MUSIC INTERVIEW: OH LAND

Creating A World Of Her Own From Copenhagen To Brooklyn And Beyond

By: Team Buzzine

March 10, 2011

Danish musician Nanna Øland Fabricius (AKA Oh Land) is definitely a product of her environment. Brought up in a family of musicians, opera singers, and designers, she is a classically trained ballet dancer who took that ‘circus family’ upbringing and made into the base for a career, seeking to intertwine all the artistic elements she has always been surrounded by. Her debut album, Fauna, had critics immediately drawing favorable comparisons with Bjork, Feist, and Imogen Heap, while her self-titled follow-up saw her uproot from Denmark and head to NYC to work with acclaimed producers Dan Carey and Dave McCracken (The Kills, Hot Chip, Beyoncé).

Buzzine sat down with Nanna in the Hollywood Hills to chat about music, family, and the creation of a ‘contraption’ for musical world domination…

Stefan Goldby: It’s hard not to start talking about your family when talking about your music.  Between your mother, your father, your sister all doing different kinds of artistic things, you went in one direction and made a little bit of a turn… Was becoming a musician something you always thought would happen?

Nanna Øland Fabricius/Oh Land: I never thought that I was going to be a musician. My mom was an opera singer, my dad was a composer and an organist, and many members of my family were musicians, so I kind of rebelled a little bit against that idea, because I felt like I was quite a wild child, and in general I didn’t want to do anything that my parents suggested or anyone expected of me. So when they were like, “Are you gonna be a musician like your parents?” I was like, “No.” [Laughs]

But it was such a natural… Music was like a language that I understood very easily. It was not intellectualized, it was just emotions for me, and whenever I felt something or there was something I was struggling with, I would go to the piano and I’d start singing and playing a little bit, kind of like my diary. But it would always be a very private thing and I didn’t want to share it with anybody. Also because I feel like I might have been intimidated by their skills because they were so classically trained - everyone! - and in classical music, there’s a special ideal of perfection, and I felt like my ideal wasn’t that, and I couldn’t live up to that of idea of perfection. I was much wilder and I needed to have some quirkiness in the things that I did.

SG: You began interpreting music through dance. How do you think that changed the way that you go about actually making music?

OL: I think whatever artform it is, whether it’s music, or dance, or visual arts in any way, I think some of the general rules and compositions are very much the same. You think about proportions, you think about dynamics and phrasing, and the space around you and a storyline, if there is a story, or abstract, or whatever it is. But I feel like definitely many of the things I’ve learned while dancing I have used in the way I make music. I grew up in an environment where I was used to people telling stories in a 3D way.  It wasn’t just telling a story; it was dancing and singing and costumes and stenography… My mom would take me to the theater and I’d get babysat by the dressers and the opera singers, so I had a very colorful childhood, and I think that has influenced me in a way that it feels natural for me to tell stories with the whole… shebang.

SG: You made your first album, effectively, at home or close to it. Why throw all that off to the side and make such break like that? Why relocate to Brooklyn?

OL: I feel like the place from where I wrote Fauna was a very different place in my life from the way I am now. It was a time where I had just stopped dancing because I got a serious back injury, and all the songs on that album came from a place where I expected absolutely nothing from life because my dreams had just been devastated. So I started from nothing and just trying out…discovering this new way of expressing myself, and at that point, when I started out, I didn’t ever intend that product to be something that people would actually hear. It was something I did because I needed to.

But then it was amazing that people wanted to hear it, and I got really positive feedback and I went on touring, and suddenly I just felt like, “Wow, this is my passion. I can do something because I need to do it, and then that can be my life.” I can live from that, and that was such an amazing discovery.  Then the whole music scene and making music and writing, I just took it all in and…I was really critical with myself, like, “I can do better. I want to do this better, and I want to be more specific about lyrics…” and I wanted to develop myself because I felt like I had just started out, which I had. The songs from Fauna are the first songs I’ve ever written, so it was a natural progression for me to step it up and demand more from myself, try to be as critical as I could and really try to give my best.

SG: Why Brooklyn?

