Fragile melancholy in brighter tones

By Georg Cederskog
Published: DN October 27th, 2001
Translated by: hegude

She avoids the spotlight, but still is a Swedish artist with international penetrating power. This is the only interview that Stina Nordenstam gives connecting to the release of her new album "This is".

Out of her wallet she fishes up her driving licence. Very satisfied. She just got it back for the second time, after driving her turbo-Saab and Cherokee-Jeep in a way that neither Danish nor Swedish law has managed to digest.

- It's hard for me to accept authorities if I find that they don't make sense. I feel like I'm a bit outside the society and this becomes very clear when it comes to driving a car, she ascertains and adds that her friends are happy that the driving teacher didn't allow her to apply for a driving licence for motorcycles (she didn't reach the break).

Her love of high speeds seems to have worrying similarities to open-air dramas. She just recovered from a temerarious climbing over Kebnekaise, which ended up in rescuing by helicopter and hospitalization.

This is the second time that she's been seriously put in her place by mother Earth.

- I was up in the North, in the autumn two years ago, taking pictures - It turned out to be about twenty very good pictures that Dazed & Confused had ordered. (British image-based life style magazine, editorial comment) - and ended up in Örnsköldsvik. There I went to the tourist office and found a folder about Europe's largest cave system of some specific kind. And in less than no time it was absolutely no doubt that I was going there. I browsed the folder half-heartedly, and then packed what I thought was necessary; two flashlights, water, sugar, fruit and gloves, maybe. In the folder, it said: "Never enter a cave alone", but I just thought "yeah, right" and drove there. A ball of fire had mapped out these caves, but it was more personally, not that informatively written.

- And nobody was there, because it was low season, but at the entrance there was a lot of helmets - which I disregarded, "those are only for families with children". I climbed straight down into the shaft, and when I reached the bottom it immediately became very narrow (aims just over one meter in diameter) and totally dark. I kept on grabbling until I reached a passageway that not even I could pass. Then I lay back - and was frightened. Panicked. I crawled back, but ended up in a place where the cave passage was divided into two. First I tried one, but I didn't recognize it, and when I tried the other one it was the same thing there. And the map and the signs that were there, was from the sixties and just made me more confused. "Princess' passage", "Dark King's valley" and "Hero's cave"

- It was like something from "The Lord of the Rings". After that I can't remember anything. I had a mental black-out. I haven't got any memories from the rest - until I suddenly was outside. And then I just stood there screaming continuously.

At what?

- At life, at myself and at the old devil who drew the map. Noone would have found me down there until next spring.

In the winter of 2034 when some degree student from the Musical Academy will sit down at any of the institution's plasma screens to write a degree project about " The most influential Swedish popular artist from the post-war era", hardly a dozen names will qualify for the table of content: Lars Gulin, Monica Zetterlund, Thåström's Ebba Grön, Pugh and Abba of course. Jan Johansson, Stry Terrarie and Freddie Wadling as well. And Stina Nordenstam.

This former student at the Musician's program at the Musical Academy has, despite her gifts, remained a matter for a limited, but very devoted, horde of listeners around the world.

She's got most of her fans in Scandinavia, US, Japan, England and France. She doesn't seem to wish for more.

She's been nominated for a Grammy and was selected to "Best woman of Sweden" by Darling Magazine with the motivation that she's "the most beautiful, most intense artist in Sweden today". in Sunday Times "Dynamite" was described as one of the best albums of the 90's.

Her career as a professional artist has lasted for ten years so far, she's made four globally distributed albums and has worked with contemporary headliners such as director Baz Luhrmann (Through her song in the movie "Romeo & Juliet" with Leonardo di Caprio), Yello, Vangelis, Bill Laswell - and on the forthcoming album - Brett Anderson, singer in Suede. Right now she's in discussions about participating in two Dogma movies and a project together with William Orbit.

Although, she claims that she declines most of it, in particular "those predictable suggestions like Chemical Brothers". Those that don't include any uncertain elements.

