Quotes

L’énergie de Howie B se retrouve dans la chanson. Un enthousiasme nerveux, haletant, trop puissant même pour te laisser le temps de faire tout ce que tu voudrais. J’avais dit à Howie que je voulais une chanson physique, énergique, latine et moderne. Je voulais qu’il fasse exactement ce qu’il voulait.

Björk had a book full of the lyrics ideas for Isobel but nothing that worked.
"I’d been fighting like a lunatic, and going completely bonkers. I knew that if I waited for three months, threw away the book, preferably burning it, then I’d wake up one morning with the lyric. But I badly wanted this song on the album. I didn’t know what to do"
What she did was contact Sjón.

It’s a song for the movie "Tank Girl", but it is actually about my
brother. He is pretty lazy and likes things like food, sex, sleep - very
basic needs. It’s just that he does it more than others.

Then he started smoking, well, not cigarettes. It felt as if he was in a
coma. He just sat on his butt complaining, "the worlds stinks, I can’t
get a job, there are no good albums to buy and even if I wanted to buy
them, I don’t have any money to buy them with. Blah blah blah."

Self-pity from morning to night, which really pisses me off. You can
stand a whining brother to a limit, but for ten years, from he was 14 to
that he turned 24. I simply had enough. That’s it. Stand on your own
legs, get a job, get a life. And if you complain once more, you’ll met
an "Army Of Me".

I am not going to save you anymore, your rescue squad is too exhausted.
That’s what the song is about.

It’s actually written to a relative of mine who had been a bit out of order for a while. I’m not sure why I wrote it. Maybe I felt that Debut had been such a polite, shy album - there was a side of me that was so shy and such a beginner, I was very flattered when everyone loved Debut but also a bit confused because it wasn’t really me. Maybe ’Army Of Me’ was an attempt to balance it out.

It’s not about anyone in particular because it’s about someone I haven’t met. It’s like a word game : ’I miss you but I haven’t met you yet’. It’s about looking forward to something that hasn’t happened.

Je suis probablement une chanteuse très particulière : mes mélodies sont très difficiles à chanter pour les autres, même si elles n’impliquent pas vraiment de technique spécifique. Army of Me est peut être la seule de mes chansons qui échappe à ce schéma. Je me souviens qu’en l’écrivant, j’ai essayé d’être aussi froide que possible, alors que mes mélodies sont en général chaleureuses, accaparantes. Là, j’avais tenté de rester distante.

I had written two tracks with Graham Massey before I did Debut : "Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things." Then I met Nellee Hooper and we ended up doing a whole album’s worth of stuff together, so I decided to keep those two songs, wait, and put them on the next album. Post then ended up being more schizophrenic with collaborations of a lot of people, so it was a better match.

Graham came up with ["Army Of Me’s"] bass riff. I had written that melody earlier in Iceland. It matched very well together, I felt. I then did the sarcastic scratch noises in the chorus with a coin on a deep bass string that Graham sampled for me.

My younger brother was having a bit of a crazy period at the time, so I wrote this for him. It is sort of a big sister telling little brother off song. The other song I have written for him is "Where Is The Line" on Medúlla. It was written under similar circumstances emotionally.

Army of me is about a friend of mine who for a very long time was in a
way in a coma, not literally. But he would live his life every day and
kind of not be alive and it used to be very frustrating for me. I used
to shake him and try to wake him up and get him to do things but he
wouldn’t. So that song about if you complain once more, you’ll meet an
Army of me.

Enjoy and You’ve Been Flirting Again both have mysterious or open-ended lyrics. Are they to be seen as some sort of pairing ? The idea of sex without touching and flirting ?
Hmmm, at least I wasn’t conscious of it ... but there was a lot of flirting going on.
Lyrically, Enjoy feels central to Post’s storylines : A need for the tactile, exploration, etc. Do you remember what/who inspired the song ?
I guess it went with the mood of the album, to be greedy, to be eager to consume a city ... to merge. Promiscuous musically and city-ally.

