Their style is so adorably dinky, with rinky-tink rhythms, toy power chords, and teensy vocals, that you practically want to pet it. In addition to the LP box with four vinyl albums, the original album is also released for the first time with a gatefold cover and pressed in marbled or black vinyl.Roxette’s Joyride sounds like it was made by elves.
“Sweet Thing” is also one of many candidates which never managed to elbow its way onto the “Joyride” album, but who now sees the light of day for the first time. Other 1990 demos that can now be heard for the first time are “Small Talk”, “Church of Your Heart”, “Physical Fascination”, “Things Will Never be the Same”, “I Remember You” and not to mention the upcoming single B-side “The Sweet Hello, The Sad Goodbye ”- one of the strongest songs that never managed to take a place on the album, later a big favorite among many Roxette fans and recorded by several other artists, including American singer Laura Branigan. However, the recordings were shelved – in the Rox HQ there was a tiny but strong taboo against Roxette and Gyllene Tider being mixed together, so therefore they have been collecting dust in the archive. We made new and more “Roxified” demo versions of them – and especially “Run Run Run” I think could have been a strong contender, Per Gessle remembers. And when I was looking for material for the new album in the autumn of 1989, I got hooked on these two. – We’re talking about “Run Run Run” and “Another Place, Another Time”, which Gyllene released on our English album The Heartland Café in 1984. Interestingly enough, there are also two Gyllene Tider songs here, which in January 1990 were candidates to end up on the upcoming Roxette record.
Twelve of the songs are previously unreleased, including the first recording of “Hotblooded”, which for a while was intended as the album’s opening song before “Joyride” pushed it to second place.
In addition, a richly illustrated 32-page booklet is included, which in text and with unique images from Roxette’s archive tells the story of how a classic Swedish pop album came to be. The Joyride anniversary is celebrated with a vinyl box consisting of four LPs and a 3-CD box, which in addition to the original edition contains lots of unreleased or hard to find material that paints a larger picture of a piece of Swedish music history: demos, alternative versions and leftover material. Thus, the group set a record that no Scandinavian group or artist has managed to surpass. The album not only became Roxette’s bestseller, the title track swung on to the top of the US charts – giving Roxette their fourth US number one. Joyride was the album that would cement the unlikely successes of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle. Roxette had in record time turned into a global hit phenomenon thanks to the three US hits “The Look”, “Listen to Your Heart”, “It Must Have Been Love” and other big hits such as “Dressed for Success” and “Dangerous”. This year marks 30 years since Roxette released their third album Joyride, which followed up the band’s record global breakthrough with the album Look Sharp! in 1989. But already tomorrow, October 8, the single “Small Talk” will be released with two previously unreleased versions of “Small Talk” and “Hotblooded” The Joyride 30th anniversary box with the whole story, demos and unreleased material will be released on November 26.