The singing anarchist

By Martin Halldin
Published: ETC 1/04 (ETC.se 040706)

- Stina Nordenstam om politik, utanförskap och att vara mer alien än kvinna.

Since Stina Nordenstam released her first album "Memories of a color" 13 years ago, an at times fanatically devoted crowd of fans have been following every step of her career. When Peder Bjurman's text "Isens Fasor", spoken and musically interpreted by Stina, was performed at Elverket, the experimental stage of Dramaten, the rush was close to chaotic. Rumours had it that Stina Nordenstam herself would be sitting in the audience, listening to the work played back from a reel to reel tape recorder on the stage.

However, Stina didn't show up, much to the disappointment of the audience who had to put up with the tape recorder. This is just one example of the almost hysteric cult status enjoyed by Stina Nordenstam. Her records have been elevated to the skies, and she has collaborated with superstars like Suede's Brett Anderson, Yello and Vangelis. But she is mostly famous - and appreciated - for being a solo artist. The commercial peak of her career came, somewhat surprisingly, when she contributed to the soundtrack for the Leonardo DiCaprio spectacle "Romeo + Juliet". But most of the time, the media buzz is very low around Stina Nordenstam. She rarely gives interviews, and is almost never played on the radio. For a long time, getting an interview with Stina Nordenstam seemed a hopeless endeavour to me, until I managed to get in touch with her by a coincidence. We decided to meet up for an interview, on one condition:

"I'm only up for it if we discuss politics. To leave the political context out of a conversation with ETC would in a way imply a silent approval, an agreement on a common point of view, and I'm not comfortable with that", she wrote in an email. And she's right about that. So here it comes: Stina Nordenstam's view on politics.

Have you read ETC?

- No, but I know about the magazine since I come from a communist home. That's why I have this aversion towards the left, in a way.

You've said that you find it very difficult to relate to different groups of people.

- Yes, that might be the fundamental reason that I dislike political matters.

When they become generalized?

- I think they are per definition. It's very difficult for me to relate to and see myself as a part of a group.

Is that what politics are for you?

- Yes, somehow. It's like there's something fundamental to it when people engage in political matters, that there's a will to join together. A mutual agreement on the nature of things. Somehow that's against my nature. I feel constantly in opposition, in all contexts, in a rather annoying manner.

Is that bugging you?

- Yes, it's a really irritating trait. To be uneasy and to question things all the time.

But what do you do with your thoughs and views on the way society is? Do you channel it into your artistic expressions?

- In the extent that it's present in my art, there's the personal journalism. I've never had any other ambition with art. To be able to comment and represent society, you have to feel like a part of it. And I don't. I think it takes some kind of attachment to be able to do it. Since I've had an insecure childhood, I've never felt safe enough to feel that attachment. I've always felt like I was off the side. And that's when it turns into a voicing of criticism instead.

Like some kind of anti politics?

- Yes, or like a process terminated early on, demanding something new to continue. But in a way I'm a part of society. I take things in as a consumer, and have spontaneous opinions about stuff. But it comes to a halt as soon as I feel required to say something.

How do you mean when you say you're not a part of society?

- It's a feeling, not an analysis. I don't feel like a part of a family, group, or school, but rather like being outside, always.

But isn't that a bit contradictive since a lot of political people listen to your music? How does that make you feel? You've got a standing as an artist in the left ranks.

- But I think that goes without saying, except for the musical part... Since I'm not going for the average commercial approach.

So that's why the "alternative" people find you?

- It might be twofold. Both in representation, a kind of view of me as a performer, and what the music is, because it's personal too, rather than commercial and genre oriented.

Do you care about the views and thoughts of your interpreters?

- There is an aspect which is difficult to talk about, but it has to do with the construction of my psyche. My perception of reality is a bit askew and rather frail. I'm very short-sighted in the sense that I experience things very intensely right where I am. I can't think in distant terms, or in greater contexts. I just can't. So the thing about how people perceive... That's too many abstractions from here and now.

Even though they are deeply personal, many of your songs seem to speak to their own periods of time, for instance "This Time, John" which is about the murder of John Rhon. Could it be that because you have a feeling of being outside society, you view it in a completely different way than other people?

- I definitely think so. I think adopting a stance and being part of a group can be limiting a lot of times. And while it's tormenting to always be a bit uneasy, it does grant some kind of... Well it isn't objective, it's a kind of subjectivity in control. It's personal narration.

But really, where do you think you're standing, politically?

- This thing about definitions... I partly feel like an anarchist, and I don't have any moral. And when I've had a car, I've lost my license several times. Now I've quit driving, because it didn't work. I'm an excellent driver, but it got difficult. I had to think in two parallel thought processes where one was "but I'll make it on time". A musical way. And the other one was sort of "what am I gonna do? Oh yeah, that!". Aside from being caught a couple of times, it got very tiresome after a while. It turned into an inner conflict in every crossing. Then finally I came to a point when I felt that I was gonna sell the car. Besides, I'm quite a daredevil. I'm biking like a... The more I learn, and the better I get...