- That's the first criterion for making me interested in something. I'm getting bored of things so easily. Repetition is giving me panic. It's like claustrophobia. I don't want to keep on doing what I already know, I don't want to just practice my expression.

A few, if any, Swedish artists have tried so hard to avoid the spotlight. It's now almost a decade since Stina Nordenstam gave a concert. No tv-sofas, No Luuk (popular Swedish talkshow), no radio, no performance at the Hultsfred Festival. This is her second interview for DN, the second in Sweden at all for the last eight years.

There are those who rule out the big shyness as a strategic marketing plan. However, she's got another explanation.

- I've got many reasons for avoiding the publicity, for example I imagine that it would make things that are important in my life impossible. To me it takes a certain balance - too much social life and too much of exhibition would harm it I think. But the fact that I don't perform live, it's because it wouldn't be fun enough, I suppose. It's not a scenario that attracts me enough.

Furthermore, by consistently wearing wigs and disquises on all portrait pictures and covers, the 32 year old everyday person Stina Nordenstam from Fisksätra, she with the red bicycle pannier, walking boots, the wild wardrobe and the many boxes of General-snuff, still becomes a well-kept secret.

She takes care of her anonymity and she's happy with being recognized just a couple of times a year.

- Meeting people is the coolest thing there is, but reactions to my music is a bad start for a meeting. There's a dramaturgy in the meeting, a give and take that is the whole point. I demand the real stuff in a way, a demand for truth and some kind of intensity, otherwise I'm not interested. You're not supposed to run your own race, put up an one-man show, just to sit down and get applause. As an artist, I want the reactions from people I don't know, to be respectful, based on professionalism. Basically, I find the other way uncomfortable. But I never go to pubs, to meet those twenty-something, that can say whatever they want about my music - and noone knows how I look. That is necessary for me.

Her need for a wide free zone doesn't just bottom in a fear of losing balance. To Stina Nordenstam, even a collision between her reality and the media's black and white version is a latent threat.

- I've been fighting for reality, since I've had panic disorder. That fight is very central to me, and has always been. My view of reality is very mobile, and this has made me feel, which I think everyone should feel, that media presents only one reality, one quality. What media shows, is in many cases a verification of an already accepted view. And then a lot of people read the same over and over - it becomes a collective mantra, where everyone has agreed on that "this is reality". And if it's written about me in the papers, suddenly my view of reality gets totally knocked out.

Silence.

- The discomfort it results in, to be described in words, is actually the reason why I haven't been given any interviews.

Therefore you accede to artists like Aretha Franklin, Kraftwerk, Ulf Lundell, Van Morrison, Glen Gould and others with very public jobs and a strong disinclination for the consequences of that.

- Yes, but I see myself as an extremely free-standing person. I'm not a part of anything. Just as little of a family, a group, a context, a society, as of a music scene. And this experience is more important to me than the fact that I don't feel comfortable in my public role. The first is primary and the rest follows it. My life provides that the people I meet, I must meet impartially. Besides, many journalists are just stupid.

I hardly think they can be more stupid than the average Swede, do you?

- Yes. Average people are talking about, and are moving in a sphere where they are intelligent. They talk about things they like and about the family and so on, and they're experts on that. But if I'm supposed to talk about my music with journalists… I've experienced a whole lot of situations where the journalist is incapable to do that.

In just over a week, her new album "This is" will be in the shops. It's a big, and a happy step into the light. Away from the sore and the broken sound-landscape that was so significant for "Dynamite" (1996) and outstanding "People are strange" (1998). Towards a partially pop-sweet melancholy of a more hopeful kind.

She discribes how she used to fear that the night radio producers would like her records, she was afraid of becoming background music.

Now she feels that if the P3 (Swedish Radio channel) -friendly song "Sharon & Hope" will be spread far and wide in the ether, it's ok because the song so clearly express what she want it to express, "it can't be used or misunderstood".

