Totally Stockholm 1
Ellinor ‘Elliphant’ Olovsdotter has had her new a
lbum in the bag and awaiting release for two years. Now, Rocking Horse will be here within a month, and with it, we’ll see a new side to the persona we have come to know over the last ten years. Drugs and decadence have been swapped for life as a parent. And along the way, a lot has happened. “The challenge for me has never been breaking free from a shit job, and doing something fun and spontaneous, but rather the opposite. It was handed to me on a golden platter. I dropped out of high school, found a job and then went travelling when I was 17. I lived for the day and had sex with whomever I wanted, ate whatever I wanted and slept whenever I wanted to. While everyone else was slaving away with their studies and jobs, and took out mortgages to buy apartments, I lived the easy life, laying on a beach somewhere. Everything just came to me for free, presents, great parties, everything. It was too much fun, but after a point, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. It was time to stop, to stop living for my own ego. I wanted to create a family and challenge myself,” says Ellinor Olovsdotter, when we meet up in her living room in Hornstull. A couple of years ago, she was living in Los Angeles, and had just bought a summer house in Sweden with her then boyfriend. And she had just finished what was then supposed to become her new album. “I was 33 years old and felt it was time to think about having children. We had a summer together in our house and then went back to LA. It was then, just when I felt the most secure, that the rug was pulled out from under my feet. My best friend, with whom I had created the Elliphant project, took his life. Tommy Tysper was an acclaimed producer and songwriter, part owner of the label Ten Music and a close friend to Ellinor. “There was a real crash, and everything that I had built up was demolished; my relationship with my record label, my relationship with my boyfriend, with whom I had lived together for four years. I went back home to Sweden and decided to quit making music. I had a dark period, where in some way, I blamed music for him [Tysper] not being able to cope with life anymore. I had a really weird relationship with music for a while,” she says. “I had no alternatives - it felt like life was making decisions for me. I had to go home to Sweden, to kind of land on my feet again and find my way back to some sort of stability. So I went home, got sober, and went through a real ‘go out into the woods to kick the trees and shout’ kind of psychosis.” Was it an obvious call, to get sober after that crash? Well, I want to point out that I’m absolutely not some kind of abstainer, but I’d come to the point where I’d realised that there were no limits. I could drink as much as I wanted, smoke as much as I wanted, without anyone raising an eyebrow. I realised when this crash happened, that I had reached a crossroads. Of course, I could have gone on drinking, at 33 years of age, still pushing everything off. That’s what’s so fantastic about drinking and smoking, you can just go on with it and you won’t have to deal with things. But this was something I HAD to deal with. I had to take a sober look at myself and my situation. It was just an idea I had, and I even decided to quit smoking cigarettes at the same time. Instead of the alcohol and drugs, Ellinor went out to Djurö in the archipelago to a friend’s place, and spent two months totally sober. “I became addicted to walks in the woods and the sauna instead. It was during this time that I met my now boyfriend. I think that if I had continued on the same path, hanging out in bars and clubs in town, not giving a damn about anything, I wouldn’t have transmitted the confidence he felt from me as a person. People have always liked me, but maybe not everyone thought ‘I’d like to put a baby in her’…” Ellinor describes it as if the universe was rewarding her for her temporary sobriety. Shortly after finding love, she became pregnant with her first baby. Your whole life was more or less a party and touring, before you moved back home. So, what was left of Elliphant? That’s the whole point, there wasn’t much left. It was very much an identity crisis. But it has been fantastic to see that I have other qualities. I was Elliphant before I became Elliphant – I’ve been that person, who chose to take each day as it came, and did everything just to have fun all the time. Now I have met someone who can take responsibility. My guy is in complete shock over how boring I am, and I’m so proud of just being able to be boring. Now that’s what’s left. And now I’m just a mom, I’m not Elliphant at all. How was it to place all your focus on someone else, when previously, you had just been looking out for your own ego? It was a relief. In my desire to have a child, I was talking very much about it being a selfish act, but selfish in a way that I had to be unselfish. I felt so strongly about having to get away. But I wasn’t prepared for it limiting my creativity as much as it did. I didn’t expect to write songs in the same way as before, because music and art often comes from a dark place. At least that type of music and art that affects me. But I thought I would be creative in fixing up my home, writing a children’s book, and rediscovering painting, but I haven’t been, not at all. Did it stress you out, that your creativity disappeared? Yes, because creativity was my only security, even long before I took up music. Since I was a child, creativity has always been my therapist, so to speak. Through creating things, I have been able to process my problems and look at them with perspective. I have processed my life through creativity, to allow me to really sense that I exist. The first single from Elliphant’s upcoming album is called Uterus and was, fittingly enough, released a day before Elliphant’s child’s expected arrival date last year. It’s a vulnerable ballad, miles away from what we’ve heard from Elliphant in the past. How did it feel to release that song? It felt good. I have always been interested in change, and I’ve always thought it was strange that as an artist, you were expected to stay the same. I have never understood that, and I know it’s hard for people to take in. I’ve worked with big names like Diplo, and had comments like “can you please just decide what you want to do?”. But I have stood my ground in those types of situations and just said “no, I won’t”. It feels like such a responsibility to go through with it, and to do what I have been talking about. You grow and change as a person. This Elliphant that broke out was from a period where there were no fucks given, but my taste in music and what I listened to when I was growing up leans more towards Uterus than [her Major Lazer feature] Too Original. I never listened to EDM before I became an EDM artist. I listened to Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. This was something that I personally just had to do. Can you tell me more about Uterus? The song came about in a magical and natural way, in partnership with two other songwriters. I think it’s such a timeless and fantastic pop song, and I’m really proud of it. I thought it was a fitting way to burst the bubble. I wrote it long before I got pregnant, and it’s really more about my mother and her pregnancy than me and mine. I thought it was fitting and fun to see pregnancy as some sort of legacy. As well as Uterus, a handful of other singles from Rocking Horse have been released. Some of the songs date from before her personal crash. Why did it take so long for this music to be released? It might be a bad time to release and promote music right now, but I felt that it was time, there so much in my life that has turned a page. This album has become like a sort of tentacle from my old days, and I need to get rid of it. What’s the biggest difference between your last album [2016’s Living Life Golden] and Rocking Horse? Living Life Golden was made during my most intense period of touring. Back then, I was sitting in studios with some of the biggest producers in the world at the same time as I was touring constantly. I was thrown into a studio with a person, made a demo and then went on the road again, while the producer stayed behind processing the track until it was done, even though I felt every song was unfinished. In general, it’s hard as an artist to feel that anything is finished, but despite it being a Million-selling album, it was really half-finished. I think you could hear that in the songs. That’s why the most important thing with the new songs was that it shouldn’t be as sprawling as before, in terms of the people involved. I didn’t want to have 16 different producers this time. I had taken a long break from touring when I did this album, so I had done so many studio sessions in LA, and was sitting on 40 good songs. To avoid the mistakes of the previous album, Ellinor chose to work with only one producer, Grammy winner Mark Rankin, whose CV includes work with Adele and Florence and The Machine. “He was open to reworking the songs from the bottom up, so I decided to take in the demos, crash them and rebuild them again with him. It was an enormous 9