really astounding luck — he had been (and this is not atypical) on a seven-year waiting list to get this Swedish apartment.

I love this place. I love that things like Isobel’s Gathenhielmska House are just sort of normal here. Mostly, I love the feeling of multiple layers of time all through the inner city. Down by the river, giant early twentieth century cranes display the city’s more recent history as the biggest seaport in Scandinavia; near the central canal in the town center, an elegant and simple display at the City Museum of Gothenburg uses modern technology to show how the central district has changed, and hasn’t: a video fades between historical landscape paintings and drawings and current photos that meticulously match the same viewpoints. Trams and electric buses, the neon Tesla dealership and MAX Burgers signs appear and disappear, while the canal and buildings remain essentially untouched.

My friends in California have been almost universally enthusiastic and supportive of my inexplicable project, which holds a vicarious appeal: “How exciting that you are doing this! How brave you are!” (Perhaps with accompanying thought balloon, “But of course I would never do such a thing myself!”) Indeed, a sense of onrushing life has fueled the adventure. But the moment of deciding on this venture was also the beginning of living with an unprecedented level of emotional volatility. I go through wild emotional fluctuations: from “What the fuck am I doing? I must be out of my mind?!?! I’ve just completely fucked up my life…” to “Wow! The future is open! I’m really living it now.” Back and forth, at least one major shift per day, often more.

The manic thrill continued through my first months “really” living in Gothenburg. There was a giddy feeling of vacation from pesky reality, moving to a place where the pandemic, at least as practiced in California, just didn’t happen. The Swedes never closed their bars and restaurants and night clubs, never gave up having concerts and parties and hugging and kissing their friends when they met (Swedes are big huggers).

And, pandemic or not, America’s work-life imbalance was absent among the people I was meeting; no one seemed oppressed by overworking. I’m not saying there’s no economic striving and struggling but there isn’t the constant fear of failure, the assault on one’s self-worth that Americans struggle with. The whole culture has a different feeling in this regard, that I’m not sure people here even appreciate fully; you feel you are in a basically benign environment, where care is being taken, and artists are respected workers, not weirdos with strange hobbies. A friend (who, like most musicians everywhere, supplements what he makes from gigs with teaching) was complaining what a drag it was to deal with annoying government bureaucrats at the public studio where he gives drum lessons, and I asked, “Why don’t you just do it here in your own studio?” “But if I just got what the student paid for the lesson, it wouldn’t be enough!” The cultural transaction is subsidized on both sides: he gets paid more yet the student pays less. This type of socialism, sort of pretending to be capitalism, is pervasive, and it’s a good thing.

In any case, the dreamy adventure phase of my move — which, amazingly to me, even included “dance until dawn” parties with hard-drinking younger nightclubbers — soon settled down. I needed to acquire a personnummer, without which one can do nothing. My sometimes-gloomy German-Swedish friend Biggie assured me I would never get one, it was hopeless. Then, at a dinner celebrating the close of a show I was playing in, I met the mother of one of the dancers, who was wearing a button that said, “NO PERSON IS ILLEGAL.” An immigration activist! And I was an immigrant with a problem. Through her help and that of my friends at the weekly jazz club Brötz, I was able to get employed there, with the thirteen-month, five-hour-per-week contract that met the government-required minimum.

Brötz is a Wednesday night jazz/free-jazz/experimental concert series which has run for decades: last week’s show was no. 891. Like many “mini-institutions” that make up Gothenburg’s art scene, it’s been steadily funded in all that time: two bands per week, each player paid a few hundred bucks, enough to make this a one-night stop for serious international groups undertaking a Scandinavian tour. Its home for at least ten years has been a somewhat shoddy “temporary” multi-purpose classroom-type building perched on a hillside above Konstepidemin, a red-brick, former medical center campus repurposed as an art center; there are around fifty artists in residence at any given time.

Brötz has use of its room only on Wednesdays, which means every Wednesday afternoon we pull everything needed out of a couple of jammed closets to make it a venue (chairs, tables, amps, mics, sound board, drumset, lights, etc.) and put it all back after the show to leave a clean space for the dance or yoga or whatever class is happening the next morning. Six or seven of us work here, volunteers and near volunteers. My pay is nominal, my work varied but mostly unskilled labor plus a few hours a week editing the show recordings for YouTube. My limited Swedish makes it a bit awkward for me socially: I’m the quiet guy in the corner. And it’s often at the end of a long day. But not having the option of going home when I begin to feel tired means I hear great music I would have otherwise missed, and this has expanded my musical tastes.

