As a child, Swedish popstrel Lykke Li thought she knew what touring was all about, having watched In Bed with Madonna. Alas, the reality doesn’t quite measure up to the fantasy, she tells Jim Carroll
WHEN LYKKE LI was a kid she got notions about what being a pop star was about from watching TV shows and films. “I hate mentioning her name because people always take it up the wrong way, but I remember seeing the In Bed with Madonna film and she was in this amazing suite and hanging out with her dancers.
“That’s what touring meant to me: big suites, walking around in a silk kimono, waiting for my movie-star lover to show up and then strutting on stage. I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into.”
It’s another day on tour for Li and she is sitting in a poky dressing room in Dublin’s Tripod that is slightly better than the coffin-like bunk on the tour bus she currently calls home. One of the local crew has brought in a kettle and advised her to use bottled water rather than anything out of the tap. It’s certainly not the glamour that the young Li thought would come her way from a life in pop.
This, though, is what the Swedish singer signed up for. Two fine albums in, the debut Youth Novels and this year’s expansive and melancholic Wounded Rhymes, Li knows that this is how things are. She’ll grumble and give out and occasionally throw a strop, but usually she just gets on with it.
Besides watching Madonna strutting around, Li also got her pop bearings as a youth from reading musicians’ biographies. “When you read about people in those biographies, people like Nina Simone not being able to get into Juilliard, you realise that two roads are never the same. When you’re young and in school and you haven’t found your place, it’s very comforting and reassuring to know that other people have been there too and have found a way to get somewhere.”
Her upbringing was as exotic as anything she’d read in those biographies. She was born in Sweden, but her musician father, Johan Zachrisson and photographer mother, Kärsti Stiege, moved the family around a lot. “I grew up on a mountain top in Portugal, which kind of looks a lot like California, and lived in India and Morocco. That was my upbringing, that was the norm. But when I was a teenager, I got tired of being surrounded by hairy German hippies trying to teach me about life.”
Perhaps all that travel as a kid is why touring now causes her so much angst? But Li knows she has to tour the poky dressing rooms of the world if she wants to stay in the game.
“It’s such different times now. You can’t really do what Kate Bush does and not play. No one gives a fuck about you if you retreat. I survive on touring, but my dream is to retreat and just do a few shows every so often.
“I’m realistic, though, and I realise that touring allows me to do so much of what I want to do. I wouldn’t be able to make a record without touring.”
She’s also realistic enough to know that the best way to survive in the music business is to keep as much control as possible – no matter how difficult that might be.
“I run my own label. I do the art work. I do all the videos. I do all the styling. I do all the creative stuff and I do so much on my own. I didn’t know this was what was in store for me, but I have to do it. And I’m a perfectionist when it comes to the onstage stuff –it has to be perfect every night.”
When the touring to plug her debut album was finally over, Li headed to Los Angeles to get away from the world and dream it all up again.
“I went there for practical reasons, because of the weather. I’d been on the road for so long and was just sick and tired of the whole touring routine. When I got to Los Angeles it was calm and the sun was shining, and I just wanted to stay there. I hid in a cabin in Echo Park. It had a piano and that was it. I cry when I am in my coffin in the tour bus thinking of it.”
The city got under her skin in many ways. “Los Angeles is so mysterious, one of the most fascinating cities there is. I’m obsessed by films like Chinatown and the fact that there is no history and that they kept on building and spreading the city.”
In her cabin in Echo Park she started to come to life again. “I was in so much pain at the end of the last tour and had to unwind, so I started to dress down and let my hair colour go out. I just wanted to find something real. I was watching a lot of John Cassavetes movies, like Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence, and I wanted to make music and videos that made me feel like those films made me feel.”
The result is Wounded Rhymes, an album that is dark, dreamy and dramatic. If Li’s debut was pop to charm, seduce and tease, the songs on the second album are the bruised and heartbroken sounds of the morning after. “The lyrics and the songs are heavier. I was very young when I recorded my first album, and I’ve been exposed to so much crazy things since then that it has had an effect on my writing. I just wanted people to know, too, that there was more to me than this young Swedish pop singer.”
A lot of interviewers come away from their encounters with Li talking about her prickliness, but she’s often just as annoyed at them. “I get very irritated with interviewers sometimes,” she says with a smile. “They say to me that it must be fantastic to be in my position, and they have all these assumptions. But I try to give them the other side. People want me to be like, ‘It’s all great, I’m so happy to be here, yadda yadda yadda’, but it’s not like that at all. If you catch me on a day when I’ve done 10 interviews, I’m not going to be all smiles.”
The next couple of months are already mapped out, and Li knows this will involve more shows, poky dressing rooms and nights in that tour bus.
Afterwards she plans to take stock. “I don’t want things to become tired or routine. No matter how exciting touring can be, it also becomes a routine, and when that happens I think it’s time to leave. I would love to escape and stay in one place for more than a few days or weeks. That would be amazing – that would be a dream.”
st Lykke Li plays on Saturday