The more risks you take.

- I think it's hilarious.

But you managed to get a drivers license.

- Yes, I managed to a accept the rules in that sense. I guess I can do that, at times. In a focused phase, you can repeat just about anything you're told. Then, after one night's sleep, it's gone.

Is there anything that you can identify with?

- Yes, I feel like I identify strongly with some groups. Once I was walking on Fridhemsplan, and some drunks were hanging around there, quite a few, about five or six, and some were young. And my heart sank. But my boyfriend hardly reacted at all. The human misery and the self destruction just goes straight into me. It's been that way since I was little. When I was with my aunt before I started school, she was a social worker, and I was there once when she met a man who was an alcoholic. And then I started to cry because I thought it was so difficult, and then he started to cry because I cried. My aunt just sat there and didn't know what to do.

- And then when I was about nine years of age I read "Christiane F", and recognized myself in the book so deeply. I felt like I understood the entire logic, and the intense human misery. That's when I somehow got terrified of drug addicts. I got paranoid ideas about addicts. Then, when I got a little older, I read lots of books about drugs. I've always been incredibly fascinated by them. Also, it has something to do with this thing about reality...

Escapism?

- Yes, but that word is more suitable when talking about movies. Because it's a shallow word for this kind of substance abuse.

But it really is a way to change your perception of reality.

- There are people who have been doing drugs, who are clean now, but have a lot of experience of it. When I went psychotic I worked with someone who had experimented with drugs, and it was very easy because he could recognize everything. Things that he had experienced in chemically induced conditions.

Do you feel that the border is very fine between...

- It has always been. When that happened, the first time I checked into a place for people with first-time-psychosis, although I never had one but rather moved closer to the border, then I got a very important explanation from a doctor that I'm still in touch with. Because I've lived with it so long, I have a strong defense. While a lot of the patients there were having drug or alcohol induced psychosis, or had a sudden change in life which you're totally unprepared for, and just pushes you over the edge. But I was prepared.

You've mentioned that media has a monopoly on explaining reality. Is that the reason you don't give a lot of interviews?

- Yes, but I can perceive media as extremely unreal. And I'm very sensitive to things like describing reality, even though I think it's the most interesting thing, because it's very modern in a way. A hundred years ago, that effect on people's perception of reality didn't exist. For example, I tend to think that it's horrifying that everybody is reading the news at the same time. They buy the evening paper, read the same thing and think the same thing. That's really scary, I think.

Do you think you keep up to date on the current events of the world?

- I know more about the latest movies than the state of the world, haha.

I've understood that you love movies. Is that the kind of escapism that appeals to you?

- Yes, because it's about describing reality too, and that's a kind of dramaturgy that I'm familiar with, and from which I can appreciate detours. When I saw "Matrix" for the first time, I just sat there, gaping. It was accomplished with an amazing musicality, something with the vision and rhythm reminiscent to dancing.

In an interview you gave about five years ago, you said that you feel a lot of angst looking at your work.
- I'm very egoistic about what I do. And when it's done, then it turns into a juxtaposition of reality, and people from the outside are going to look at it in contexts like the music scene, record stores and what have you. At those times I feel very confused and uneasy. So when I hear myself on the radio, or even worse, in a clothing store, I might think "God, this sounds so strange". What a high voice...

That sounds rather tough?

- I guess! But when it comes to my voice, there's not much I can do about it. It's like your personality. You simply have to accept... It would be a lot more easy and handy to be invincible and tough, cool and hard, I don't know. And then it can get a bit tormenting to feel that vulnerability in a clothing store. Then you wonder if you really did that deliberately.

Can you make a living, doing what you do?

- Yes, I've been doing really fine up until a few years ago, because I've had deals with international labels, and then you get good advances regardless of how much they sell. But the latest album I've recorded, which hasn't come out yet, was done on my own label which I share with my ex manager, an Englishman who financed half of it. And by then there wasn't any money coming in, just a lot of expenses. So there's been many loans and bank credit the last few years.

Yet, do you feel privileged for being able to work with your art full time?

- That's almost a rhetorical question, so would I have to say no.

But could you see yourself in another context than the one you're in now?

- Possibly I've been thinking like that earlier in my life, that I ended up doing this by coincidence. But now I feel like I'm in just about the ideal and only possible position. And that's got a lot to do with my psyche, having learned more about myself. The creative matters have been the most important, beyond comparison. They have replaced human contact in a high degree during my childhood. And they've kept me reasonably sane.

What's your view on illegal music downloads?

