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Lykke Li's I'm Good I'm Gone video
If Amy Winehouse ever tires of the attention, Lykke Li Zachrison (“Luck-a-Lee”
to anyone hazarding the pronunciation) suggests she could do a lot worse
than embrace Stockholm. “If there’s one thing you can rely on people here to
do,” says the 22-year-old singer, “it’s ignore you. Even your friends.
People are too cool to do anything around here. It’s crazy.”
It might be crazy, but it also means that Lykke Li – the Zachrison doesn’t
make it to the record sleeves – can make the walk from her flat to String,
the bustling boho cantina in which we’re sitting, and be stopped not once.
And yet it’s been five months since her debut album Youth Novels appeared
in Sweden.
It says a lot for the country’s enlightened pop climate that a set of songs
that emulate the crepuscular quirk-pop of early Björk by way of a Nordic
Nina Simone have made a star of Lykke Li. Even her hair has achieved a
measure of fame – in Swedish magazines “the Lykke Li bun” has apparently
acquired a profile all of its own. Now, if music press hyperbole and the
radio ubiquity of the current single I’m Good I’m Gone is
anything to go by, Britain looks set to follow.
She might have a baby face but, in every other sense that matters, “I’m a
hundred years old”. In spite of her intensely confident veneer, your
instinct when she says it is to smile. At least, it would be were it not for
the songs, which act as a vessel for most of the melancholy, lovelorn
thoughts she seems to have. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that the love
she sings about on Let it Fall and the recent single Little Bit
is unrequited. “He’s an artist,” she says, with an edge of hurt, “and he’s
stupid, so he couldn’t get past his own ego to love me back.”
When, in the words of Morrissey, she wants the one she can’t have, it drives
her mad. It has been ever thus. Four years ago she left school with every
intention of becoming a Nordic R&B pop sensation. Had it happened from
the off, you wonder what instant stardom would have done for Lykke Li’s
teenage ego – not least because of the almost comical indignation with which
she met failure. After abortive collaborations with Swedish producers, she
says she fell into a depression “because I was, like, what the f***? Is this
it? I’m not a star yet?”
Desperate to pursue the breakthrough that had eluded her in Sweden, Lykke Li
told her parents that she would be moving to New York. Far from expressing
concerns for her welfare, her mother encouraged her to leave. It was, after
all, what she herself had done 30 years previously, hitch-hiking through
Afghanistan on her way to India.
By the time Lykke Li was born her parents – both veterans of the Swedish punk
scene – had swapped the stability of Stockholm for an itinerant life.
Between six and eleven, for example, Lykke Li lived in rural Portugal.
Before Sweden beckoned again, an impetuous sortie to Morocco led to them
lodging in the only hotel in town, which doubled up as a brothel. “I was
maybe 12 or 13,” she recalls. “Old enough to work out what it was, and what
the razorblades on the floor were for.”
Six years later, when Lykke Li landed alone in New York, her situation was no
less precarious. The music she wanted to emulate was hip-hop, so it made
sense to move into the Brooklyn suburb of Bushwick. A white girl in a black
and Hispanic area, she didn’t need to draw attention to herself. She begged
a gang of girls on a subway to desist from mugging her. Taking a taxi home
was no safer. “One time, the taxi driver turned off his engine at my place
and he was like, ‘Oh, can I get your number?’ And I’m like, ‘No, can you
just drop me off?’ Then he got out and chased me to my apartment. I thought
I was going to die.”
Taking to the stage before a typical crowd of Afro-Latino diaspora at the
legendary New York club SOBs, she certainly felt like she wanted to die.
Given a few more seconds to ponder the ramifications of singing her newest
“Kate Bush-type song” before the assembled throng, Lykke Li might have
thought twice. “The problem was,” she recalls, “that I went with a friend
who told me I would be too scared to do it, so I wanted to prove him wrong.”
She was on stage for only 15 seconds, but can recall every one of them in
detail. “I had this blue scout shirt on and I was 19 looking like 12.
Straight away everyone started going, ‘Get the Britney Spears off the
stage’. There was a riot. I had to leave the stage because I felt like I was
about to puke.”
She had left Stockholm to become a pop star. The irony was that in her absence
two of Sweden’s biggest exports in years were achieving international
success by staying put. By forming her own label, the sometime UK
chart-topper Robyn returned to the fray with the machine-tooled futuregum of
her eponymous album.
No less remarkable for its ubiquity was Young Folks, the single by
Peter Björn & John, whose Björn Yttling was impressed by a
four-song demo by Lykke Li, so much so that he produced Youth Novels.
His stamp is audible on many of the esoteric settings that the songs on Youth
Novels inhabit – in particular the woozy, waxing harmonic tides of My
Love and the strange, sensual soliloquising of Melodies & Desires.
Her pride at what she and Yttling have achieved is compounded by the nadir her
life had reached last summer. Yttling’s interest was beginning to assume a
mirage-like quality as Peter Björn & John chased their hit single
around the world. While Lykke Li waited for him to return, the grim
realities of getting by began to weigh upon her.
She got a job at a residential care home. “I was feeding people and changing
nappies. People were dying all the time. Then I quit to work in another old
people’s home. That was better, actually. You would have to help some people
shower, and then there was one lady with a colostomy bag that I had to
change regularly.”
Those five years in Portugal showed her that things could be different. “Over
there you grow old and you move in with your children. Over here, that
doesn’t happen. Everyone is lonely. People want to have a career. They’d
rather work their asses off than have time for their families.”
Perhaps that’s the corollary of living in a country with high taxes that are
used to ensure a strong infrastructure. Familial duties have been
institutionalised. “Exactly,” she says, “It’s f***ed up. If you need help,
you call the Government. In Portugal, people are poorer, but they help each
other.”
All things considered, it comes as no surprise when Lykke Li declares that she
won’t be in Sweden too much longer. She may return to New York. London is
also a possibility. For the first time in her life she is spoilt for choice.
If nothing else, that must be cause for happiness?
“Happiness?” She alights on a line from I’m Good, I’m Gone,
the bit where she goes: “I’m breaking my back, but it’s all good.” As if her
point weren’t already clear enough, she adds: “That’s the key to it all.
You’ve got to bust your nuts.”
Super troupers: how Swedish pop has moved on since Abba
The Cardigans
Fronted by Nina Persson, delivered a seamless succession of slick 1990s pop
creations.
The Hives
Surprisingly enduring garage pop practitioners, who number Timbaland among
their fans.
Thomas Denver Jonsson
Sweden’s equivalent to Will Oldham, now on his third album of lovelorn
meditations.
Peter Björn & John
Esoteric and poppy at the same time, no mean feat.
Robyn
Returned last year on her own label with a million-selling album.
The Concretes
They’ve been quiet since the departure of singer Victoria Bergsman, but the
band’s hybrid of the Velvet Underground and Motown should weather the
blow.
I’m Good, I’m Gone is released on June 2 and Youth Novels on June 9. Lykke
Li begins a UK tour at Blue Flowers, the George IV, WC2 (www.bluflowers.org),
on June 1 2008. www.lykkeli.com
