EMILÍANA
TORRINI
Edited version published: Frankie #26 (Nov/Dec 2008)
Emilíana Torrini is very cute in the morning. Talking
to us from her place in Brighton, UK (having relocated from her native
Iceland) she apologises for not being very conscious. She’s not
very good at this hour, she says. Then she admits it’s actually
10am her time. After some muttering in Icelandic, she then explains she’s
just stupidly poured a whole lot of salt into her coffee, when she wanted
sugar. If you didn’t know her well, you’d think she was a
bit weird.
However, when the Icelandic folkster last toured Australia, something
struck her as a little weird about us. At all the shows, the audience
insisted on singing along to her entire performance—loudly. It wasn’t
something she’d experienced before. After all, if you’re familiar
with Emilíana’s work, you’ll know she doesn’t
exactly trade in raucous, bass-heavy, made-for-karaoke tunes.
Back then, she was best known for the single ‘Sunny Road’,
a gentle, lilting folk song with a barely-there, softly-sung chorus: “It’s
time, meet me, on the Sunny Road.” But at her Australian gigs, the
crowd obviously believed in audience participation. “IT’S
TIME! MEET ME! ON THE SUNNY ROAD!” Emilíana bellows, inflecting
an ocker, bogan accent. “They were basically screaming, as though
it was the rock version.” She laughs, then pauses. “I was
like, ‘Wow.’”
Wow, indeed. It’s not everyday you experience the drunken masses,
boisterously chanting along to your personal meditation on death. Fisherman’s
Woman, the album which featured ‘Sunny Road’, was written
in the wake of Emilíana’s boyfriend suddenly dying in 2000
from a hit and run accident. The lyrics of that song—“I never
married / Never had those kids”—takes on an entirely new dimension
with that information. “I’m very, very glad that I can’t
write another Fisherman’s Woman,” she says, “because
the circumstances were very difficult at the time, and that’s what
I had to express. Now I have different things to express.”
For her, writing and recording Fisherman’s Woman was made
even more difficult because she was incredibly fussy. “I’ve
always been very hard on myself, and that’s not very fun,”
she says. “Being a perfectionist is being anti-fun. With this new
album, I completely left the whip at home, and didn’t allow it to
enter. So it sort of surprised me that I could still write music without
being horrible to myself.”
The follow-up album, Me and Armini, runs the full gamut of Emilíana’s
range—upbeat folk, tear-jerking hymns—and flexes some intimidating
pop muscles along the way. On a track called ‘Jungle Drum’,
Emilíana is almost frantic with energy. “My heart is beating
like a jungle drum!’ she wheezes giddily, like she’s on the
verge of a heart attack. “The more poppy songs surprised me when
they came out,” she says. “But it was very natural, because
it’s exactly how I felt that day: you’re in love! And for
me, all poetry just jumped out the window.”
While she’s loathe to box herself in any categories, it’s
undeniable: Emilíana has been demonstrating some canny pop smarts
lately. It was only a few years ago that Emilíana was handed the
unlikely job of co-writing a new Kylie Minogue song. You might remember
the result: the slinky number one single ‘Slow’. People baulked
when they found out, especially considering Emilíana had never
bought or listened to a pop record, until her late teens.
“In the ‘80s, I just wasn’t interested,” she says.
“In my town, there was a war between Duran Duran and Wham! Kids
would take you into the corner and ask, ‘Who do you like?’
and slap you around the ears if you said the opposite of them. I didn’t
get it.” So what changed? “Nothing changed. Pop is just melody—an
easy listening melody, that’s all it is. I find pop much easier
to write, than anything else. You need a lot of thought for other things.
The Kylie song? It was just a holiday for us in the midst of doing a record.”
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