It’s pouring down in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. It’s Halloween and the stone staircases along 48th Street are adorned with soaked pumpkins and plastic skeletons.
Five stairs up at 353 West 48th Street is the legendary Walter Sear Sound studio. It’s one of those dream-like studios you see in ambitious music documentaries – I come to think of Grace of My Heart, the beautiful film about Carole King, which to a large extent is played out in a music studio environment.
On the floor there are Persian rugs, the walls have massive oak boards as isolation and everywhere around are remarkable outdated instruments – a moog synthesizer, a Theremin, a dusty old harp and an enormous bamboo stick used as some kind of flute.
The studio is run by Walter Sear, an eccentric old man who greets me at the door in a yellow turtleneck and small round glasses. In the 1950s he helped his classmate Robert Moog to build the first moog synthesizer. Since then his audiophile musical equipment has been used by The Beatles, Sonic Youth, Steely Dan, Norah Jones and now by two Swedes: singer Lykke Li Timotei Zachrisson and Björn Yttling – producer and musician from the band Peter, Bjorn and John.
Björn sits on a leather couch in the corner. He’s here to produce Lykke Li’s debut, Youth Novels, and plays some yet-to-be finished songs from his laptop. On the other side of the room, Lykke Li is standing on her toes in her black Converse Chuck Taylors, taking pictures of Manhattan’s skyline through a window full of raindrops.
Björn tells me that he and Lykke have finally realised that they have at least two favourite artists in common, “We both like Dr. John and Elton John.”
Lykke Li’s debut single A Little Bit has just reached the zenith of its international triumphant procession. This particular week the song has been praised on both prestigious blogs and in the fastidious American music press. I might not really see the comparison but someone said, “Swedish chanteause Lykke Li reminds us of a blog-birthed Kylie.”
With the help of Björn Yttling, Lykke wants to find a “raw, dirty, punky sound that is still pop”. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this. To do something good is a way of finding a meaning to your existence and as long as there is room for improvement life never gets boring,” she says.
The searching lyrics on the debut album are not only influenced by music and her life experiences, but also novels she read during her youth. She mentions JD Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. “I get inspired by anyone who refuses to realise that life is boring. For instance, I love the film Grey Gardens. They’re so quirky and wonderfully distorted.” ‘They’ being Jackie Kennedy’s eccentric cousin and her mother. The film is not only a classic among documentaries but also a long-standing influence on fashion shows around the world.
The next day Lykke is having a meeting with the agent for Justice and Hot Chip but apart from that she seems to be mostly occupied with sampling New York’s nightlife. A few days prior she saw Justice in Greenpoint and since then she has been hanging out at the popular clubs The Box and Beatrice Inn. “But that was pretty much like Riche in Stockholm,” she says a tad dejected.
The media have already compared her to every sweet-singing female who has released a record over the last few decades. The American press first tried to pigeon hole her in some newly invented Canadian-Scando neopop tradition (Robyn, Feist, Annie). But when I see Lykke Li in the basement of Manhattan’s Knitting Factory a week after we met up in the studio, I come to think of much louder artists.
The basement in the Knitting Factory is an almost unbearably intimate place to perform. The stage is not so much a stage as it is a threshold – a little piece of wood a quarter of an inch high – and it doesn’t succeed in making Lykke any taller than anyone else in the room. An artist with less ambition would probably not be able to, or want to, do it but when Lykke Li starts to sing the rowdy room goes silent.
A lot of her songs start out softly, gropingly, with Lykke at the piano or sitting on her heels to later sharply explode in electronic noise, an aggressive pattern of movement and a howling voice. It’s a dynamic learned from Patti Smith’s Free Money which starts out as a quiet pop song before it evolves into violent rock‘n’roll.
But more than anything, her aggressive and riotous ways are a reminder of her indirect influences from hip hop. “It’s music for your arse, or to cry to,” she says.
Last summer the music critic Sasha Frere-Jones was holding a lecture in New York about how hip hop permeates almost all kinds of popular music. Nearly 300 grumpy music bloggers were herded into a little theatre only to be confused when Frere-Jones played videos with Kate Nash and Lily Allen and asked “do you hear how hip hop this is?”