If you force her to describe this, her fifth digital spawn, she starts with just saying "easier to access".

- There are two things that have been essential for the album's sound: My personal development, I'm much happier and vivid today. And my co-operation with producer Mitchell Froom (who has worked with Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega, Bonnie Raitt, Richard Thompson and Los Lobos before, editorial comment). This is actually the first time I collaborate with someone.

- The complexity in the music is necessary of varying levels, depending on where in your life you happen to be. To me it's like I've always tried to search for the greatest possible clearness. If you find yourself, like I did before, in a totally fragmental and dark life, then it's impossible to make it clearer than I did then. It's not about trying to find hits.

- (Long silence). There aren't any new subjects for the new album, To me it's obvious that I sing about universal stuff, but along with new love stories and increased access to my history, it always turns out to something new. Maybe I would describe it as "sentimental" too. That's probably something I've been moving towards, some kind of intensification of the emotions. To push every feeling so hard, that it ends up on the brink of parodying itself. Now there's more than the darkness that has had the opportunity to speak, and since this is something new for me, maybe I've exaggerated a bit with big gestures, almost like a variety show.

I can hear a lot that resembles David Bowie at the time around 1980, "Lodger" and "Scary monsters". Not least in the constructions of the melodies and Brett Anderson's dull singing style.

- Yes, maybe that was the purpose. Bowie tends to be the idol I've had - insomuch I've had any idol. Bowie, followed by Rickie Lee Jones during a very limited range of time. I've had this idea about which voices that would fit - Bowie and Brett Anderson - and Brett said yes immediately. It all went on very well, you can hear that too, I think his singing effort is one of the best he's ever done.

The album was recorded last September to November in Los Angeles. She wrote the eleven tracks, initially in her head, then she tried with "humming singing" and it was written down on music paper.

- I can work to order from myself. To several of my collaborations with other artists, I've written the song at the hotel, the night before recording. It's all about presence - To me, it's the only thing about music that's interesting. Maybe you can't have that presence every day all year round, and then you do some other things instead, living. But suddenly you sit down and then everything's coming to you very concentrated.

For the moment she's working with a whole suite vocal- and strings music to a SVT-documentary about a homeless man in Paris. The writing part is a happy process. She's writing a kind of ongoing soundtrack to her life, and this makes her feel more fulfilled than drained.

- I don't think I'll come across any kind of music that's going to affect my own music that much, in the same way it's influenced by my life and the way I feel. To me, it's all about some kind of, however strange this may sound, discovery of what I feel inside - and that's very satisfying (smiling). And the difficult parts are just as satisfying to discover, because the fact that you're clearifying and visualizing things is really worthwhile, regardless if the pictures you imagine are light or dark. It's a pleasure because the blackness is allowed to take up a great deal of space, and gets relevance. My darkest experiences get a meaning.

She's writing her lyrics quickly. In her funcional-style two room apartment, there lies a novel, which she has started to write, and which she's going to finish when she gets older. She's getting ideas and headwords from poems, advertising posters, and among her notes with phrases that she's keeping. The writing is her strength, the musical qualities are more abstract.

- A language is only essential if you have listeners or readers, and that wasn't the case for me. I've always had to fight for my language, and have always been sceptical towards the language. I've spent a tremendous amount of energy in formulating, and I've done that since I was a child. But I don't need to write all the time, I only do it in connection with a record release.

Stina Nordenstam brings about strong reactions. She functions in a tradition which has root-fibres in both yore female, Swedish folklore singers - those who chose to have the eleven-year-old as their voice ideal - Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones. There were many who were provoked by her voice and who brushes aside the eteric girl soprano as mannered. Others are fascinated by the intensity and its capacity to carry heavy current in scuffed phrases.

The influence which it has had is unquestionable and can be studied more closely in vocal parts by Nina Persson, Lisa Ekdahl and Regina Lund.

- I'm not flattered, they should come up with something individual instead. I think that my relationship with Rickie Lee Jones was just as embarrassing.