OL: I got signed in 2009 at SXSW to Epic Records, and that was a big fairytale because I came with this little indie album, and then suddenly got picked up by a major label, and it was like a fairytale. [Laughs] It was just my call. I was like, “I’m gonna do this fully.” And I feel like I’m the kind of person who…I enjoy living life where I never know exactly what’s gonna happen. I feel like I’m the happiest when I put myself in situations that are a little bit shaky, where I never know who I’m gonna meet or what’s waiting around the corner. And when I moved to New York and it was such an overwhelming city, I definitely got that, big time. [Laughs]

SG: How do you think the music was influenced by making it in New York? Is there anything on there that is geographically specific?

OL: I think moving to America and living in New York has definitely made its imprint directly on the lyrics, and I think also in the way I’ve picked instruments and sounds, because I’m very much into recording specific sounds from everyday life. I use things in a way where it’s not just traditional instruments, I record birds or record walking in the snow, or things that give an atmosphere and kind of illustrates where I’m at in that song. I have one song called “White Nights” which is specifically about New York, and that song is about those nights where you just don’t want to go to sleep because there’s just too much to take in, too much inspiration, and the police car sirens and the noise and the traffic almost get like a mythological meaning and a call, like the sailor and the sea. [Laughs]

SG: When you think about actually making the album is there something about the experience that stands out most in your mind?

OL: I feel like every song I’ve written has an extremely important meaning to me and comes from personal experiences, but I feel like in the beginning, when I started recording this album and, for the first time, I had to work with other people in the room, like write with other people in the room, was an extreme challenge, and in the beginning I really feared it and it was such a private thing for me. It’s like writing a diary when somebody’s there [laughs]—it’s a little bit of that kind of feeling. But I had such good experiences with that because I was so lucky to meet the right people to help me. I met Dan (Carey – producer of The Kills, Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip) and Dave (McCracken - Depeche Mode, Beyoncé, AFI) in the very beginning, when I went to London, and they became this wall that I could push against, and it became this kind of mirror where I always had to explain myself a little bit, which I think pushed me even further. It was hard. Sometimes it was a little bit like being at the shrink or something. [Laughs] It’s very emotional.

SG: What is it about the album that you’re most excited to share?

OL: I’m so excited for the album as a whole to be finished because it’s been such a long process, and it’s been, at times, painful. Writing lyrics is not always fun because it’s your emotions, it’s your experiences, and it’s hard. It’s like Sudoku with the emotions [laughs]—you have to get it out the right way. So I’m so happy that I ended up with these 11 songs on the album, and they are each a very important brick in the puzzle of my life, and it came together in a way where I feel like it presents who I am as an artist and as a human being, and I just hope that I can connect with people through that music, and that people will take it in and enjoy it.

SG: When everyone at Buzzine has been talking about your music, it’s very hard to talk about your music without—at least for us—talking about images as well. Is it that way for you? How important is the visual to your audio?

OL: I think the visual part is really essential to me because I can’t think of a sound without also envisioning the sound. As soon as I start thinking of something, I’ll immediately start seeing pictures as well, and I think that’s very much the way I also like to write. I often write with some sound element that inspires me, and it could be the sound of Velcro or it could be the sound of rice, or just something that has a texture and gives me some emotion. It’s very much like interior decorating, in a way…you have to decorate the room with sounds, and then you can tell the story of what happens in that room. But I think also, when I play live, I have a very visual live show, and the most important thing for me is that it’s always the music that triggers the visuals, and not the opposite. I don’t just make some visuals to have a visual. I do it because it’s triggered by the music.

SG: So when it cames to the “Sun of a Gun” video, how much is you trying to get the visuals to accompany the song and how much of it is finding someone you appreciate as an artist and trusting the partnership with them to create it?

OL: I have only done one big video yet: “Sun of a Gun,” and I just can’t wait to start doing more videos because I feel like I have so many ideas and so many pictures and stories that I want to show with my songs. When you write something from your own life, you cannot help but have a lot of ideas of how it’s supposed to be, but I also like to show things with a bit of abstraction so it’s not just, “This is about me,” but it’s a general thing that becomes relevant for more than just me.

