Spending My Time

This Roxette song stands out for its blend of melancholy and pop rock, where Marie Fredriksson’s voice paints an intimate yet powerful atmosphere. The track unfolds with a slow rhythm that contrasts with a chorus that sticks in the memory, something critics at the time highlighted as its greatest virtue. The production, handled by Clarence Öfwerman, uses acoustic guitars as a foundation to amplify that sense of restrained heartbreak, while the bass and drums add weight that prevents it from becoming too fragile. It’s not an explosive track, but its construction—featuring a bridge that breaks the repetition—gives it an unexpected twist that makes it sound more organic than many ballads of the era.

They recorded it in July 1990 at the EMI studios in Stockholm, just as the duo was at the peak of their popularity. The album Joyride—of which it is part—hit the market in March 1991, but this single did not replicate the massive success of its predecessors. Though it reached the top 10 in countries like Germany, Canada, and Italy, in the United States it only peaked at number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100, interrupting a streak of five consecutive top-2 hits. Years later, Gessle mentioned in the liner notes of the compilation Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus! that he believed this track could have been their biggest hit, but the restructuring of their record label after the EMI merger left the band without the support they needed. The video, directed by Wayne Isham, plays with intimate shots of Fredriksson in different spaces of a house, reinforcing the idea of loneliness that the song conveys.

The single included a remix by M.C. King Carli and Dr. Renault—pseudonyms of Öfwerman and Anders Herrlin—recorded in July 1991, just before its official release. There is also a Spanish version, Un Día Sin Ti, which was released in 1996 as a preview of Baladas en Español. Interestingly, the song was not written to be a commercial hit: it emerged during the Joyride sessions, where Gessle and Mats Persson explored more organic sounds, far removed from the synth-pop that had previously characterized them. Engineers Anders Herrlin and Alar Suurna were tasked with capturing that balance between rawness and polish, something critics like Larry Flick of Billboard described as a "pop/rock ballad with an acoustic base" where what stood out was not just the melody, but Fredriksson’s vocal delivery.