It was inspired by a situation I saw a lot of my friends get in to. I really like reading magazines about science, you see, and when people fall in love, they make this kind of drug in their bodies so they become addicted to each other physically.
_
Nature makes things so that the drug lasts for three years, so if they’re together they’re just on a natural high. Nature makes sure that people get three years to sort out if they want to be together for life or not ; that three years is a try out time. Then they wake up and it’s a ’Whoops, what am I doing here ?’ kind of thing ? Then they are forced to sort out if they love the person, like real love, or if it was just a trick.
_I just read this article and I looked at all my friends since I was a kid, and I saw that it always happened after three years, it’s so strange. You think you’ve never seen people so much in love and then after three years, like precisely, they ring the phone in the middle of the night and it’s , ’Björk, I’m coming over’ and they come over and say ’I don’t love him, what is it ? I don’t look forward to coming home anymore. What’s wrong ?’ Then at that point I could actually say, ’Well listen, it’s science.’
_
They get really hurt of course, it’s this David Attenborough dilemma I’ve got, I really want to be him. Another completely different angle on the same thing is when you fall in love with a person, you think that might be the last time, that maybe you will never ever fall in love again, so it becomes a very precious thing to you. So you start showing the person you’re in love with you’re best side only and you keep all your bad parts in the bag behind your back.
_
For some terrible reason, for which I’m actually a bit pissed off with, is when you fall in love with a person you start to separate into two sides and you’re only sweet with them.
_So basically, ’Hyperballad’ is about having this kind of bag going on and three years have passed and you’re not high anymore. You have to make an effort consciously and nature’s not helping you anymore. So you wake up early in the morning and you sneak outside and you do something horrible and destructive, break whatever you can find, watch a horrible film, read a bit of William Burroughs, something really gross and come home and be like, ’Hi honey, how are you ?’.

I wanted each verse to be each month. The first month is February, and the next verse is March. There’s maybe 30 seconds between each verse, so you’re listenning to the song and 30 seconds later is another month.
It’s a calendar thing. I wanted to have ...possibly maybe...(dingdong, dingdong)...probably love...(dingdong, dingdong), then boiiing ! the first verse.
Just to show how you feel different each month when you’re going through a relationship.
That’s why I decided to have all choruses the same, but it’s a different melody every verse.

Can you briefly discuss "You’ve Been Flirting Again"’s lyrics ? There’s a weightiness to the words that’s quite different than the playfulness of the title.
I guess the title is taking the piss out off myself more than anything else. Hmmm ... It is hard to pin it down ... I guess that is the nature of flirting, it is ambiguous and slippery. The lyrics are an attempt to describe that.

You once recorded vocals naked in a cave full of bats to get ‘the right vibe’.

Not naked, but I did climb in a dark cave and sing the vocal for Cover Me [from Post]. I have to credit Nellee Hooper with that idea though. He did it as a treat. Put me blindfolded in a car and when I got to the cave, he had headphones and generators set up with the song and I sneaked in and sang it in one take. One of my favourite experiences ever.Yes, there were bats there.

When me and Nellee decided to work together again on Post, I wrote this to him. I guess I was trying to make fun of myself, how dangerous i manage sometimes to make album making. And trying to lure him into it. but it is also a admiration thing from me to him. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else.

I always knew it would be two albums and that’s why I called them Debut and Post. Before and after. Björk packs her bags and goes to England and works with all these exciting people. I’m not saying there are no more people to work with - there are tons of exciting people - but maybe we don’t have anything in common.

When I made ’Debut’ I felt I’d just touched on something. I was getting a really good reception everywhere. Nice as that was, it was strange too. I found it uncomfortable in a way. What I did on ’Debut’ , I actually didn’t think I’d done it very well. I was just starting out what I planned to do. That’s why ’Debut’ is the beggining and ’Post’ comes afterwards. The before and after atmosphere.

Whereas ’Debut’ was like the greatesthits of ten years, ’Post’ was like the last two years. For me, all the songs on the album are like saying, ’Listen, this is how I’m doing,’ and that’s why I calle dthe record ’Post’, because I always address my songs back in my head to Iceland in a letter. Because it was such a big jump for me to move away from all my relatives, all my friends, everything I know.

