Interview: Pop star Lykke Li on the making of her new album

Published on Sunday 13 February 2011 13:21

LYKKE Li, the cool Swedish pop star, knows the form by now: release album, go on tour, talk about yourself, be misunderstood. This happened last time and already it's happening again. "If a woman wants to be naked then she should be allowed to be naked," she says.

In the video for Get Some, the first single from her brilliant second album, Li isn't the one getting naked, although she doesn't sport many clothes and she's glimpsed pawing at her hot-pants. Behind her, a screen plays ancient, flickering footage of what appears to be an all-female cult and here there is much nudity. "Naked voodoo women running around with their chickens," Li confirms.

Both the video and the song's lyrics – "I'm your prostitute" – have been misinterpreted. "Suddenly, because I dress like this and try to do something artistic, I'm a victim. I find it almost endearing that people think: 'Omigod, Lykke's changed! She's fallen for the devil! She's going for the sex and she's going for the dollars!'

"If they think that then the whole thing of being a woman in this business is even more f****d up than I first thought. I've not turned into Lady Gaga. The inspiration for Get Some came from Alejandro Jodorowsky and his incredible, amazing film Holy Mountain (a psychedelic classic from 1973 about the quest for the secret of immortality, which the Chilean Jodorowsky made while experimenting with LSD and isolation tanks). How can people's cultural references be so narrow? They should search a little further." So would Li like to join such a women-only tribe? She laughs. "Right now I'm its leader!"

It should be said that all through her mild rant there is laughter. She's often presented as grumpy and gloomy but her lugubriousness is leavened with droll humour. If the tribe were to make a cannibals' dinner out of her naysayers then they should be assured their final hours would be spent free-range.

Li is in Stockholm today, daunted by all the touring she'll have to do for the album Wounded Rhymes but also "looking forward to all the mysteries". She thinks back to the person she was, just 19, when she wrote her 2007 debut Youth Novels. "I was wise but also naive. I still believed in a lot of those old rock'n'roll myths and I still believed in love, that it could save you."

But Youth Novels dealt with the end of a romance and so – with songs like Youth Knows No Pain, Unrequited Love and Sadness Is A Blessing – does its follow-up. "Everything came crashing down again," she says, "and when I wrote this album I was in a very dark place. That's the interesting thing about my relationships: they never seem to work out."

Well, that's quite interesting, but Li, now 24, becomes even more intriguing on the subject of love after she says: "Actually, I don't think we can say this is an album about a relationship because I don't have them in any functioning sense. Serge Gainsbourg once sang 'The love we will never make is the purest, the most tender' and for me the illusion of love is always so much stronger than the reality, especially when that reality is sitting together watching TV."

It's safe to assume that closing track Silent My Song – "Close the door and take it further/Where no man has been" – isn't about a couple who never miss an edition of Postcode Challenge. She explains: "I think we've all found ourselves in situations where the other person can be very manipulative. These people can be very smart and I've known the pleasure, and the pain, of being involved with geniuses: they suck the blood out of you. So, no, mine haven't been relationships. I'm not a relationship person and I don't even like the word. What I'm talking about is something much more wild, much more romantic."

In case you've forgotten, Li comes from Sweden, a place where they do things differently. The daughter of neo-hippies, she was dragged round Portugal, Morocco, India and Tibet in a childhood full of creativity and no rules. She calls Sweden home, more or less, but after even a short while there, "can't wait to get the f*** out". She's a strange one, for sure, but fascinating with it.

The touring slog and the promotional rigmarole – "Different town but identical Holiday Inn, and ten new faces asking the same questions as the place before" – depress her, but when she's told she has got some time off, she doesn't know what to do with herself. This is the career she always wanted, no doubt that.

"But would doing something different make me happier? Yes, I can imagine myself baking bread and having babies although that's not a choice I have. I'm uncomfortable in life, so restless. I'm tired of the way I looked or sounded yesterday."

Youth Novels was much-hyped and rave-reviewed and the fact sales were disappointing didn't bother Kanye West who requested her presence for a collaboration, or the producers of Twilight: New Moon who got her to croon Possibility for young vampire-lovers everywhere. She reckons she was asked to help soundtrack the movie because she's the "poster-girl for broken hearts". So who makes up her audience? Is it all girls? "Maybe, but I just hope they're not virgins. You know, my dad is a musician, he reads (heritage rock mag] Mojo all the time, and my dream has always been to have older men love me. But of course I have to live with the fact I'm never going to be Bob Dylan."

Wounded Rhymes was recorded in Los Angeles. Li went there with a head full of "David Lynch and Joni Mitchell, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown and the writings of Joan Didion". The city didn't disappoint, and with a sound fleshed out by Hammond organ, tribal rhythms and girl group harmonies, the album is a more grown-up work. Does she think she's gone from girl to woman? Too simplistic a question. "Maybe woman to man. I hear it all the time that I'm a man trapped in a woman's body. After the record was finished I went to see a psychic. She told me I was born with a broken heart – I was like 'Duh?' – and also that I was supposed to have been a boy. I called my mum and she said it was true.

"But I can't figure out men. In my experience they have such big egos. It's very hard for a man to even approach me. For sure they have it tough. Women can behave like men, that's OK, but it's not so easy for a man to show sensitivity. I believe, though, that more of them than you think are women trapped in men's bodies. The return of Saturn is happening. We're changing even as we speak."

• That's it: I'm stripping off and joining Lykke Li's cult today. v

Wounded Rhymes (Atlantic) is released on 28 February. Lykke Li plays Glasgow's Arches on 18 April

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 13 February, 2011