Lykke Li Talks About Appearing on the ‘New Moon’ Soundtrack

Lykke Li: 'I'm intense, and I get psychopathic, too'

Sweden's Lykke Li appears on the Twilight soundtrack, sang with Kanye West and is the toast of the music blogs. So why the long face, asks Rebecca Nicholson

A few nights before our interview, I watch the Swedish singer Lykke Listomp and strut across a London stage theatrically hung with sweeping black drapes. When we meet in person, she's quietly squashed into a remote corner of a hotel bar, looking tired, small and a little suspicious, and dramatically different to that strident pop star. Introductions are made, but there's no small talk, just a deeply set frown above huge eyes, and an insular, brittle poise. It's not uncommon for musicians to take themselves seriously, but even by "artist" standards, she is particularly intense. "I'm intense, but at the same time, to be that intense I get also psychopathic, too," she nods warily, by way of explanation.

Those psychopathic tendencies made up the bulk of her first album,Youth Novels, which arrived in a storm of hype in 2007. It seemed to be about first love, and collected its teenage longings into gentle, danceable and occasionally twee pop. Bloggers went crazy for it, but its critical success failed to bring the kind of satisfaction she expected. "It was a surprise, actually, to find out that after touring for so long I was really unhappy," she says. "I feel like, to be at some kind of inner peace, is much more complex than getting blogged about."

Getting blogged about made hers a peculiar kind of victory. Youth Novels didn't sell particularly well, instead making her an unusual go-to girl for internet-endorsed cool. In the three years since its release, she has popped up on a track with Kanye West (the song Gifted by rappers NASA), has been covered by hip-hop's golden boy Drake, and found herself penning the pivotal ballad in Twilight: New Moon, matching Kristen Stewart's heartbreak with the sweet, slow Possibility.

"I was sitting in a car in England [when I got the call]," she remembers, "eating a sandwich from Tesco, and I had no idea what Twilight was. Somebody explained it as this thing about vampires and I'm like, 'I hate vampires.' But when I thought about it, there are so few pop culture things today, where people are really crazy about something, like Beatlemania, so I thought, how cool to be part of something that so many young, open hearts listen to." Though she might not have been the obvious choice, Li knows why they approached her. "'Cos I represent lonely hearts, you know. Kind of emo I guess." She lets out a rare giggle. "I'm definitely emo, yes."

Her "lonely hearts" calling card has been amplified for her second album Wounded Rhymes, due out early next year. She holed up in hipster haven Echo Park in LA for six months to record it, visiting the desert, rewatching Jodorowsky's ultra-psychedelic film The Holy Mountain and listening to Alan Lomax field recordings, eventually coming up with songs she calls "hypnotic, psychotic and more primal". Comparing it to Youth Novels, she emphatically refers to it as more.

"I felt like my heart was broken on the first record, then life happens, and badabing badaboom, I'm heartbroken again, and I don't deserve this at all, oh my God," she says, referring to the break-up of another relationship. The album's first single, Get Some, centres around the line, "I'm your prostitute, you're gon' get some."

"A lot of people think it's about sex," she says. "But it's about power. I was reading the Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where she goes into this guy's mind by making him fantasise about her, so it's kind of like powerplay. As soon as a woman does anything, they seem to hit a nerve and it's back to sex. At least men seem to think that."

Has she experienced that, as a female performer? "Yeah, and it's quite terrible, I think. You get judged on things you don't give a fuck about." Like what? "On the first record people were talking about my girlish voice, and I'm like, what? This is the voice I have. I just feel like it's unfair sometimes to be a woman. People never listen to what you say." Who doesn't listen to you? "Well," she pauses. "I will get listened to. But it's boring being compared to other female artists who you have nothing in common with. "

It seems odd that Li has chosen a life that revolves around touring and travelling, meeting people and shaking hands, when she'd be happier on her hilltop in Echo Park. "I chose to be an artist. I did not choose to be on flights all the time," she grumbles, but "there's no way to get your message out there if you're not willing to hop on the bus". And one day, she says, she wants to be like her film-maker heroes – Godard, Antonioni, Almodóvar – adding with a final, emo flourish: "[I want] to express despair and longing through pictures and to intensify life. It's the same thing as with music: to make things more grand than they are."

guardian via gossip-dance
xoxo
Carrie