International Champions

A fifteen-year-old dream has finally come true! What a journey it has been, what amazing people we have met, and what immense support we’ve felt all the way.

From listening to Vocal Spectrum on repeat on our way to school, to singing our first tags in the hallways of Kungsholmens Gymnasium, to visiting our first Zero8 rehearsals in 2009, to competing at our first SNOBS, to singing at our first Internationals in 2010, to sailing and singing around the world in 2011, to winning the Collegiate Championship in Portland 2012, to earning our first big medal in Las Vegas 2014, to struggling to stay together in 2019, to finding ourselves again in 2022, to returning as a full quartet in 2023, to becoming your 2025 International Champions.

We wouldn’t want to change a single step along the way. The journey that brought us here and the people we met along it are what really matter.

There are so many people we want to thank — people without whom we would not be who we are. School first brought us together, but Doug Harrington was the one who shaped us into a quartet. He poured countless hours into us and taught us what it means to sing as a barbershop quartet. Zero8 became our home, a place where we were allowed — and encouraged — to grow, both as singers and as people. To all our brothers in Zero8: we love you, and we look forward to every Thursday night there will ever be!

If Zero8 is our home, then Ringmasters have been our guiding stars — our role models. Watching and learning from you, being inspired by your brilliance, and having you as our quartet big brothers has been invaluable. Rasmus, Emanuel, Jakob, Martin, and Dider: thank you for sharing the secret sauce!

Rasmus has shaped us more than any other living being. Your coaching, warmth, honesty, playful arranging, and god-tier leadership have become one of the founding pillars of Squeezy.

Leading up to Midwinter in Orlando 2013, we were introduced to the newly crowned Rising Stars of Sweet Adelines: GQ. Together, we toured schools with Christian Diaz as our host and guide, spent long nights singing for and with each other, and danced the night away in Miami. We were absolutely starstruck by your talent — the epitome of music-making. You’ve inspired us since that first day in Daddy Dean’s house and will continue to inspire us for the rest of our lives. To close the chapter of our competition run alongside you is an absolute honour.

To all our previous members — Alex, Jonathan, Larsson, and Pontus — thank you for being part of our journey. We couldn’t have made it without you. And thank you to Oscar, Jakob, Jonas, and Mikael, who have stepped in along the way.

To Sam Wey: your friendship is beyond words. We celebrate this victory with you. Thank you for being part of us — through thick and thin. We love you!

Congratulations to everyone who competed this year, both at Internationals and around the globe. We are all what makes barbershop go ’round. To Gimme Four, First Take, Full Effect, and GQ: we are honoured to be medalists alongside you. And to all finalists: what a SHOW we put on Saturday night. Such musicality, diversity, and love poured out of every group. That’s why we sing. 

Thank you Barbershop Harmony Society and everyone who worked to make this convention so incredible. We will remember it for the rest of our lives.

To finish these finals the way we did felt absolutely surreal. Lemon Squeezy has never experienced a hit quite like Saturday night — and we’ve never had more fun on stage in our lives. Ending 15 years of competition with music that feels 2000% us, and a performance that truly felt like our best ever, is so much more than we ever could have hoped for.

Lastly, to our families — Per, Inger, Anders, Elisabet, Ali, Ensi, Daniel, Jackie, Carro, Ella, Pauline, and Astrid: thank you for your unconditional support. We made it!

Becoming International Champions is the end of an era, but only a small step in a much longer journey. Our goal has always been to keep learning, keep rehearsing, and to become better singers — and better humans. We still have so much to learn, and oh so much more music to make. It’s a DREAM to be your 2025 Champions, and we’ll do everything we can to be proud ambassadors of barbershop. WE LOVE YOU ALL! 💛

Now there’s only Senior’s left.

Lemon Squeezy out.

Japan tour 2023

Karuizawa

20/08 Sunday 13:00

Lemon Squeezy in Karuizawa & 9th ICCC concert

Karuizawa Ohga Hall

Tickets: https://s.confetti-web.com/detail.php?tid=72840

Tokyo

25/08 Friday 19:00

Lemon Squeezy Tokyo Show in Shibuya

Sakura Hall, Shibuya Cultural Centre Owada

Tickets: https://s.confetti-web.com/detail.php?tid=71910

Saitama

26/08 Saturday 19:15

Lemon Squeezy Last Show in Tokyo with The Lockers + Tokoya

Kawaguchi General Cultural Centre

Tickets: https://teket.jp/6498/22007

ticket@lockerschorus.org

Tokyo

27/08 Sunday 16:00

Love & Harmony

Koganei Miyaji Instrumental Hall

Tickets: https://www.cnplayguide.com/evt/evtdtl.aspx?ecd=CNI81952

David freckin' Holst

Introducing the new lead of Lemon Squeezy: David freckin Holst! Some of you may know David, some of you may not. To us, he has been a close friend, a shining tenor and a committed member of our choir Zero8 for many years.