At the end he showed everyone the now classic YouTube clip where someone mashed up scenes from SpongeBob SquarePants to the tune of last year’s big hip hop song Crank Dat (Soulja Boy). One of the bloggers stood up and asked “So, what do you think this video says about the zeitgeist?”
If you could take a question like that seriously the answer would probably be that hip hop has been so all-embracing over the last decade that it’s left its mark on a lot of music that wouldn’t be classed as hip hop, or even R’n’B.
That’s why it’s perhaps logical that Lykke Li can be compared to twee popstars but at the same time be best friends with a rapper.
A couple of days later I meet Lykke Li at a French cafe in the East Village, a stones throw away from the flat she currently shares with a producer of the controversial Howard Sterns radio show. She tells me about the night before, “I was at a party for V Magazine, the fashion mag. My sister works there. I was dressed as Edie Sedgwick, you know, a blonde wig, a lot of make up.”
Lykke Li is still dressed all in black, from top to bottom with blonde hair cut in a short style that reminds you of Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless.
Naturally, we soon get talking about her mad upbringing. Lykke’s parents were both members of two legendary Swedish punk bands – her dad was know as the Zilver Zurfer, in a band called Dag Vag and her mother was in the all female new wavey outfit Tant Strul, before leaving to become a photographer. Lykke calls her childhood “a typical hippie upbringing”. The phrase that comes up most when she recalls the environments she lived in is “outrageously cold”. “My parents were part of the green wave sweeping across the world at the time. I was born in the south of Sweden, but this was just after Chernobyl. My mom got paranoid and wanted to move to a country that didn’t have any nuclear power stations. We ended up in New Zealand. My most vivid memory is that it was outrageously cold.” Later her parents bought a house by the sea in Portugal. “We really lived in the countryside. We had donkeys that carried our stuff, I was barefoot, naked and constantly freezing. After that we moved to a mountaintop in India and from there to the United States. My parents have always done weird stuff. At first we stayed in Los Angeles but we soon left to go to a native Indian reservation in North Dakota where we slept in a tent. Obviously, it was freezing cold.”
As a child Lykke never came across pop culture of any kind, but when she turned ten she got her first two CDs as a present from her dad: Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. “That was the only thing I listened to and I knew all Madonnas’ lyrics. I decided I wanted to become a dancer and took up ballet and after a while I started to sing and write songs.”
Two years ago, after she graduated from high school in Stockholm, she moved to New York for the first time. She crashed at her friend, the rapper Mapei’s flat in Bushwick, while she chased gig opportunities at the city’s amateur stages. “I performed every week at open mic venues in East Village. It was always 20 guys who wanted to be Dylan, plus me. In the end I got some real gigs, but I soon realised that I wouldn’t get anywhere in New York without a manager. I went back to Stockholm but only got depressed. At the time I hated Stockholm and only wanted to go back to New York. I don’t really know why I feel so at home here. For half my childhood I was living on a mountaintop in India and in my school there wasn’t anyone with half as weird a past as me, but here on the other hand I meet people who have been through even crazier things. There’s room for everyone and if you want to go out with gigantic eye lashes in the morning no one cares.”
When the children of punk grow up they become social climbers. Lykke Li likes the enterprising, dreaming and slightly self-asserting culture that pervades New York. In that way she differs from her parents, she says. Despite the fact that she also became an artist, her view of life and her idea of a career is totally different she claims.
In December I read an interview with another person whose father was a punk star, that guy’s main interest was the stock market. To be a singer is completely different but it seems like they have a common goal in their showdown with their parent’s rebellion. “I’m very conscious of my career and have very clear goals,” she explains. “My parents were totally un-materialistic. I can’t revolt any other way than making money. My mother already did everything else. She was hanging out at Studio 54 and dancing naked at raves in India. But we never had any money when I was a kid, I never even had my own room. I hardly knew when I was going to get food again. I’ve stayed overnight in brothels five times and when I was 13 I was living with a prostitute in Morocco. It’s only natural for me to become a hustler.”