“Sun of a Gun” the video is directed by two British directors called thirtytwo, and the idea with that one was to show the two mental states you get into when you are in love, like in the beginning of love, where it can be the beautiful, romantic, kind of “I surrender” side, which is showed by the daylight and there’s this romantic pink light thing and my hair is out and I’m dancing - it’s all beautiful. And then the night, the darkness, when it’s like “I want to get out of this. I’m obsessed, I don’t feel like an independent human being, this is scary” - that kind of schizophrenia that you can get into when you fall in love, and that is what that video tries to illustrate, and that is what the song is about.  It’s about being pulled in and out of a relationship that’s not necessarily good for you.

SG: One of the biggest difficulties for electronic music in general has always been making a compelling live show and you’ve certainly come up with something different. Tell us a little bit about ‘the contraption’…

OL: ‘The contraption’ is a big black box with drum pads in it. It’s basically a machine where I trigger different electronic sounds live, and it’s synced to a projector that projects visuals on balloons in sync with what I play, so everything is triggered live, and the idea behind that was to not be that dependent on the computer, because I feel like, in electronic music, the computer is a main character, but I want things to come out of the computer and not just be this thing streaming out of a laptop. So the thing was to make a physical instrument that could represent computer music but better, and would also be fun to watch live.

And then there’s an emotion-activated screen that lights up when I move in front of it, and reacts to different lightings and movements. Then I have a drummer who is also triggering sounds live. He’s got triggers on his acoustic drums, and in that way, I thought it was not just about how it looked or how it sounded, it was also about justifying playing electronic music live, because otherwise you could just put on a CD… I wanted it to be played live the same way as you go and play guitar live or something. But it’s been a long process to develop these things - we actually had to develop a special software program that could execute these synced projector things, so I’m trying to push it and see how far we can go with this crazy Mad Hatter thing!

SG: Plus there’s all the fear that it’s not gonna work, so that gives you a burst of nervous nice energy as well as the potential for disaster at every show. Congratulations…

OL: Thanks. [Laughs] No, definitely in the beginning there were problems, and whenever you do something that has not been done before, you run into problems, but that’s part of developing something new, and I’m willing to take that risk if I can get something exciting and new out of it.

SG: Other than, “Oh my God, how long did that take to work out how to do,” what do you hope that somebody who does see you play for the first time walks away thinking?

OL: First of all, I would like them to get a whole experience of the whole Oh Land as kind of my little world. I just want people to feel like they have stepped into my head for just a second, or to feel something, to react to the music and maybe get a feeling of recognition or something that reminds them about something from their own lives. The emotions are important to me—that people get something emotionally out of the music, whether it’s happiness or anger because they hate it… [Laughs]

SG: You have all these different threads, artistically, whether it’s in your family, in your own life, in the world around you… Do you have some grand idea of a project that could actually pull all of these threads back together, or is this still just about getting things out of your head? Where, ultimately, do you want this to lead?

OL: Ultimately I would just love to continue making music and get it out in different forms. It all comes from music with me, whether it was dance when I was younger, or whether it’s projections on balloons - it’s all ideas from music because that’s the language I understand the best. But I would love to use that language in different ways, and I would love to develop this world and the creativity and see how far I can go with it.

SG: We understand that being an artist is hard and there’s lots of “loading in the gear in the snow” moments, but you do have the opportunity, doing what you do, for that shiny rock star moment, when it all kind of comes together. So what has that been so far for you? What is that moment so far where you’re just like, “Yeah! This is it! This is what it’s all about!”

OL: [Laughs] I think my biggest rock star moment so far must have been my last concert that I played two days ago, I think. I was standing on stage and I was singing this song and suddenly out of nowhere, the whole room just started singing along, completely unexpectedly, and I didn’t even encourage people to sing along. And I stopped singing and I could just hear people singing up, and I was like, “Wow. Now we’re talking!” [Laughs] That was amazing. I got really… [sigh]. “Can I just take a picture of you?”

Oh Land’s self-titled second album is released this week on Epic Records.