David has had a long quartet and choir career with many outstanding achievements. His journey with Trocadero has taken him around the world on a journey similar to ours. Together, they won the International Collegiate contest in 2015 and finished 12th in the open contest. Earlier this year, he won the Nordic and European championships as baritone of the quartet Primer!

He is an engineer with a degree in Engineering Physics and works with programming robots that help treat cancer. More than anything, David is a smart, kind and delightful person whose helping hand never is far away. He has stepped in on both tenor and baritone for us numerous times when we have been in dire need.

To say that we are excited is a vast understatement. This is a new journey with a new lead, a new tenor, a new sound and a new Squeezy! A final Squeezy. We hope to see you all out there in the world!

Easy Peasy streaming September first

Dear listener! On September first, a thing is finally going to happen. We’re going to release Easy Peasy, a CD that was recorded in 2019 and subsequently happened to—for various reasons—end up in the shape of a five track EP. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade as some Einstein once said.

Music is always best when experienced live. There is something magical about it, the making of music in the moment. This is especially true with a capella, the way voices mingle in the room and all the different textures and imperfections creates this sensation of every chord being alive.

That’s why we recorded our songs the old way, with four voices in front of two microphones in one room for a lot of hours. It’s especially dear to us because it’s our last endeavour with Alex. Thirteen years ago, Victor, Martin and Alex met and sang tags together in Martin’s dad’s basement and the rest is history. These songs mark the end of that tag session.

All of us are (substantial level of understatement) so freaking excited to finally release these songs for you to listen to. We will be printing a physical copy and maybe even a yellow vinyl for those giga n3rds out there, but more on that in due time.

HAPPY LISTENING! 🍋

Audition spring 2022

We need a fourth, as has previously been stated. What hasn’t been stated is that we would like a tenor or a lead, a man or a woman. What’s important is that you are *CLICK* noice and as rigorously crazy about ringing dem chordz™️ as we are!

We have constructed two application forms, one for those who understand the noble language of the Swedes and one for those who don’t. Auditions will be held later this spring. We can’t say more than that at this hour—we are kind of just going to have to see how many of you there are who wants more yellow in your life.

Instructions for the application should be clear, if they aren’t you can just slide into our DMs and we’ll iron it out as best we can.

Peace! ✌🏼

A trio longing to be whole again.

Here we are, the year 2022—well over ten years of Lemon Squeezy. We feel like it’s time to open up a bit, talk about what on earth is going on, what’s to come and how we feel about it (help).

As you may (or may not) know, we are no longer a quartet—we are a trio. A trio longing to be whole again. Because we really are, if there is anything we want to say out loud, declare or confirm, it’s that we (as a group and individuals) are one thousand percent adamant on getting back on our eight feet. As Sam so neatly put it the other week: “What can I say? We are chord junkies, we can’t stop”.

The past few years have been roller coaster:y, filled with hope, struggle, learning, success and everything in between. Going through struggles always come with a great deal of feelings, but historically we have always known what or who the next step would be. This time we kinda don’t. The last two-three years have really forced a great deal of humility on us which has sparked this need to level on a few things with our friends and community.

We are, at heart, three people who love singing in this quartet more than most things in life. Being without a fourth voice reallllllly blows! The Lemon Squeezy from a few years back would have kept things super cool and proclaimed some kind of “keep calm, this is all according to plan”-message. This time we are really just like “huh, well this sucks” but maybe everything doesn’t have to be rainbows?

There are so many things we want to do and finish (looking at you, BHS). Travel the darned world (again) and share our style of singing, rehearse until our ears and voices bleed, the good quartet lyfe you know?

Searching for our forth compadre we are going to try things a little different than before. We are going to open up for auditions, which we don’t yet know when they will take place, but some time later this spring for sure. For quite some time, our vision has been to at least sing as a part time profession. We enjoy this waaaay too much, so competing once or twice a year and going away on the occasional convention simply won’t cut it.

If you would be so kind, tell your aunts and friends about this and us.

Xoxo

—Gossip Girl

Pontus Ljung

This is Pontus Ljung, our new tenor! 

We’ve known Pontus for a long time. He has an amazing voice, a very natural musicality and we have always loved singing with him. This feels a hundred percent right for all of us and after a winter of rehearsals together we are excited to unleash his power into the world. 