One upon a time, she envied the huge vocal range that some of her collegues has got, like Björk. Today she regards her voice's development as a razor-sharp mirror reflection of the private.

- I like my voice more nowadays - and that might be because I feel better and that it eventually becomes me. And I'm not motivated to start screaming. That's not me. There's a lot of screaming in me, and around me and about be, and I feel that when I'm singing too, but the screams go the other way round. And when I'm singing, I feel like the whole spectra is still there. Before, I needed more time to reach a certain presence in the voice, that's what I'm looking for, not the polished stuff.

The presence in your voice is independently sensual today, not provocative daring like it was in the start of your career.

- Yes, I've accessed a new sensuality today, and the fact that it influences my voice comes quite natural. That I used to be daring… Behind me, I've got experiences of being a victim for other people's sexuality, actual experiences when I was a child.

And it continued for a long time?

- Yes, and one of the effects might have been - paradoxical to say - that initially I played with that in my music. Something that in fact was some kind of instinct for survival, but that resulted in sexualisation.

It gets quiet at the table. She fastens her eyes on me and amazedly says:

- I haven't realized that connection before.

It seems that Stina Nordenstam's interest in other's music is quite limited. She neither has got any instruments, nor a recording studio at home, her TV is missing its antenna and can only be used for watching video, her phone hasn't got any signal and she's 'almost never' buying records. (the last she liked was Radiohead's four year old 'OK Computer' - and respectively Atomic Kitten's and Sade's latest hit songs, which are played at the sport bar where she watches Italian football). Instead she takes photos and read. The table in her dining room is so overloaded with books, that the eating today takes place in the kitchen. The only time she ever tends to deal with the music, is when a new album is going to be recorded.

- I still feel like I'm constantly busy with almost the same thing, some kind of hunting for things that can reflect the inner me. To me, the big difference is whether I work with other people or not.

- The fact that I don't listen to music… It might sound like a cliché, but what I do now with you, meeting a person - is much more interesting. It's not often that music reaches such a high level when it comes to presence and content, that tops the meetings I have with people. For me, it feels just… 'B' to listen to music. It's boring. And I don't think it will harm not listening to it. Why would you need to have a communication constantly going on with contemporary pop music if you don't like it? And I have nothing in common with people that make music for friendship, meeting the audience or for the acknowledgement's sake. But actually I'm not a complete stranger to the fact that I'll give concerts some time, because I can't accept that I just go through life, categorically keeping saying no to something. But there are definitely no plans for it right now.

What do you want to express?

- There's a lot of vulnerableness. And then some kind of instinct for survival, against all odds. It's often about trying to describe a sign of life from a pitch-black subsistence, at least this it how it used to be. In a review in DN, a critic wrote that I 'crawled in vulnerableness'. The reason why it was so humiliating was that it was relevant: I agree that I used to excel in vulnerableness - and that I still do, maybe. To expose my vulnerableness has always been my thing, as well as in life as in the music. And that's why it hurt me so much. It was in a phase where I wasn't so aware of those things, and not so happy with myself or what I did. Furthermore, I felt that the person who wrote it became personal, controlled by his/her own history - it made the whole thing turn out really mucky.

Hours have passed. The pinches of snuff in the ashtrade on the dining table have created an estetic hill in tobacco-brown. It's time for a final chord.

- Even if I'm up to a lot of other things, it's the music that is the most important, more important than my love escapades (laugh). But I want the people who like me, to like me completely, regardless what kind of music I make. In some way, it's like I'm still doing this for myself. It's probably because I was totally alone when I grew up. What I do, appears in a creative process, and there's no recipient in that moment. I do my very best, turn myself inside-out, but it's to make it possible to create. Not for a potential listener.

She tells me that she's entering an exciting phase in her life. Then she smiles again. - Actually it feels like my whole life, on all different levels, yet has been a preparation, a training, for what to come.

Georg Cederskog