Fabnet Article

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Published: Fabnet, 2001

Stina Nordenstam (32) is a jazz influenced ‘alternative’ singer-songwriter from Sweden. The sparse, open textures and her girlish voice create a unique ‘northern woods’ atmosphere full of dark shadows and strange shapes.

With her fragile child-voice and her spookily beautiful songs, Stina Nordenstam is one of the most exciting and emotive vocal talents around.

Stina Nordenstam returns these days with her first album of original material since 1997's Dynamite. "This Is" is a harder beast than her breakthrough album, 1994's "And She Closed Her Eyes", but the elfin Swedish chanteuse can still captivate and infuriate in equal measure.

There must be something with the atmosphere in Sweden since so many interesting and unique female songwriters develops there, but Stina Nordenstam may be one of the strangest ones yet. She hardly ever gives interviews, avoid getting photographed and refuse to give concerts. For the cover of the album "People are Strange" she shot her own photographs. "I have never liked being photographed," she has said, "and I have been like that since I was a little girl. Maybe because I have been conscious that I have not been treated well, and I have been opponent to document it. I have written a diary either. That's why it have been so nice to have these records that mirrors what I have been doing."

With her whispering voice and different wigs her image is the one of a modern Greta Garbo.

She obviously lets her music speak for itself, and it speaks volumes. Her songs are beautiful pieces of life written, composed, and arranged by Stina Nordenstam alone. The only way to get to know her is through her records: Between ten years and five records, last one is simple called "This Is - Stina Nordenstam", has she shown the most distant zigzag courses of the human mind.

--I don't think those who buys my records should know me as a person, she said recently in one of her rare interviews. --I don't want to be a public person. I am afraid of it. It's important that those who meet me don't already have information about me and I don't want to recognized on the streets. I want to be invisible and private.

She is not invisible, but she is very small and tiny, though she is regarded up with the giants in the music business: As the helpless, shy little sister of Björk, Tori Amos and Polly Jean Harvey. And where Björk represent barking madness, Amos for vulnerable sexuality and Harvey for anemic aggressiveness, Stina Nordenstam being intense and personal, slightly eccentric with her songs and her melancholy vision. "I guess I represent an alternative femininity", she has said.

Stina Nordenstam was born 1969 and raised in Fisksätra, a dormitory town a couple of miles outside Stockholm to parents who reacted against their own conservative upbringing and joined the Communist Party. However, her middle class upbringing gave her trouble at school where "the idea was that people who had less were better human beings." However, Virgin Net writes, Stina found a means of escape through music.

"I guess as a kid I did music just to keep myself occupied and not be at home," Stina says now. "It's not that I was particularly interested in music. I wasn't really interested in anything, not even living, because I was severely depressed until I was 20. I was sealed off. I didn't have one healthy relationship until I was 20."

She has described her upbringing as boundless and with a lack of love. The family situation was difficult in a way she don't want to share. A few years ago she cut off all ties to the family.

In her teens, she enrolled at music school, but found the upper middle class mentality stifling. However, she moved to a more mixed college and started playing in bands around Stockholm. She then decided to start writing her own songs in English.

"For language to make sense it needs to communicate and I didn't have that when I was growing up so it was easier to develop my musical language in English, which also has the advantage of being a more profound language than Swedish, with a richer musical heritage... I wrote for my voice and sang like my voice wanted to."

After some years as a singer in several bands with a jazz repertoire she made her own debut with the album "Memories of a Color" in 1992. There were reasons to tell it then, since the record contained music and lyrics that had been written during a long period of her life.

In retrospect Stina thinks it is a horrible record.

"I am particularly dissatisfied with it", she told Dagbladet Magasinet. "It have happen so many things with my life and I don't feel any more like the same person made that record. It took so long time before I could find my own expression and my own voice."

Earlier she used to several attempt before she felt that she got the closeness to the song that she needs. Both in life and in her profession she has always aim at t intimacy and closeness, Everything feels so much easier now. She just has to stand up and be there with the song.

Her second album, "And She Closed Her Eyes" from 1994, is almost the 1990s answer to Joni Mitchell's "Blue". Hardly a small student apartment without it.

"After the first record had been released, which was in November 1991, I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just felt really bad. It was some kind of exhaustion, I guess. Mainly because I released songs that I had kept for myself for so long. And I also got a jagged picture of myself, due to things I read about me everywhere, that I was so fragile and melancholy and so. But after a while it meant something that I didn't quite understand, she said in a rare interview to Andres Lokko.

She cares very little what kind of attention the record makes: "There are very few people who's appreciation I really want. I mean, what someone in USA thinks about it two years from now doesn't matter. For me, the door was shut as soon as the record was finished. And now it's too late. If you are truly happy with what you've done, it is not until a very long time later that you start to care about what others will think. Just when you've recorded a song and brings it on a tape and listens to it in a walkman, that's enough. You love yourself right then and that is actually enough. For some reason."

The record she is most proud of is the "punk" album "Dynamite" from 1996. It document Stina on her brutal and most rawest moments. Deep into the dark blackness. She wants tear down the image of herself, make crack in the official picture. Be a new Stina every time. Break every principle.

She is 32 years old, is she ready for family and children?

"With my bad experience with my own family it's not a matter of course that I must have a family. But then, when I see a child on the subway, I also get moved. Many things would be even fun with a child."

Her fifth album, just recently released "This Is - Stina Nordenstam", represents a shift away from the darkness of much of her Nineties output, such as 1996's brilliant but at times emotionally pitch-black "Dynamite". "This Is" embraces a richer and more vivid sound and also boasts collaborations with Suede's Brett Anderson and all manner of strange musical instruments. It's her lightest and brightest album. Very optimistic mood. It's light in the tunnel. Playful. The new songs reflect a sense of an artist finally at ease with herself, having arrived at a philosophical plateau.

Stina, write a fan site, captures "... a moment in a time in a perfect way, the music and lyrics combine to give you a certain feeling. You know exactly what she's talking about. The image of Stina we get from the songs is of someone very sad and fragile. There's a lot on the albums dealing with being hurt, being lost, feeling bad. Her voice reflects these feelings and makes everything sound very very sincere. As a friend of mine put it "you just want to hug her and tell her everything is gonna be all right". She makes you feel very close, like she's singing just for you. I always like to fall asleep listening to music. Stina's voice has rocked me to sleep more than anyone else's in the last couple of years. It always makes these small moments between wake and sleep seem magical."

To mark the album release a unique film project This Is Stina Nordenstam, featuring a series of short films moulded into a longer piece, will be playing in select UK arthouse cinemas. The short films were made by up and coming talented directors on a tiny budget - proving that a great idea can be shot for relatively little money.

The unearthly beauty of Nordenstam's eerie voice is best showcased on dreamy opener, 'Everyone Else in the World', a plea for love in the style of Bacharach and David's 'Anyone Who had a Heart' and the disco-influenced 'Lori Glory' tootles along in an almost cheerful manner. Her collaborations with Suede's Brett Anderson on the faux-glam of 'Keen Yellow Planet' and childhood memory 'Trainsurfing' work better than expected as Anderson is kept strictly to the role of straight-man to Nordenstam's strange little girl rather than being allowed free rein with his usual histrionics.

"It's getting easier and easier to be alive. More fun all the time. I am tough and strong, or I w