Miike Snow: ‘You Can’t Really Say No to Working With Jay-Z’
Miike Snow may have just performed at Hard Summer and Lollapalooza, but they’re not done with the festival circuit yet. On September 1st, the Swedish dance-pop band will hit the inaugural Made in America festival in Philadelphia.
Though the Jay-Z-curated event is unproven, Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt has high hopes for the two-day event, which runs during Labor Day weekend and will also feature Jill Scott, D’Angelo, Drake, Chris Cornell, Afrojack, Passion Pit, Calvin Harris and the just-announced Run-DMC reunion.
“It’s Jay-Z handpicking all these bands – him and Beyoncè, probably. I know she’s a big Dirty Projectors fan [and] they’re playing,” Wyatt tells Rolling Stone. “It’s like Meek Mills, Pearl Jam, Skrillex. It’s gonna be a cool festival.”
Wyatt and Hova met while discussing possible collaborations, and the frontman remains a fan of the rapper. “I’ve hung out with him and I was maybe gonna do some work with Roc Nation on some other stuff,” he says. “You can’t really say no to the idea of working with Jay-Z on some level, because he’s like one of my great idols of this time, period.”
The members of Miike Snow are no strangers to collaborations. Wyatt has worked with Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, and his bandmates Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg have teamed with the likes of Britney Spears, Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Explains Karlsson of their selection process, “Mostly I want to do something I’m not doing right then, so I get a break from something else.”
The band also maintains an interest in working in movies, especially ones with sci-fi themes. “[Creating a] film score would be really great. We talked about it the other day. It would be entertaining and different,” Winnberg says. “If [Blade Runner] would have come up now and someone would’ve presented it to us, I see it as a perfect match.”
Adds Wyatt, “Or if they made a new Road Warrior and they didn’t turn it into one of these things that was sound design and action all the way through and they left space for some atmosphere. That would be the best.”