Lykke Li

by planbmag on Mon, 2008/12/15 - 6:00pm Post to Twitter

In the best, weirdest, wrongest, most poptastic pop, contradictions are the shit. Sweden’s Lykke Li is both pop puppet and producer-svengali-puppet master; awkward and a brilliant manager of that awkwardness. She doesn’t just pull her own strings, she ties them into intricate knots that could keep armies of scouts occupied. Her songs sound a bit like mid-Eighties dance-pop of the ‘Til Tuesday variety (as orchestrated by a compiler of logic puzzles) but she refuses to analyse the process: “For me it’s really important – when music is uptempo – that it has a groove, you know? All good music has a groove.” Well, yeah. But the really good stuff – which this is – has so much else, too.

‘Little Bit’ is full of broken music-box guitars. It’s like Britney Spears’ ‘Everytime’ (which I love) but much, much better, because Lykke Li sings like she’s alive, alert, and completely present. In all her videos, she stares the camera down. It’s as if she’s dissecting you with her eyes, but then she spills her own guts with lines like, in ‘Little Bit’, “For you I keep my legs apart…” I ask her what kind of reactions that gets.

“The first time I played it, it was on the piano, for all my girlfriends, and they were like, yeah, it’s so true, you know? Every girl has had that guy. It’s hard, you know, being young, and being into people, and maybe the girl is more into the guy – like it doesn’t mean as much for him as it does her – and they knew exactly what I was talking about because everybody had experienced that situation. The girls want a little more out of it, you know? And people keep asking me, so…I think it’s shocking that people find it shocking.” She laughs (a bit).

What shocks me most about her songs is how the gut-punch lyrics mesh with the collage-control of her composition.

“I don’t know, I just play around…I want stuff to be raw, but I also want it to be layered. For me commercial pop music, like r’n’b…what you hear is what you get. If you’ve heard, like, say, Rihanna…after you’ve heard that song five times, that’s it, you know? I want to make music that you can listen to over and over again. I can play it on the guitar to get one sound, but then add more of a vibe to it…”

She’s great at this. She writes songs with little black holes at their hearts. Hiccups, echoes like wind machines, piano washes that come out of nowhere, jerks of island guitar. These surprises suck you in to her songs, and you can’t escape because you need to hear them over and over for your neurons to find their bearing. I ask how much of her use of texture is deliberately crafted to do that.

“I don’t intend to do it, that’s just the way I work.”

The album is called Youth Novels. It’s apt, combining precocity and emotional confession with long-haul craft. She’s known she wanted to write and play songs forever, and went to New York, aged 18, where she played whatever gigs she could, pretending to be a huge star in Sweden – then her visa ran out, so she was sent back home. Around this time, her demos caught the attention of Björn Yttling of Peter, Björn, and John – but before he could produce her album, ‘Young Folks’ exploded, and Lykke Li had to wait it out, working in a care home, still writing through all the frustration. “It’s not perfect…it’s only the beginning so I wanted it to be…you know…I wanted the lyrics to be so good that you could just read them, and find them appealing, you know? This is my youth – there’s more to come.“

Do you feel like you’re not so young anymore?
“It feels like a hundred years since I was fifteen, so I’m not young at all! But I am young in my life, and hopefully I will learn more and get better. “

She’s chosen good aesthetic predecessors for inspiration, then. The choreography and sets of the video for ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’ look like they come from a fellow Swede, the filmmaker Roy Andersson, who has spent the last four decades humanising everyday eccentricity in bureaucratic buildings and grey-green light. Lykke Li’s a fan, and explains, “I wanted to create a world of outsiders who have their own path…but maybe other people won’t understand them. It’s how I feel all the time.”

www.lykkeli.com