Inside Sweden’s newest pop songbird lives the dark soul of an old ho.
A tip for breaking the glacial ice with Lykke Li: Steer clear of the IKEA jokes. “Sometimes I really do hate Sweden,” says the 22-year-old pop warbler (whose name is pronounced
luke-a lee) as she curls up in a corner booth at a sunny Brooklyn, New York, bar. “Everything is shiny, everything is perfect, the people are all blond and good-looking—but there’s no passion. There’s no heart.”
Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson was born in Ystad, a sleepy village in southern Sweden, to a pair of impossibly cool, if nomadic, parents: a photographer mom who was in Tant Strul, one of the country’s first-ever punk bands, and a celebrated guitarist dad who played in his own punk-cum-reggae band, Dag Vag, and partied with Andy Warhol at Studio 54. She spent her grade-school years in Portugal and India (she’s fluent in three languages) and started writing songs as a teenager in Stockholm. After a brief stint gigging in New York, where she landed bookings by lying and telling people she was already an established pop star, she returned home and teamed up with Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John, who produced her just-released debut.
Lykke Li’s lush, airy indie-pop would easily mask her inner streak of quiet, uniquely Scandinavian despair were she not so happy to cultivate her gloom. “I enjoy a bit of darkness and bleakness in my life,” she says. (Told the lyrics to her gumdrop-sweet blogosphere hit “Little Bit” are surprisingly bleak, she beams appreciatively: “Thank you!”) Which is why she also feels cursed for looking like the cutest doll in the Strawberry Shortcake clan. “I just wish I didn’t have this baby face and this baby voice,” she says, frowning. “I wish I looked like an old prostitute.”
ALL ABOUT ME!Must-see TV“
The Wire. I love the cop, McNulty. He’s very sexy.”
Worst job“At a nursing home for elderly people. I fed them, showered them and wiped their asses.”
Last good book read“Rick James’s autobiography. It’s fucking weird! He was into some really shady stuff.”
Most Swedish thing about me“That I hate myself and want to die.”