Within two weeks of working at Brötz I had a personnummer and could start the chain of events leading to normalcy, via a series of official appointments organized in maddeningly leisurely fashion — a side-effect, perhaps, of this culture’s work-life balance moderation. I could now gradually sign up for the national health service, get a national ID card, then establish a Swedish bank account (very necessary! cash has long been even more obsolete here than the States). Go into a bank and open an account? No: go into a bank, and we’ll tell you in several weeks when you can have an appointment to apply for a bank account, then wait again to establish the account, receive an electronic bank ID, get Sweden’s universal PayPal-like Swish, then my senior free transit system card… by midsummer, I could join the queue for SFI, the free Swedish language instruction available to personnummered immigrants.

SFI, which I started in September, was a step into a completely different Sweden than the one I had been experiencing, with a five-days-per-week, three-hours-per-day class schedule and additional pre-dawn tram commute. The school is in a sprawling suburban shopping center, wedged between a ubiquitous Nordic Wellness gym outlet and a gigantic Systembolaget: the state-run monopoly liquor store, the only place one can buy beer, wine, and hard liquor, and as such, the place where every stratum of Swedish society meets. The multiple layers of time thing I love about inner GBG is absolutely not at play in these suburbs, which consist of massive grids of identical apartment complexes. Imagine the same negligible street life as American suburbs, without even the varied single-family homes and gardens. A desert.

At SFI all of us were thrown into one class to learn the basics: dates, weeks, months, numbers, hello/goodbye — a frustrating experience because beginners continuously trickled in, so the level of instruction never changed. After several months, we were re-sorted and now I’m in the ‘fast track’ with college-educated people from all over the world, expected to be fluent after three hundred hours of instruction; those with lower levels of education are allotted five hundred hours before being kicked out. I am experiencing for the first time being a really mediocre student. My classmates, highly motivated Ukrainians, Indians, Somalians, Palestinians, and more, are young, intelligent, hard-working. The class is lively, convivial, and fun, but the bar is high.

I’m told the Swedish language is one of the easiest for English speakers to learn, and it’s true, the basic grammar is easy for us anglophones: “Jag måste gå nu” = “I must go now.” But the music of it is really foreign and beautiful. It’s hard to even hear the distinctions between seventeen different vowel sounds, let alone twist one’s mouth around to make them. After months of studying in the SFI fish tank, I still cannot understand even the shortest, simplest encounter with friends and shopkeepers; I just can’t hear what they’re saying. I know English holds similar problems for learners, say, the way we shrug and grunt a little consonant-free tune low-high-low that means “I don’t know.” Swedish in the wild is full of that kind of thing, with the meaning in the melody.  

In my social circles here everyone speaks English very well. This fact itself presents an unusual barrier: shall we have an intelligent conversation in English or descend into slow-mo baby talk, in Swedish with me?  But there is a point in the evening when no one wants to speak English anymore. Even if someone kindly peels off from the general vibe to have a conversation in English with me, I remain in a bubble of isolation — different from but no less profound than my Albany solitude.

It’s hard to sort out all the ways it feels different here, socially and physically colder and warmer at the same time. Yes, the winter’s darkness, more than the cold, is hard to adjust to — and those seemingly endless summer evenings, twilight until eleven p.m., are lovely, but four a.m. dawns fight against one’s bodily rhythms just as fiercely as four p.m. sunsets. It’s truly the opposite of California, where the seasons are so undetectable it’s easy to forget what month it is, and eventually perhaps what year…

I still go through these crazy mood swings daily. Was this a stupid idea? I still don’t know. Thriving here depends on the energy I can muster to connect, and leaving my house in Albany didn’t change the fact that there are more and more jars I can’t open. Waning with age is undeniable; adjustments must be made.

Yesterday I was feeling sorry for myself all morning. Then I got an unexpected call from Anne Pajunen, a Swedish musician I have long admired. I don’t know her well but had managed to arrange a duo gig with her later this month. I’m in town, she said, want to have lunch? She introduced me to the Bar Italia, a fabulous little hole-in-the-wall on a gorgeous side street in the Prinsgatan district that I had never seen, running up a hill with the glorious neo-gothic Oscar Fredrik Church perched on top. Yet-unheard music on its way, time with new friends, beauty surrounding us: life that afternoon was good.