her Icelandic roots

Because I didn’t move away until I was 27, I’m just completely made out of this place. But as a
teen-ager my friends and me were confronted with several riddles to solve, and one of them was that all the bands in Reykjavik were imitating foreign bands. There was some sort of minority complex about being Icelandic. Also, because we were an isolated colony for 600 years, another thing we were [led to believe] was that foreigners are evil and we shouldn’t communicate with them. We have this very stubborn type of protection shield that we won’t let foreign things in.

When we were starting bands as teen-agers, it was about trying to loosen up a little bit : to be proud of being Icelandic, saying Icelandic words and still communicating with foreigners and still being Icelandic. You wouldn’t lose it. That became a very important thing for me and always will be, because this is the attitude from the soil that I come from.

www.cnn.com, Sunday, October 20, 2002