When I get the chance to speak with her, roughly four hours before her sold-out concert at Metropolis, I am not surprised to find her small in stature, soft-spoken, and incredibly beautiful. She also turns out to be extremely self-aware, settling this apparent discord with an earnest passion for her craft.
In a few hours I will watch her perform, and it will become clear that, despite a strained relationship to “the Industry” in its various forms, Lykke Li is an artist who gives heart, body and soul to her music and her fans.
Li describes her newest album, Wounded Rhymes, as the record she wanted to make in the first place, but didn’t have the tools, emotionally speaking, to do so. “[When] you’re starting out you just scratch the surface, and you have to do that in order to get deeper,” she says. “Now I’m more myself than before.”
Wounded Rhymes is indeed a much more spirited release than Youth Novels. On this first album, Li’s delivery is often timid or tentative, lilting and diabetically sweet. While the content of Wounded Rhymes often mirrors this first effort, her vocals are stronger and more assertive, retaining the compelling childlike fragility that made Youth Novels such a success.
She cites among her influences Alan Lomax’s field recordings, surf music, and artists like Link Wray, Dr. John and Arthur Russell. These eclectic leanings imprint themselves on her music, making it ephemeral and wholly unique, transcending genres and the paradigm of standard Swedish electro-pop.
Li’s onstage persona is much more suited to this second album. Live, her voice is rich and impossibly flawless, the trademark delicacy now wearing a layer of armour. Onstage she is ringed by a crescent of platforms bearing percussion instruments, and her vocals are accompanied by bold synths, booming bass, tribal drums and funereal organ.
Dressed in a high-necked black bodysuit and a floor-length cloak made of the same semi-translucent material as the thin black curtains that descend here and there from the rafters she is ethereal and extraterrestrial, mingling the gothic eccentricity of Stevie Nicks with the self-aware sex appeal of Jessica Rabbit. She performs with her whole body, vamping, undulating, dreamily fluttering her arms, caressing the mic, moving with the fabric of her cloak.
The show opens with Wounded Rhymes’ lovelorn “Jerome” and segues into Youth Novels’ “I’m Good I’m Gone”. She holds a drumstick in one hand, moving with it as an extension of herself, and toying with her own drum kit. During the bluesy “Sadness is a Blessing” she hugs the cloak to her body and beckons to the audience with her hands, then holds her palms out flat in front of her as if trying to push them away.
Li’s relationship to her music is not unlike her relationship to the audience – a drawing closer and a pulling away, both a blessing and a curse.
“It’s very draining to be on tour, but something within me says I have to do this still,” she admits. “But it’s exciting too, and exhilarating. I want to create memories for people. It’s a special thing for me and I hope it’s a special thing for them. We can enjoy an experience together and watch something come to life.”
Li also acknowledges her phobia of tabloid photographers, but she hasn’t let it affect the quality of her work, and embraces the possibility of mainstream success.
“These are the times we’re living in,” she says simply. “You want to go with it and not against it. I see it as a nice way of sneaking quality into people’s subconscious. You can’t just feed the kids Mc Donalds’ food and songs about phones, you’ve got to give them something for their hearts and souls.”
Ditto her foray into the Twilight universe (Li contributed the song “Possibility” to the New Moon soundtrack). “I do enjoy that audience, those young girls and boys who still believe in love. It’s a very vulnerable age, you know, you believe that music and love can change your life. I just wanted to be a part of that somehow.”
In concert, Lykke Li breathes new life into every song she performs. Even the more cloying tracks from Youth Novels are transformed by her ballsy, bluesy vocals. In particular, the sugary-sweet “Little Bit” suddenly seems sultry and provocative.
With every song she attempts to balance familiarity with innovation. A drum interlude builds to a feverish pace before breaking into the Youth Novels hit “Dance Dance Dance”, the gospel quality of the chorus’s harmonies emphasized by its more drum- and guitar-heavy rendition. When she performs “Until We Bleed”, a song originally recorded with fellow Swedish outfit Kleerup, Li collapses, lying prone on the ground as drums and synths churn out the pulsating discotheque lead-in. During the vampy “Get Some,” she dances in silhouette as greenish light pinwheels across the stage. For “Youth Knows No Pain”, the first of two songs in the encore, Li shouts a verse through a megaphone.
“Do you like to slow dance?” she asks the crowd as the band prepares for their last number, the forlorn “Unrequited Love”, its 50s pop-style chorus dripping with oh-so familiar melancholy. “Smoke a doobie and slow dance.”
When I ask her how it feels to be playing a sold-out show on the day the Rapture is supposed to begin, Li smiles and says, “Bring it on.” Halfway through her show, she coyly poses the same question to her rapt audience.
“Are you all ready to die? It feels pretty good to be dying.”
She’s right, it does.
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Visit Lykke Li’s website here
By Rebecca Hiscott / Photos LP Maurice
