Peo Thyrén’s surprise: “Perhaps there will be a glass of champagne tonight”
Published 2026-07-03 11.06
“My sins are my savior” on Madonna’s newly released album “Confessions II” samples an old Army of Lovers song, which is based on an even older song by Alexander Bard.
– It’s actually very spicy, says Peo Thyrén, one of the songwriters behind the original.
Thyroidknown from Noice, tells us that the song that is the basis for “My sins are my saviors” was born in the mid-80s when Thyrén worked together with Alexander Bardwho then went by the stage name Barbie.
– I had an idea that we should make a song called “Barbie goes around the world”, about the Barbie character going around a lot of different world capitals. So Alexander and I started working on it, says Peo Thyrén.
New text and title
The co-producers and songwriters Anders Hansson and Tim Norell replaced all the chords and added a little melody loop. The song was then presented with new lyrics and the title “My army of lovers” for the group Army of Lovers, which Bard then had with Jean Pierre Barda and Camilla Henemark.
To Madonna’s album, the song has been refined by an Anglo-American team with Madonna and the producer Stuart Priceat the same time as Stromae contributed a French text. But the sound from “My army of lovers” is still clearly heard on “My sins are my saviors”.
– Some things from the text are also included. It sounds like you hear Camilla Henemark’s voice in the recording where she says “around the world”. It’s text that remains from this very first Barbie version of the song, says Peo Thyrén.
As with “Hung up”
Madonna obviously has a fondness for Swedish music. Also the Swedish songwriters Wilhelm Borjesson and Oskar Rindborg appears on the record, on the song “Bizarre”.
But Peo Thyrén is still surprised that Madonna and her team found the old Army of lovers song and developed it.
– It is roughly the same type of collaboration that they had with Bear and Benny around “Hung up”, which was first “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A man after midnight)” apart from the fact that it was a worldwide hit even before it was picked up, while ours was a rather obscure song, says Thyrén, who was not sure that the song would be on the album before it was released on July 3.
Are you celebrating in any way?
– Yes, maybe there will be a glass of champagne tonight.
