Ace of Base Mastermind John Ballard behind Sergey Lazarev Entry

Sergey Lazarev’s ‘You Are the Only One’ is one of the hotly anticipated winners of tomorrow’s Eurovision Song Contest final at the Stockholm Globe arena. An instant pop hit, few knows that there’s a genius mastermind behind the track.

Collaborated with Max Martin

The Gothenburg-based songwriter and producer John Ballard has written many hits. In 1995, he co-wrote Ace of Base’s ‘Beautiful Life’ (off the album The Bridge). The hit single was produced by none others than Max Martin, Denniz Pop and Jonas Berggren.

A Scot, John Ballard issued several albums and singles under his own name. He also competed in Sweden’s Melodifestivalen twice. In 1983, he sang a duet with Ann-Louise Hanson called ‘Bara en enda gång’ (Only once) and in 1984 he competed with ‘Rendez-vous.’ The former peaked at No.5, while the latter was No.3 in the Swedish contest.

In 1995, he contributed on Ace of Base’s The Bridge and Flowers albums with tracks such as ‘Perfect World’ and ‘Don’t Go Away.’ In 2013, he wrote the lyrics for ‘Hold Me’ with Farid Mammadov from Azerbaijan. It eventually came second in that year’s Eurovision. A year later, John Ballard came 7^th with Russia’s entry ‘Shine’ with Tolmachevy Sisters.

More facts about Sergey Lazarev

Will ‘You Are the Only One’ finally put him on the list of winning song-writers of the Eurovision? We’ll find out tomorrow. In such case, he will share the honors with fellow song-writers Filipp Kirkorov, Dimitris Kontopoulos and Ralph Charlie.

Some fun facts about Sergey Lazarev is that he contributed with the voices of cartoons in movies such as Shrek the Third, High School Musical and Alpha and Omega.

As of 13^th May, ‘You Are the Only One’ has been played 858,685 times on Spotify easily becoming Lazarev’s biggest hit on the network.