A lot of people talked about Post as my record and I was very flattered by that, but I definitely look at both of them as duet albums. Debut was a duet with one person - Nellee, and Post was like a duet with seven people.

Enjoy is a lyric about greed, and how what you got isn’t
enough for you, you kind of have to go out and get it.

I was in Japan and she called me from a studio in Bahamas", recalls Eumir. They met couple of days later in London and the results can be heard in tracks Hyper-Ballad, You’ve Been Flirting Again and Isobel.
— 
Björk : I attempted to make string arrangements, with a lot of help from Eumir. He’s been like a big daddy, letting me experiment with notes but still being there for me when I need him, and sometimes just completely doing it for me.
— 
"She has developed a style and a music that I’ve never heard anything like in my life," says Deodato, who is responsible for some of those string arrangements. "When I heard her material, I freaked out, and I said, ’What are you doing ? This is crazy, this is so difficult, to propose this kind of style to the people.’ But she does, and she’s successful at it. There’s the liberty she takes with melodies and with harmony that sometimes apparently leaves clashes that are not really clashes, they’re concepts. It’s an acoustic principle, but she instinctively goes into that vein, and she blends all these things with a beautiful voice."
— 
Bjork has many enthusiasms, and she pursues them, well, enthusiastically. She is standing slightly pigeon-toed in the engineer’s booth of Angel studios, in Islington, England, regarding the space in which she is shortly to record a new mix of "Isobel." The hem of her long black slip dress is taped up where it had ripped when she stepped on it in her enthusiasm. On the other side of the glass, Deodato is rehearsing a 16-piece string section, counting bars and looking very Dolce Vita. "He’s a legend, Eumir," she says. True, but it is typical of Bjork that she tracked him down because of his work on a little-known song called "Travessia," by Milton Nascimento.
— 
"You’ll listen to it and go, ’OK,’" Bjork says of Nascimento’s song. "Then after one year, it’s your best friend ; after two years, you can’t go a day without hearing it."

It was written to Graham Massey as a thank you. He was the best tape maker there was. He would make compilation cassettes and I would play them non stop. But, of course, it is also a love letter to sound. The sound of sound. Resonances, frequencies, silences and such ... a music-worship thing.

I did Headphones with Tricky, sort of a thank-you to a friend who always sent me tapes with his favourite music. I saw that as one of the most beautiful and valuable gifts somenone can give you. Such a tape says so much about someone’s personality and about what that person wants to tell you. I always saved a tape like that until it was evening, all the work had been done, I was all alone and had taken a bath. Then I’d lie on my bed, with my headphones on, to slowly fall asleep, listening to that tape. That’s what that song is about. There’s little sounds in there to amplify the effect of rest, solitude and dreaminess.

The other people I was hanging around with at that time - Tricky, Howie and Graham - they didn’t mind sitting in a studio listening to albums and arguing wheter they were good or bad. Sort of to challenge me about. So I ended up working with them, which as completely unplanned. It just showed the kind of musical contacts I had at that time. Where that spark was and where it wasn’t. I also think this describes very well what was going on in London in that period. When I made ’Debut’ I was incredibly shy and didn’t know anyone, more like a beginner. But when I made ’Post’ I’d got to know a lot of people and I thought the hanshakes between me and the people doing the duets were very genuine.

The last album was like pieces from my diary or my photo album. They were all about the past and now I want to show you things from my new diary, my diary of the last two years. There’ll be some mix of emotions, happy, sad, confused, all that bollocks, but they’ll be new.

I’ve got it written. It’s mostly based on string quartets. I wrote all of them on my Asian tour. I had my computer with me. And I’m actually recording it on Wednesday !

So are you writing at the moment ?

Yeah. Pathetic Michael Jackson songs. (sings "Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough") My next record is going to be happy Smurfs or something, I dunno. It’s very happy, which makes a change.

What inspired the song "Hyperballad" ?