We really hope you want to keep supporting us in our future adventures together! 💛

2019 US tour dates

We have had a lot of inquiries about our mini summer tour in the good ole USA, which we are very excited about. SO, we wanted to share the show locations in case you’d like to join us for a show!

• June 15 with the Capital City Chorus

• June 22 at the Westminster Annual Show

• June 29 at the Lavender Hill Farm

Are you in or near the St. Louis or Nashville area and have a chorus or quartet that is interested in coaching? Send an email to sam.wey@davita.com or send Sam a message with your inquiry. Much love to you all! 💛

Let the recording commence

It is FINALLY happening! We just finished our first day of recording at Studio Blue, a place designed with one thing in mind: uncompromising acoustic recording. Needless to say it feels good. Really good. So if we can just bring some uncompromisingly tuned chords, this could go quite well. Let’s go!

US tour 2019

Well folks, it's official. Not sure if we can "officially" announce we are back if we never "officially" went away to begin with. However, we are OFFICIALLY BACK! We are looking forward to a tour in the US during the summer of 2019. We have a show booked in June already, and we are hoping that you too would like to have us in your town, of a town near you! Please send any and all inquiries to sam.wey@davita.com and he will get you any information you need. We love our US Barbershop/Music family and we can't wait to be BACK! Here is a little video from our trip to Japan... We hope you enjoy! 

This is Sam

Many of you might not yet know Sam, but a) you will and b) you’re in for a whole bag of “AWWW YEAH!”

Alright, so some quick facts. Sam is born in 1996 which almost makes him like 15 years old. This effectively reduces our average age to 25,25 years from the previous 27,5 which means we really should be classified as a collegiate quartet again. Feelsgoodman. On another note, Sam is on his third year of studying to become an engineer of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm which also means that he is smarter than the rest of us combined. Ayyy!

We first met Sam in early 2013 when he visited a Zero8 Guest Night (see picture 2), yes it’s the child on the front row on the left hand side. Sam later joined Zero8 during the autumn of 2014 after the Las Vegas Internationals. Besides competing and singing with Zero8 since then, he has also managed two SNOBS Collegiate Quartet golds in 2016 and 2017!

It feels really great to be rehearsing again and we have some super cool things coming up this year! We don’t plan on achieving unlimited power and world domination until some time in early 2019 though, so please bare with us. Most of all, we are just reeeeeeeally freaking stoked and thankful that Sam wanted to sing with us! 💛

Silver in Nashville!

And all of a sudden we find ourselves back home in Sweden. There are so many things going through our heads, so many people we want to thank and so many things we want to share. Six years ago we met in Alex’ father’s apartment and sang our first song together, we truly only have one person to thank for that and everything that has happened to us since, Doug Harrington. His unyielding passion for teaching and involving us young Swedes into the art that we call barbershop. Those six years ago, as we would be heading to school with our first Vocal Spectrum CD very carefully loaded into our phones/mp3-players, our lives changed. Drastically. 

The nature of Swedish choral music is very stiff in the general presentation area. Undeniably beautiful, but you stand up, hold your music in front of your face and you’d better bloody well sing in key. And standing still is not exactly what Lemon Squeezy has become known for these past few years, and for that we thank every one of you so much. Not only have our journeys across the world taught us to occasionally move a leg or wave our arms in seriously goofy ways, but it has taught us to feel music in a whole new way. 

Walking on stage for our three sets this past week was absolutely, incredibly and just CRAZY insane! The love, cheering and appreciation we felt from everybody watching, in the arena and all over the world is not measurable by any scale currently in use on earth. Nor any magic futuristic scales either for those whose thoughts were headed in that direction. We would also like to thank our friends, our brothers in Zero8, our big brothers in Ringmasters, our younger selves in Trocadero, our families and girlfriends and of course our absolutely crazy mothers who doesn’t seem to grasp the sheer unreasonability (it’s a word) in traveling half across the world to see us perform six songs. And yes, we fully understand that they never would have it aaaany other way and for that we are eternally grateful. 

So if anyone ever had told us those six years ago that we’d be able to sit on a plane back to Sweden wearing S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A. silver medals around our necks, we probably would have fainted on the spot one by one. Probably starting with Alex. We will wear this silver proudly over the coming year, and all years after for that matter, count on that.

It feels kind of sad leaving the States – being there has become a synonym with joy, learning and giving for us. So in other words, we really can’t wait to come back because we love all those things! Until we see y’all next time, we wish you lots of fun and a happy rest of the summer!

Love /Lemon Squeezy