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A Day in the Life of a Swedish Star

Lykke Li gets just a little bit more from Peter Björn and John
 

By Paul Rogers

 

“I don’t have time to do anything,” laments Lykke Li. “Not even wash my underwear.”

The svelte Swed

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Lykke Li gets just a little bit more from Peter Björn and John

 

By Paul Rogers

 

“I don’t have time to do anything,” laments Lykke Li. “Not even wash my underwear.”

The svelte Swedish songstress’ relentless tour schedule—she’s scheduled to perform at the Ogden Theater in Denver Nov. 11—since the release of her critically-acclaimed sophomore album, Wounded Rhymes, dropped in February has precluded many of life’s niceties. Time with friends and family, a home-cooked meal, or indeed—since both her parents and sister moved away from Sweden—a home have become distant memories to the chanteuse.

“If I stay in a hotel for a few days in a row I feel at home!” says Li, 25. “I’m a freedom junkie, so I kinda like that I can kinda stay wherever. But in the darker moments it’s really terrible to, like, be exhausted and not knowing where to go.”

Wandering is nothing new for Lykke Li. Born Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson to a photographer mother and musician father, she spent her formative years in Sweden, Portugal, Morocco, India and Nepal. At age 19 she moved to Brooklyn for three months, returning two years later to record her debut album, 2008’s Youth Novels. Last year she re-located to L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood while recording Wounded Rhymes.

Yet a through-line of Li’s interviews of late has been her struggle with an increasingly cluttered calendar and her rapidly swelling celebrity in the wake of Rhymes release (the album has charted in more than 15 countries). Already a household name in Sweden, she’s well on her way to similar status here having had a song (“Possibility”) on 2009’s The Twilight Saga; New Moon movie soundtrack and for American Idol contestants to sing her “I’m Good, I’m Gone” on the hit TV show that same year. As of last September, she’s even an official face of Levi’s jeans Curve ID Collection.

One constant in Li’s nomadic rollercoaster of a life is her creative relationship with producer Björn Yttling. The pair met through a mutual friend five years ago, right before Yttling’s band Peter Björn and John blew-up with their whistle-y hit “Young Folks.” Yttling plucked Li from her job in an upscale Stockholm boutique to come sing in his band, and has produced both of her albums to date.

“I consider him a part of my family almost,” mulls the singer. “Like, we’ve created something from scratch and we’re still in some kind of process and progress, so why would you want to turn your back on that? I feel it’s something really interesting.”

The results, on Wounded Rhymes, are wonderfully uncluttered and often infectiously catchy, yet stained with an ominous seediness: violent bass lines worrying at glacial keys; heartbeat quasi-tribal drums dancing with Li’s assertive middle-register timbre. Though much of the instrumentation is clearly digitally generated, the album retains a primal, outdoorsy air.

“I talk a lot with [Yttling]. I’ll have melodies and words, but I’ll just tell him what types of feelings I want . . . strong, or soft, or silly,” Li explains.

Li has hinted that her arrangements will become increasingly bare-bones and, she hopes, visceral as her career progresses.

“Because that’s the music I respond to,” she says. “A strong voice; strong melodies and lyrics; and something to accompany it. But then you feel a presence there that you can’t really know what it is . . . How come it’s so powerful? There must be something in there and if you can grasp it, then it’s magic.”

 

www.lykkeli.com

 

 

 

 

How Swede It Is

 

You can say Lykke Li’s got a pretty open-minded attitude toward cannabis. The Swedish star’s been known to ask audience members at her shows if they are smoking marijuana (www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCjJWmSiIi8), and in a 2008 “Breaking Artist” Rolling Stone interview, Li discussed her childhood in Portugal with her parents—“free-minded hippies” who could “grow weed in the backyard. In a 2009 interview with L.A. Record, she revealed her retirement plans: “Smoke weed and hang out with my grandkids.”

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