The critical time in a relationship, which usually happens after 3 years, and I can see all around me with all my friends. It’s got to do that when you fall in love it is so precious to you, you never know this might be the last time, so your behaviour towards the loved one becomes very sweet and
you go somewhere else to be aggressive. Because I believe that all people have got both sides. So you end up having to unload your aggressions at a bar or by throwing cuttlery off cliffs. So you can come back to your loved one, kiss him sweet on his cheek, and say happily, ’Hi honey.’

hyperballad was a lyric idea that i had in my diary for a while
and i remember standing in nellee’s studio and it
fitting like a glove to this new melody.
i recently read jungian books about the shadow and it
seems to fit this idea pretty well. i definitely was not aware
of these theories when i wrote it.
i guess it is about how in a relationship you isolate the shadow
and deal with it on your own, without your partner. or do you let it in ?
or do you harness it in an innocent routine like proposed in the lyric. ... ?
i guess it is an attempt to create a boundary and therefore you can
truly come back and be generous ...

I think it was a dream I dreamt...

I guess that song is about when you’re in a relationship and it’s going really well and you’re really happy and maybe you have given up parts of yourself. To fall in love and be in a relationship for a long time is like giving a lot of parts of you away, because the relationship becomes more important than you as individuals. It’s a bit of a tricky balance. I think everyone in a relationship needs to know not to forget themselves...

Obviously, it’s imaginary and didn’t actually happen : she wakes up before him and sneaks out and throws stuff off a cliff so she can climb back into bed and go ’Good morning honey’. There’s maybe a side of you that you can’t fit into a relationship.

It’s not about anyone in particular because it’s about someone I haven’t met. It’s like a word game : ’I miss you but I haven’t met you yet’. It’s about looking forward to something that hasn’t happeed.

I like the saga idea, the way that some songs bounce from one to the other. Presumably that’s your Icelandic roots coming out, the sagas in your history.

Bjork : I think so. I also think that being in bands for so long, and thinking if I don’t go to London and do my record I will explode. I had to justify it to myself what egocentric behaviour that was. So it started from there, that I would make part of the songs I was writing by taking the gentle piss out of myself being that self-important, but at the same time, confessing that I enjoyed being this central character in a story, which was about me, first being a kid in Human Behaviour then leaving and going, when I never thought I would leave Iceland, to the bright lights and being tempted by all the corrupted things.

By being a bit over-excited and coming from nature, in the song Isobel, a creature that functioned purely on some very intuitive, compulsive ways and that clashing a lot with a very well-behaved and well brought-up British, and ending up getting hurt and escaping into the forest and training those little moths to be my messengers of intuition. So I would send them all to fly back to the city and go in front of the nose of all those people who were being too clever and not following their instincts and they would shiver in front and go : "No, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah" until the clever people would click out of their logical behaviour, and then they would say " Oh, I’m so sorry" before they flew back to instinct stuff. That’s the ’nah nah nah’ stuff at the end of Isobel. In the video of Isobel we had a load of those moths, and it was his idea to make them tiny aeroplanes that grew inside light bulbs. So I was planting those tiny little light bulbs in the ground and they grew to be big light bulbs before the little aeroplanes would break out, like chickens from eggs, and fly out into the world in front of peoples’ noses and getting them to stop thinking so much.

In Bachelorette, which was maybe the third leap into the epic trilogy, once the moths had prepared the city, Isobel would take the train and go to town and confront the people that had hurt her before, where instinct and logic clashed with love. Bachelorette is quite a confrontational song. But in the end nature wins and all the trees and plants grow all over all the skyscrapers, and it all becomes nature again. So I guess it’s some form of revenge.

There’s an epic continuity between ’Human Behaviour’, ’Isobel’ and ’Bachelorette’. I’m not sure if it’s a joke or serious - probably a bit of both. It’s basically a character I invented called Isobel.

In ’Human Behaviour’, she’s a little girl. In ’Isobel’, she moves to the big city and big lights. She functions with her intuition wich isn’t very good in cities and crashes with a lot of ill-behaved people. So she goes back and trains a lot of moths and sends them back, as messengers of intuition, into the city to people who are not working with their intuition. In ’Bachelorette’ she takes over and trees grow over the city. It’s part autobiography part storytelling.

There’s a side to me that’s really casual and that’s in them. There’s a side to me that’s very dramatic and very romantic and there’s a side to me that’s pretty hardcore. I guess the line of songs were meant to be like an epic, 19th Century novel but at the same time taking the piss. I can be a little too dramatic at times.

