Björk Issue #32

Although she doesn’t consider Volta a political album nor herself a feminist, we’re certain about this: Björk is one of the most innovative artists of our time. How does the Icelandic avant-gardist remain a pop icon? Because people yearn to understan

By Marisa Meltzer
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Björk is supremely busy. After exchanging literally dozens of e-mails and phone calls with my editor and her publicist, dates and times were arranged, then rescheduled, and soon my in-person interview is changed to a phone interview. Which is not to say any of that is unusual or even particularly harsh, but, you know, there goes the fantasy that she — Icelandic icon, fearless wearer of swan outfit to the Oscars, life partner of artist Matthew Barney — and I would bond over how cruel the Fashion Police in Us Weekly are to her, she would ask me over for drinks, and we would soon be on our way to wearing matching halves of a best friends forever pendant.

Two months before its May release, her new album, Volta, is far too precious a commodity to let members of the press listen to it in the comfort of their own homes, lest one of us leaks it to the public. So instead I spend an allotted hour on what may be the coldest day of March in the corner of her publicist’s Meatpacking District office. It’s actually quite cozy: Volta playing for me on the headphones, lyrics sheet in one hand, cup of some kind of intensely smoked tea in another. The album sounds like a Björk album — and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s epic and dark and filled with sounds that are hard to discern (my notes have “tugboat noises?” written next to “Wanderlust”). It’s a record suited for a party where some people want to dance and others just want to grope on a sofa.

Suddenly, here is Björk on the phone. I really want to ask her what she’s wearing, but I force myself not to, the question either seeming a little too teenybopper or a little too phone-sex. Instead I ask her what I deem to be the much more professional query of how she knew it was time to start working on a new album. “I guess I write songs most of the time,” she says. “Not all day or something, but there’s always something brewing in my head a little bit. It’s just the way I am.”

She tells me she had “travel fever” during the album, recording in Mali, Belgium, and even on a boat traveling around Tunisia. (Here I wonder aloud, “Were you influenced by the sounds of the oceans or of birds?” Um, no, Björk says.) She took Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, who she knew through mutual friends, with her to Iceland to record songs for Volta. “I think Björk was in a period of really reaching out to people and seeing what happened, playing with chemistry,” he says. And it shows in the album, which has input from musicians ranging from Timbaland and Lightning Bolt drummer and vocalist Brian Chippendale to Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen and a 10-piece Icelandic brass band.

She and Antony both use the word “organic” to describe the collaboration. I e-mail him for further details about the experience. The first time they recorded, “We went to her cabin with the polar-bear rug and recorded us plonking on the clavichord and the celeste, just making up songs on the spot,” he writes. “The next time we met in Iceland, it was dark 24 hours a day in the winter, and she took us to a place for strange ocean-life shish kebabs.” (At that point I write, “OMG!!!” in my notes and underline it twice.) Once they started recording again, they “sat next to each other staring out at the landscape and made ghost recordings, with many voices just melding together.” A few months later, Björk spontaneously decided to record in Jamaica because of its relative proximity to New York — it takes about three hours to fly there. She brought Antony and they spent part of the time jumping in waterfalls, swimming in rivers, and drinking fruity drinks.

Of course, there was work involved, too. Björk’s voice, Antony says, “Really forced me to be more expansive, just to respond to her energy. I couldn’t really keep up, but she had me screaming at the top of my lungs! We had our cheeks pressed together at one point. It was just so fun.” The finished record, he thinks, is brave and great. “It feels very powerful, a very grounded energy that roars,” he says. “It is quite a pagan, feminist album in a lot of ways.”

The F-word! Whether Björk considers herself a feminist is something I’ve wondered at least since I first heard “Army of Me” or found out she was the drummer in an all-girl band when she was 14 (so proto-riot grrrl of her!). She says she isn’t a feminist — “not in the traditional sense of the word.” But here’s a word she does identify with: stubborn. Says Björk: “I’m a really stubborn person. I make sure I get what I want.”

So does all of this stubbornness influence her music? If she starts something, she usually finishes it. “I will carry things through even if it doesn’t work out initially. Part of the creative process,” she explains, “is that I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it’s important when you do work with someone that there’s some chemistry there, but it’s not about you or the other person. It’s about where you meet. I put a lot of effort so that ‘the meeting thing’ happens.”

I am curious about her commitment to making things work and what collaborating with her is like, so I call up Brian Chippendale one night while he’s on tour with Lightning Bolt, trying to figure out where he’s going to have dinner in Cincinnati. A little background: An e-mail to him from Björk — or rather, from her manager — came out of the blue. He had been a casual fan since her days in the Sugarcubes, but started obsessively listening to all her albums (his favorite is Homogenic) 20 times a day when he knew he’d be recording with her in New York. “I knew she was getting drummers that weren’t necessarily mainstream” — he’s talking not just about himself but drummer Chris Corsano, who’s also on the album — “and was trying something percussively different.” He was there for about seven hours, played over everything, given free reign to improvise on all the songs (He says, “I was like, ‘I’m playing over a Timbaland song!’”). “I was instantly not intimidated. She just had a childlike glee about everything.”

He also notes “she’s one of the few people in the pop world that stands out as this really creative, different kind of artist.” Björk’s role in pop culture is something of an anachronism: She’s incredibly popular, playing-at-the-opening-ceremony-of-the-Olympics-popular, without relying on many of the more staid, pop-star trappings. And it is difficult to deny that allure. Not only is Björk an exposed midriff/choreographed backup dancer/high-profile divorce/stints at Promises-free zone, but she’s unapologetically weird in the most liberating way possible. I wonder if this is why so many of her fans are so frankly obsessive and protective of her. “They are very dedicated,” she says.

In her songs, she doesn’t shy away from politics; there are references to colonists and suicide bombers throughout Volta. Yet, she resists calling it a political album. I ask if it’s instead more light-hearted. “I don't think it's that simple. There are very strong songs on this album that are probably quite serious. There are other songs that are …” She pauses for a while and starts explaining it in a different way. “I think a lot of stuff I do is quite humorous, but I'm not sure if people get my sense of humor.” So is she just really misunderstood? “There's always been an aspect to what I do that people don't get, but that's OK. People go out of the way to understand me,” she starts laughing. “Overall, the proportion is pretty good.”