NYLON - August 2008 - (Page 127) WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE? stylist: erica b. dress by chloë sevigny for opening ceremony, shirt by acne, silver necklace (worn on head) by erickson beamon for temperley, feather headpiece by jenny yuen, chain necklace by kimberly baker. all other necklaces, lykke li’s own. Not up for dancing? Lykke Li will change that. By Samantha Gilewicz. Photographed by Julian Gilbert On a recent tour with fellow Scandinavian songbirds Anna Ternheim and El Perro del Mar, Lykke Li sprung onstage every night with a snarl of gold chains around her neck, disrupting the sober trance induced by the other acts’ folky acoustic strumming. In between candy-coated choruses, the 22-year-old singer erupted into spastic dances, sung into a kazoo, smashed cymbals, and, through a megaphone, exhorted the crowd to start a dance party. “I love going out and dancing,” says Lykke Li (whose full name is Lykke Li Timotej Zachrisson) in a whispery Nordic lilt, “as well as I love being alone, on the floor, having a cigarette, and writing a really sad song.” She pauses to sip her mint tea in a cavernous downtown New York café; it’s a few days after the end of the aforementioned tour. Lykke Li’s strawberry-blonde hair is coiled into a bun, which is apparently something of a trend these days in Stockholm, and while her hazel, saucer-shaped eyes flash a glimmer of naïveté, she adds, with the gravitas of a woman twice her age, “I’m not a pop artist; pop is something that’s perfect and glossy. I would much rather be Tom Waits than Madonna.” And yet, like the Queen of Pop, Lykke Li left home at 19 to make it in Manhattan. The daughter of a hippy jazz musician and punk girl group-member-turned-photographer, she spent her youth winding her way around the globe from Sweden to India to the mountains of Portugal, so by the time she landed a Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment and started booking herself at Lower East Side open mic nights, she was ready for anything. “There are a lot of shitty places around Avenue A. The first time I played I had an iPod that fell off stage,” she recounts with a laugh. By the time Lykke Li got her act together—by telling promoters that she was famous in Europe—her visa had expired. “I kind of gave up all those dreams of being a big star in New York. So when I was back in Sweden, I wanted to do it underground…well, not underground but I wanted to put out 10-inch vinyl, and just basically do it myself,” she says. Lykke Li created her own label, LL Recordings, and teamed up with producer Björn Yttling (Peter Björn and John), to record 2007 indie anthem “Young Folks.” “We’re like two kids in the studio; we play around,” she muses, although her ambitions were anything but modest: “I wanted the sound to be like Dr. John meets the Shangri-Las meets Nina Simone meets Blondie.” The resulting album, Youth Novels, is a confectionary of electro-pop strewn over Yttling’s melancholic, lo-fi stylings in which Lykke Li bares her young heart. Stories about dark adolescent angst are couched in a patchwork of instrumentals (“piano, synthesizers, strings, flute, theremins, harpsichord, omnichord…” she rattles off), and the unabashed lyrics (“For you I keep my legs apart/ And forget about my tainted heart”), are made even more resonant with Lykke Li’s Björk-like, honeyedwhiskey voice. “He wasn’t my boyfriend, just a person I had this weird…thing with,” she explains of the inspiration behind much of the record. “Being alone is something everybody can relate too, but you can’t depend on feeling like shit all time!” Lykke Li has no reason to feel bad. Her single, “Little Bit,” was nominated for a Swedish Grammy and her Stateside encore has won over music journalists. Now, to keep her happy, they just need to stop calling her a Swedish pop star. “I’m sick of it,” she says. “It’s either about me being Swedish or being female. It’s like being from England and having everyone always compare you to the Beatles!”
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