According to Björk, Isobel was born in the forest. After the pebbles turned to skyscrapers, she ends up a grown woman living in the city with only instinct as her guide. Isobel dances naked on tables and falls in love with all the wrong people and causes pain.

So she escaped and isolated herself. That’s why she’s called Isobel and not Isabel.

It’s the story of a girl that grows in the middle of the brazilian florest while baby-buildings becomes sky-scrapers. Then suddenly, she see’s herself in a whole town full of crafty people. Then she asks for a moth to help so the insect goes cover the mouth of these people.

i remember, while writing the melody of "isobel in reykjavik
( by the window in my house on tryggvagata ) that i was not only
trying to make something passionate but it also had to contain
some strange graceful joke ?! i tried to explain for hours and hours
to sjón who this creature "isobel’ was . and that humour was essential
in hindsight, i feel it was my way of dealing with
the mythical creature i had become in the media,
kinda writing a tongue in cheek song about a magical reality persona
and perhaps by allowing me to be the author of it,
i could own it. bypass victimhood.
timewise, isobel was 8% of the album ,
so somehow i was revealing that was how much of me
would step into this persona in the future, but for the other 92 %
i wanted to be a lot of other characters. most of them hidden.
but perhaps all things tongue in cheek have a grain of truth
in them and for sure the story of a girl that leaves instinctive
impulsive iceland for a calculated cold city was not totally far off...?

It was sort of a joke really. It was a song Guy Sigsworth used to play on the bus when we were touring. Ever since, I almost regret doing it bacuse I wanted to put so much importance on making new music. So many people are doing old music and you’ve even got new bands doing old music. If I put something out in this world, it would be the courage to go ahead and invent things, so it’s ironic ’It’s Oh So Quiet’ became my biggets song. The best bit was the video.

It was the last song we did. Just to make it absolutely certain that the album would be as schizophrenic as possible, that every song would be a shock.

People think my version is over the top ,but hers makes mine the ambient version ! I guess the song describes pretty well what being in love feels like because it’s in and out, isnt it ?

Guy (Sigsworth) found it in a truckstop and it became the tour anthem of last tour. Turned us on before the gigs. And the rest is history.

I still don’t know how to write that kind of song and I want to. To write with that kind of lust for life about now, 1996, completely full-on life, saying on the scale of one to ten I’m gonna live life at 17. They’ve got the joy for it, that fierce love for it, and also the pain.

Isn’t that the best song you’ve heard for five years ? In a way it was against my principles to do an old cover version because I’m so anti-retro. But it has this story, this narrative : there’s a beginning and something happens in the middle and the ending is different. So many pop songs, especially with English lyrics, are just 900 different ways of saying ’she left me !’ Which i actually love because it’s pop, just one idea, very simple, but it doesn’t mean it’s cheap. I can relate to it, but I belong to the storytelling group.

Would you take offence if I said my favourite Börk song is ’It’s Oh So Quiet’ ?

My obvious answer to that is I didn’t write that song. So yeah ! It is interesting because to be honest for somebody like me, there’s always that conflict between writing music, being a musician and being a singer. Maybe on this album I decided to be not such a nerd stuck in front of the computer for nine billion years and my voice serves that side of me - I just wanted to get out a bit more. I had cabin fever. I just wanted to be the singer a bit more, so I understand. l’ve been a singer since I was a child and maybe have matured most on stage with a microphone in my hand in front on an audience since the age of 12. It wasn’t until 27 years old that I went in a studio and made my own music... so forgive me ! [laughing] But the two sides of me are more equal on this project.

It was amazing !
It was me and my friends and Spike Jonze and his friends.
In the summer in L.A. and the whole atmosphere around it was fun ! It was in 1995.

There is a song Björk wants me to hear, one of her favorites. It is a kitsch ’40s affair called ’It’s Oh So Quiet’ by Betty Hutton. The big speakers for her walkman aren’t working properly, so she takes them and holds them on either side of my head. Whenever the song goes loud and upbeat she jiggles the speakers up and down in a low-tech, slightly painful version of Sensurround.

