Isobel

À propos des paroles d’Isobel
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.

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Isobel
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.

Showbizz, february 1996

Isobel
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.

Paper, September 1997

Isobel
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...

Record Collector, August 2002, August 2002

Isobel
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...

David Toop Interview, 2002

Isobel
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....

Björk - Octobre 2021