Frida Hyvönen Interview

I meet Frida Hyvönen on a freezing Sunday afternoon in a dingy coffee shop off Union Square in Manhattan.

Draped in black wool and cashmere, she claims to be suffering from an agonising hangover but is as porcelain-faced and self-possessed as a Bergman starlet. She is utterly polite but easily distracted and spends as long humming quietly under her breath, staring out the window or giggling hysterically as she does engaged in conversation. I shouldn’t be surprised.

I first saw her at the End of the Road festival in 2007, when she charmed a midday crowd with a set of awkwardly scored and metered, yet weirdly catchy, numbers that she pounded out on an ancient, damp piano like the platinum-blonde, scarlet-lipped mistress of some jazzy Prohibition gin joint. Her voice is distinctive and beautiful in its own way, but not classically strong, swinging from low and gravelly to high and reedy. An eloquent but oddball grasp of English sees accents fall on unexpected syllables and vowels twisted through a soft Scandi-American filter.

Her new album, ‘Silence is Wild’, mixes slow-burning torch songs with joyful tributes to birds, dancing and boys. It’s helped along by synths, castanets and other unabashedly 1980s instrumentation on top of the usual piano and vocals. Still, the inescapable weirdness of her voice, its wilful amateurism, keeps it edgy rather than retro. (Painfully vulnerable lyrics about sex and loneliness and the abortion clinic help, too.)

The waitress approaches. “You ladies wanna order some drinks?”

I would like a large coffee.

Can I get a white coffee please?

What does white coffee mean? With milk?

Yeah.

(Pause) I know what black coffee is but not white coffee.

So how was the show last night? My flight was delayed so it was after midnight when I finally got into town. Did it go well?

Yeah, it was fun. I haven’t played in such a long time. I did one show in Düsseldorf last weekend, and before that I played two shows in the summer, but the last year I’ve spent almost completely composing and recording. I was so tired of touring before, I did it so intensely for years, and now I feel like a beginner again, which is…

Enjoyable?

New, very enjoyable. And I’ve been so spoiled from touring Sweden and Europe because I don’t carry my instrument, so I can fly, take the train, it’s so easy, and I get a hotel and everything! And here you don’t get a hotel. The people who arrange the shows, they wouldn’t dream of getting you a hotel – well, if you’re really famous I guess, but I haven’t tried that.

Soon?

(Giggles)

Can you tell me how you came to music?

From the beginning of my life, music was something you would do with your family, play songs and sing. Then I went to a music high school, far away, so I moved away from home when I was 15, got my own apartment. You could choose between singing classical or jazz, and I was doing both, but that was really confusing – when you are 15 and learning music in that serious way, it was really scary for me. And then after school it turned into something that was cool. I was a club kid for a few years, singing things with a house producer, so then it was something exciting again.

Did you feel like when you left school, music became exciting again?

Yeah, but it wasn’t immediate. After I tired of that dance music thing, I didn’t do music for a few years. Then I got a piano and I started making little songs, but I didn’t dare to play piano in front of others. Because at school I never did my homework. So I was always so horrible, it was a horrible… fear when it came to playing piano in front of other people. Then a friend of mine was going on tour and he asked if I could play Wurlitzer in his band. And I was like, are you kidding! I’m the worst piano player in the world! You don’t know what you’re doing! But he said, “I just want your energy on stage”. It was all these punks and we were going round Sweden in a bus – it was very relaxed. Then I started recording on a 4-track, little songs. Victoria Bergsman of The Concretes, she heard, on my website, ‘You Never Got Me Right’. And she called me and said she wanted to release it on a 7” and I told her that I had recorded a whole album, ‘Until Death Comes’. So my then boyfriend went into the studio to play it for the whole band. I didn’t dare to go,
I stayed at home. But they liked it and they wanted to release it. So now music is the only thing I do. I have nothing else.

How did you come to write the new album? You said you’ve moved to the countryside?

Yeah, but being in the countryside wasn’t about finding inspiration or anything like that. I've always used that method of being alone when I compose. I bought a house a year ago to have someplace to work. There is one room where I sleep, one room where I do yoga and one room with my grand piano in it. And a kitchen. And it’s very effective. I could get up early every morning and get to work without having to do anything else. I don’t like being isolated just for the sake of it. But it’s very good, because I’m not so tough. It’s good for my heart to have a house that stands there, you know? Because I think I’m so tough, but it’s only on one level. I get worn out easily, really insecure about where my roots are, so it’s good to have a house, just for the symbolism of it. I’m not sure how much
I’m actually going to be there.