Isn’t that the best song you’ve heard for five years ? she raves.

I listened to it when we did the surround mixes of it like two or three years ago and I have to say I was kinda surprised how the odd spastic thing of the album had actually aged well. I was very aware of it at the time that I needed to be musically promiscuous and have almost every song [a] different mood/style and so on. The picture on the cover is me on Piccadilly Circus (Times Square of London) too excited, too many things, Bright Lights Big City kinda thing, and me eager to consume. So my musical heart was scattered at the time and I wanted the album to show that.

For me, Volta is a similar album in that sense. The style of it is all styles, sailing around the world going to new places making new friends. It is a beginning of a new period. Then Homogenic — that came after — was something more stable. Post was looking, Homogenic was what I found. Volta is definitely looking, and I can feel my next one is going to be more centered.

If you went back, would you do anything differently ? Sequencing ? Song selection ?

Not really. You do the best you can at the time. That’s all you can do. You only get one shot.

This album is on the contrary. I’ve moved from Iceland to England and all the songs are written since then. So they’re all written with in mind that many people are going to hear them. They’re not shy and introvert, they’re more sort of conscious and more confident.

Because it’s the girl who leaves home and tries out all these brand new things she hasn’t done before. Seeing new cities and meeting all these lunatics. All the lunatics are like herself because there aren’t that many back on Iceland. She’s figuring out there are more people out there who feel like her. It’s definitely a brave album but at the same time it’s a bit scaring. "Post" is more scaring than "Debut" cause I’m definitely jumping off more cliffs this time.

Opposed to the content solitude of "Isobel" there’s "Possibly Maybe." Who’d you have in mind when you wrote "mon petit vulcan" ?

An impossible Frenchman. I guess I was taking the piss out of myself after breaking up with a boyfriend — how your mouth misses kissing.

The last lines — "I’ll suck my tongue / as a remembrance of you" — create a strong image. Do you remember how you came up with it ?

I just thought it was kinda comical to walk around sucking ones tongue.

’Possibly Maybe’ is a song that I can really do rollercoaster rides on and just go for it vocally. It’s one of the first songs that I wrote but didn’t hold my voice back. For me, and this is why I play it live almost every time, as a singer I can really use my voice as an instrument.

Actually, it was supposed to be a country song - an ambient country song - and when I first wrote it, we got a slide guitarist in. I’m not sure it ended up as one but that’s where it started. We were thinking about that song by Chris Isaak.

You feel ashamed about it. The first unhappy song I wrote was ’Possibly Maybe.’ That was very hard for me. Usually I write all the time, but that was like nothing happened for months. Then the song came out. I was ashamed writing a song that was not giving hope.

The last album was so polite and careful since I was so shy, almost like
a virgin. I didn’t really know how to behave. Now I feel much braver.
The happy songs are happier than before, the sad songs are sadder and
the bitter songs have become more bitter.

Everything is more extreme on "Post". But, sure, you can call it a
divorce album, I broke up with my boyfriend just before I wrote the
lyrics. The album is also a divorce from Iceland. Much is about being
without roots and with no foothold, happy and scared at the same time.

I am actually surprised that people thought of the last album as happy.
It doesn’t seem hip to be happy. It is unusual at least. I am still
happy, but I have more sides to me than that. But when I am happy I am
one hundred per cent happy and when I’m pissed I am one hundred per cent
pissed...

Personally I think that albums which express only one emotion, are boring. Post is a fearless album ; it talks about the emotions of a girl who left her home, her city, and faces a new and unexplored world.

When we were preparing to record ’Post’, my accountant called me very upset, and said unfortunately we might have to go to the Bahamas. It was to save a lot of money on taxes, so we got our bikini’s sorted and left.

For me Telegram is really Post as well but all the elements of the songs are just exaggerated. It’s like the core of Post. That’s why it’s funny to call it a remix album, it’s like the opposite. It’s like the-cover-of-Post-me like this [she smiles beatifically] in pink and orange and big ribbon and it’s like a pressie for you. But Telegram is more stark, naked. Not trying to make it pretty or peaceable for the ear. Just a record I would buy myself.