Photo by Miranda Penn Turin
Theresa Andersson goes a bit loopy with Hummingbird, Go!
By Laura Leebove
Published: September 4th, 2008 | 9:40am
Theresa Andersson’s song “Na Na Na” — the opening track of her album Hummingbird, Go! (Basin Street) — uses five-plus instruments, sometimes several at once. It sounds like a normal setup for one track, except that the layered sound comes solely from the Swedish musician’s own hands, feet, and mouth. Beginning with two tinny chords strummed on a dulcimer, Andersson builds herself a backing band of drums and vocals via looping pedals, a method often used by the likes of Feist, Andrew Bird, Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett, and up-and-comers Priscilla Ahn and Anni Rossi. By the time the verse and Andersson’s guitar are added to the mix, it almost appears that she’s doing a dance — her left foot controls the chords, her right foot guides the drums, and her fingers handle the guitar.
The video Andersson recorded in her kitchen — which has been viewed more than 700,000 times since its posting on YouTube in June — makes this look easy as pie, but the 36-year-old says looping altered the way she performs. “I was always a very intuitive performer and I wouldn’t really plan out what I was going to do,” she says. “I just relied on the moment and inspiration. And I was prepared [to go onstage], but I wasn't prepared in that I knew exactly how everything was gonna pan out.”
She didn’t know how her debut would pan out either, but the answer can be credited, in part, to two strokes of serendipity. The first came via producer Tobias Fröberg from Gotland, Sweden, where Andersson lived until she was 18. The second came by way of Jessica Faust, a poet from New Orleans, where Andersson has called home since she left Sweden. Fröberg and Faust’s contributions — along with Andersson’s musical experiments and her fascination with colors and textures — helped turn the musician’s two homelands into an album that mixes New Orleans retro and R&B with sugary Swedish pop.
Andersson introduced herself to Fröberg while he was touring through New Orleans about a year ago and they became instant friends. After learning they were from the same town, Andersson realized that she had taken music lessons from Fröberg’s father when she was young. “It was almost like it was meant to be,” she says. They decided to record together, and after falling in love with Andersson’s demos, Fröberg, who has worked with fellow Swedes Peter Bjorn and John, traveled back to New Orleans — Andersson’s kitchen, to be precise — so the pair could lay down Hummingbird, Go!
Andersson then handed the recordings to Faust, whose carefully crafted poems became the album’s lyrics. The relation between Faust’s words and Andersson’s thoughts and feelings was uncanny. “We could relate a lot, and we had conversations totally not related to exactly the themes she wrote about, but we talked a lot beforehand,” Andersson says of Faust. “We just realized that we had some of the same experiences … but I don't think she ever intended to write for music before, so we were both taking a chance on this.”
The music developed from Andersson’s playful relationship with textures, colors, and art (“I would draw a doodle and then I would try to sing it the way it looked on paper”), and her New Orleans surroundings (“I would spend all day and every day in my backyard or walking along the Mississippi River, because I live just about a block away from there”). With a collection of about 20 instruments, including feet, filled water glasses, and violin, Andersson transformed her doodles into a blend of jazz (“The Waltz”), doo-wop (“Hi-Low”), and ’60s pop (“Birds Fly Away”).
While the 12 tracks borrow from various genres, the album’s recurring bird theme helped string them together — not only in the lyrics of songs like “Birds Fly Away,” but on Andersson’s end as well. “The whole time I wrote the album I had birds around me,” she says. “They were singing, and there was a birds’ nest next to the kitchen where we were recording everything, and you can hear them throughout the album.” But for this lifelong musician’s first try at a solo record, the theme resonates in a less literal way. “I think in a lot of the songs there are a lot of references to life or to spreading your wings and lifting off,” Andersson says. “I think it represents very well where I am right now.”
—
Issue #34
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more