The search for an emotional centre, a physical or symbolic home, permeates ‘Silence is Wild’. The songs flit around the globe, from ‘London!’ to ‘Oh Shanghai’, but never stop for long. “My cousin got married in a distant land – wonder when, wonder how, wonder who,” Hyvönen muses in ‘My Cousin’. Men, despite their inevitable unreliability and weakness, figure larger than family. The one who takes his girlfriend to the abortion clinic in ‘December’ is chased out of the room by the nurse: “When it’s my turn to get the injection, you’re sent outside. ‘We’ve had a problem with boyfriends – they often faint if they see blood.’” Hyvönen herself appears to be the only person she can count on, more or less, through the album’s unending agonies of hope and disappointment.

I’m sure the first thing that everybody thinks is that your songs are autobiographical because they’re so specific and so emotional. But how much of it is just storytelling?

Yeah, that’s a contradiction. I have no desire to expose myself, but I do it a little bit. I use things from my life, but I never hesitate to change things. I don’t really think in terms of true or false or anything like that. Naturally, the stories I want to tell, you need to know something about something to tell it. But, I mean, it’s art. You can write very personal stories and deliver them just like someone can write a film script and actors can deliver it. I love working with lyrics until they become something that I feel is independent, they become a song that someone else could sing.

Do you feel like you’re acting when you’re on stage?

I think I’m acting the role of myself. My stage persona takes some acting – she’s very much like me when I’m on my own, but when I’m with people I don’t like to take up so much space. She’s much more of a diva than I would ever be. I put it on, like a hat.

How did the horse on the album cover come about?

I wanted to have a horse on the cover. So my friend at the record company called around and got permission from a riding school outside of Stockholm. When we got there it was me and [photographer] Knotan and it was the last day of riding camp and all the little girls were braiding flowers into the tails of the horses, and all the parents were there because they were going to have a show. And there was a pony at the end of the stable that was just standing there with no braids and they were like, aww, “That’s Minta, you can take her”. And with the clothes that I chose for the cover – the record is so much about the civilised and the wild within the person, the clash between the physical and the spiritual, the hormonal and the intellectual, and everything like that. And I got really enthusiastic about the idea of me being dressed as a wild animal and being with a small tame animal, the pony.

But you think of ponies as being tame, when actually they’re a big, powerful animal. It’s funny that people happily put their children on them. I used to ride and I think you always have to have a certain fear, just as part of your relationship with the animal, because when you become too comfortable that’s when you can get hurt.

Yeah! And I think that’s so fascinating, that with the wild animals and us, we’re side by side but we see things differently. Human beings tend to humanify animals, like, “My dog is so arrogant” or “My cat is so lazy”. There might be some animals that can develop something that’s towards compassion or empathy, but I’m not sure. I think it easily washes away.

So how do you find people respond to your music? Or do they find it too personal and they don’t want to tell you how it makes them feel.

My music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak. But I do get e-mails from people. I think ‘Dirty Dancing’ is very charming and it has this romantic old-fashioned sound, so a lot of people have written me and they’re like, “I can’t stop listening to this song, I can’t stop listening, I listen to this song over and over again”. And I’m like, that’s nice. And some people have asked me about, in ‘December’, the contrast between the musical style and the lyrics. I mean that’s obviously how I write songs a lot of times, like a formula. One funny thing was that I was talking to an Australian man – I know that journalists do tricks like asking too – simple questions, just because it brings out some sort of answers – but he was saying, “I want to ask about your song ‘Scandinavian Blonde’. It’s obviously a proud exclamation of identity”. (Giggles)

Really?

I was like… (makes face).

So did he think it was about you?

I think he thought that it was like… di-di-dah-dah-duh-duh-dah-dah di-di-dah-dah-duh-duh-dah-dah Batman!

Your theme tune?

Exactly. That’s what he thought, and he didn’t really get the sense of irony. If he wasn’t just asking me the stupidest question he could come up with on purpose.

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‘Silence is Wild’ is out now on Secretly Canadian. Find Frida Hyvönen on MySpace HERE

Words: Jocelyn Kaulks