THE STORY

After 30 Years Backing Other Artists, This Swedish Duo Finally Chose Their Own Songs

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A new single, a Swedish summer tour with Nashville co-writers and musicians flying in, and a national TV appearance — Thyra & Magnolia Road's busiest season took three decades to arrive.

For thirty years, Karin Thyr and Göran Eriksson built careers helping other artists tell their stories. This year, they finally decided it was time to tell their own.

The result is the busiest season of their lives. Their new single "Time is Money" is out. They're touring Sweden through August, and two of their Nashville friends, co-writer Chris Roberts and musician Mark Evitts are flying over to join them on stage. 

They recently performed on Bingolotto, Swedish national television's Saturday-night institution. And the duo's Spotify map tells its own story: their two biggest cities are Nashville and Stockholm.

The momentum is new. The craft isn't. Their recordings have quietly accumulated more than 74 million Spotify streams, with multiple tracks passing the million-stream mark, and their acoustic interpretations of Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" and Katy Perry's "Firework" were certified Gold and Platinum by IFPI. What's new isn't the ability, it’s the decision to finally spend it on themselves.

The two met on tour thirty years ago. Ask them when they started writing songs together and you won't get a date.

"There was never a moment where we 'started' writing together," Karin says. "Creating was just a natural outcome of being together. Thirty years later we're married, and we still write our songs on the same couch where we've had our worst arguments."

The duo describe their sound as ”Swedicana”, a blend of Scandinavian storytelling, Americana, and fifteen years of songwriting in Nashville, carried by two voices that have spent three decades learning each other. But for most of those thirty years, their own music was the thing that had to wait.

"We were touring with other artists, raising kids, making it all work and when you're doing that, 'someday' is a very easy word to keep saying," Karin says. "It's not that anything went wrong. It's that life is very good at filling every space you don't actively protect."

"That was the real struggle, honestly, not one big obstacle, but the slow everyday version. Family, work, other people's tours, other people's songs. Creating space for our own thing meant actually deciding it mattered enough to take that space, and that took us longer than we'd like to admit."

Fifteen years ago, a door opened. The couple began making regular songwriting trips to Nashville and found a home in the East Nashville community, writing with people who've become real friends. The city left its fingerprints all over their work — you can hear it in album titles like Nashville Songs & Stories (2020) and the EP Stockholm Tennessee (2022), which between them map exactly where this duo lives, geographically and otherwise.

Then, last year, came the decision that changed everything: to finally create space for their own music. "To stop treating it as the thing we'd get to someday," as Karin puts it.

The first fruit of that decision was releasing Country Song this January, followed by "Time is Money" — a song about what the grind costs you in the moments that actually matter. It's not a hustle anthem. It's about the crossroads moments where you choose each other, or don't — and how easily "yours and mine" replaces "ours" when nobody's paying attention.

It's a theme they've earned. Ask what they're most proud of, and it isn't a song.

"It's that we're still here, still together, still curious about each other, after 30 years of life, kids, and tours," Göran says. "A lot of couples can't work together. A lot of creative partners can't stay together. We've somehow done both, and I think the secret is that we've learned to create space — for the music, but also for each other. Together and individually."

"Maybe that's what sets us apart: the songs aren't written about a life, they're written inside one. Thirty years of showing up, and choosing each other every day. That's not something you can fake, and we think people can hear it."

Asked for the single quality behind that longevity, Karin doesn't hesitate.

”Patience, and let's be honest, that's mostly Göran's patience with me," she laughs. "But really, it's that neither of us gives up at the same time. When one of us is done, ready to quit, the other one keeps going — lifts you up, picks you back up. Then we switch. That's the balance we've found, and it's not a math equation where fifty-fifty makes it perfect. Some weeks it's ninety-ten. It evens out over thirty years."

When Roberts and Evitts step onto those Swedish stages with them this summer, it will be the East Nashville living rooms coming to a Swedish summer night — fifteen years of friendship made visible. Thirty years after meeting on tour, Thyra & Magnolia Road sound like a band at the beginning of something. Karin doesn't mind the irony.

"It feels a little funny that it took us 30 years to get here," she says. "But maybe that's the point. Some things need exactly that long."