- I don't care that much. First of all, I can't assess the economical impact they have on me. So I'm not that interested, because it's so abstract. But then I think that everything anarchistic is rather appealing, the way it goes against the idea someone had about how things should be sold. Doing it your own way. Not to mind breaking the law.

I read a review of your second album, which said you and the author Mare Kandre are the only ones who dare being un-Swedish.

- Ah, it's the same thing everywhere. I played a great song by bob hund to an american producer, and he thought it sounded like everything else. It's just that it's in Swedish. So that which you find unique maybe isn't. I can't imagine fitting in anywhere else, that I would be more French if it was in France. I guess I feel rather... well not rooted in Sweden, but this upbringing in the seventies, the left, that feels Swedish.

And you didn't get on very well with that?

- No. But it's... The family... How it worked. Rather than Sweden and the left. But when I think about it I remember it clearly. This movie, "Tillsammans", I couldn't watch it. Only for three minutes. It wasn't funny. They mostly got it right and it sure as hell wasn't funny. It was too much like reality, even though it was supposed to be cheery and funny. And it really wasn't.

I think most people who have seen it regard it as a funny movie. But my generation didn't have to go through that. We got to grow up in the "merry" eighties instead, and that wasn't much fun either. I've got my share of traumas from back then.

- Ha ha, yes, that was different. Permed hair and puffed sleeves... Anyways, my dad was a pioneer leader when I was little. It was kind of like Young Eagles, but communistic. And we went to camps, singing songs. He really held the flag high. And now he's apparently joined the liberals.

I know a lot of people from my parents' generation who've gone right wing in their elder days...

- It's unbelievable. You don't want to accept the old clichés, but...

When I was around five years of age, I went to a kpml(r) camp with my mom.

- I went to a lot of things like that when I was little. My dad is a psychologist, so he attended the "socialist psychologists" meeting in Scandinavia each year. There was nude bathing and they slept in dormitories.

Everything was very libertarian.

- Yes, very... I thought everything was really strange. I couldn't make sense of it.

A lot of people regard you as a feminist artist, and several of your songs can be interpreted as feministic, for example "The man with the gun". How do you feel about that?

- A strong identification with a group, for example a political group, often springs from insecurity. But it's strange in a way, because my insecurity gives the opposite effect. In a situation you set out to find a group where you share values, and have, if you exaggerate, a desperate need for peers. While my insecurity makes this impossible.

- At the Tempo festival (a documentary film festival in Stockholm) I was at a seminary called "To talk about the most forbidden - in whose interest?". It started out from two films, a Swedish one called "Nina, darling" and the American "Capturing the Friedmans". "Nina..." wasn't that good, and it wasn't aired by SVT who commissioned it, because it was so biased, and they were afraid of getting sued. However, "Capturing..." was great, and fascinating on many levels, about a truly dysfunctional family. During the seminary, I once laughed at something someone said. Then Suzanne Osten turned around and looked at me like a fellow sister, and smiled. And then I felt, oh, that's what it feels like, this feminism and kinship between "us fellow sisters". Suzanne Osten turning around and smiling at you every day.

But did it feel good?

- No. Neither did it feel good nor bad. It just felt weird. It really doesn't happen that much. Even if there are a lot of things in feminism common to my point of view, those are two different things. When I grew up I spent a lot of time with my mom and my sister. Somehow that made me interested in men and male stuff, and I've always thought the stuff they do is fun and cool. And then I haven't reflected over it when I've got the question about how it feels being a woman in a man's world. I've never been able to reply because I don't feel like a woman in a man's world, I generally feel like an alien. So the surname is Alien, not Woman.

- There's an amazing need for different kinds of femininity. I'm sure that goes for men too, but it might be stronger with women because there are images more distinct than with men. I think it's easier for men to fall through the cracks, to be strange, weirdos, and keep a low profile. But I feel that the older I get, the more I become what is regarded as female. Sometimes I feel like a parody of womanhood, being unreliable, unstable, an entity of emotion. Having a vision, fainting or getting headaches. I'm like a parody of the 19th century woman! I've always preferred hanging around men, but I've never felt like one of them, and that's the point.

But if you had been around women, maybe you wouldn't have felt like one of them either.

- No, and maybe that's when it gets worse. But when I'm with men, I enjoy myself, it's like the cream of the crop, that I'm a tricky person, and on top of that, I'm a girl. Then it turns into something acceptable and maybe even positive.

A new record by Stina Nordenstam is coming this spring. She talks about working in different ways on each album, which make them sound different from eachother. But the voice is the same, just like the personal lyrics. Her fans can look forward to another album with deeply personal comments on the times we live in. The record shops will file it under "alternative" or "independent", regardless of Stina Nordenstam's own dislike of categorization. Because even though she doesn't want to identify herself with the group, the group has ide