Totally Stockholm 1
It’s the warmest day of the year so far and I’m s
tanding at Årsta Torg waiting for Josefine Jinder, aka Little Jinder. Neither of us had realised that today was actually a holiday, but luckily her favourite café is open anyway. We’ve barely sat down at a bench outside the café before a woman with her young daughter approaches us to thank Josefine for her music. Josefine cracks up and thanks her for the nice compliment. The mother asks her to continue making music, especially for future generations. ”I’ll try,” Josefine affirms. In the press release for Little Jinder’s Unreleased Romance she’s quoted saying “Seven years ago, before I released my first song in Swedish I didn’t even think a life in little corny Stockholm was an alternative, but the music would keep me here. All dreams might not be supposed to come true. But it’s still dreams that keep me writing.” This makes me wonder what alternatives were more appealing seven years ago. “In a way I contradict myself, because I actually did release an album in English when I was 19. It came out through a New York label and the idea was that I was going to live there or in London. To become one of those kinds of people. But I think I did that thing too early. I was too young and too crap, but incredibly naïve and I had a lot of confidence. It didn’t fly, which made me crash down to earth pretty hard. It wasn’t until I began writing in Swedish that it worked, so in a way there wasn’t any other alternative. Especially in the beginning, I thought so much bigger, that I wasn’t only going to be an artist who sang in Swedish, she explains. Isn’t a prerequisite to being an artist having really good confidence and being a bit naïve? Yeah. And that’s why it becomes harder as the years go by. When I was young it just came naturally. Now I have become everything I despised back then, like ‘who am I to say something?’. I almost feel ashamed when I see interviews with myself, how obnoxious I was and acting all emotional. It becomes so incredibly embarrassing in hindsight. Success usually comes hand in in hand with some sort of humility, and it can be a bit hard when you have been an underdog who said fuck you to everything and everyone. I can still think that I was right, but perhaps I didn’t have to say it. The pop scene is actually still so fucking boring. Do you feel like it was a loss, staying in little Stockholm? I can sometimes feel like I have missed out on having that life I was supposed to. I thought it would be cooler to live, that life was greater. But what is that? An illusion, if anything. At the same time I know that life looks pretty much the same regardless of if you’re sitting in New York or Stockholm. In November of last year, Little Jinder said goodbye to her music in Swedish, and at the same time the country. During a farewell concert at Mosebacke in Stockholm, she announced that she was moving to Paris. “The idea was that I was going to move there and have some sort of fresh start. But I fell in love with a person in Stockholm. So after a month in Paris I gave up and moved back home again to be with him,” she says. With Jinder’s CV of the last few years in mind, it’s kind of understandable that she would have the feeling that she had outgrown Sweden. Apart from three albums, wellreceived by both critics and the general public, she’s also made several appearances as both a host and a guest in various TV shows. How have you changed as a person over the last seven years? I think I am more or less the same person, but that my traits have changed to a certain extent. My need to be assertive is still there as a motivating force but I’m not as desperate to always get a receipt of having been seen. When I received my first Swedish Grammy I said 19