Back in 2008, Zara Larsson was worried that her career might be over.
“I was like, ‘Why am I not getting signed? Why is this not happening?’” she says, looking back now. “I was so stressed out.”
It should probably be pointed out that Larsson was 10 years old at the time. She had just won Talang, Sweden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent, and clearly did not view patience as a virtue. She eventually got signed, but only at the ripe old age of 14: “And I was still pretty stressed out, but the older I get, the more relaxed I feel. ’Cos when I was younger, I thought life was over by 25. But now I’ve kind of realised that life begins at 25.”
If so, Larsson has managed to accomplish quite a lot before her life has technically started. Her singles have gone platinum multiple times across Scandinavia, and she’s recently launched an assault on the UK, too. She’s currently in the Top 40 three times: her brilliant Rihanna-sounding single Lush Life is at No 5; Girls Like, her single with Tinie Tempah, is at No 6; Never Forget You, a duet with MNEK, peaked at No 5 and has not yet dropped from the charts. She has clocked up hundreds of millions of Spotify streams and even had a song named after her by Swedish band Regimen.
It all comes from cramming as much musical practice into her 18 years as possible. As a child in love with Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, she used to sing for her parents after every meal. They weren’t musical themselves, she says, although her dad was in a punk band when he was 15. “I don’t dare to say that he was no good,” she says, “but I think that he was no good. He quit the band anyway, and then, later on, they became super-rightwing extremists.”
Oh my God!
“Yeah!” she says, laughing. “I don’t even want to say the name. He quit before it escalated – it’s not what my dad thinks and believes at all.”
Larsson’s music is probably as far away from Swedish Nazi punk as it’s possible to get: take Rooftop, which exemplifies the Scandi knack of combining sleek pop with lyrical melancholy. She matches her music’s youthful charm with a brilliantly unguarded social media presence, in which tweets about sex, body hair and panic attacks go out to almost half a million followers (“I can’t think about that, it gives me anxiety”). One Instagram post in which she put a condom on her leg – to mock guys who claimed they couldn’t wear them because they were “too big” – went viral.
“I just did it because it was funny,” she says. “I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal. And I had so many mentions in my timeline from guys, like ‘but it doesn’t feel as good with a condom on’. Well, no, but it feels better than having an STD.”
Larsson has said in the past that Sweden’s ability to punch above its weight in pop comes from the country’s socialist mindset (“In America, you can’t say to your family: ‘Hey, I’m off to LA to make it as a songwriter, sorry I can’t pay for the dentist’”) and the fact that everyone is encouraged to learn an instrument in school music classes. She doesn’t back up the latter argument particularly convincingly when I ask what instrument she chose.
“Erm, honestly? I kind of skipped the music classes. It sounds fun but there’s a lot of music theory, a lot of history. Learning what they were playing back in, like, 1571),” she says, sounding particularly appalled at the state of 16th-century pop. “History is important but … I just wanna sing Beyoncé songs all day long in front of a mirror.”
Larsson’s Beyoncé fandom is actually quite something to behold. When she got the chance to see her idol recently, she says she spent the whole time weeping in the front row. On meeting her backstage, Beyoncé told Larsson: “You’re the girl I saw crying!”
“I can’t really remember what I was thinking or saying because I had this adrenaline,” she says, gabbling away at manic speed. “It was weird – to look at the person you love the most in their eyes and she’s looking at me and talking to me and that’s INSANE!”
Larsson held herself more together in order to collaborate with MNEK: the pair of them – inspired by Justin Bieber’s Where Are Ü Now – wrote Never Forget You and ended up fighting over who should get to record it. In the end, they agreed on a duet – it went Top 5 in the UK and has received more than 62m Vevo plays.
Last year, she also worked with Dr Luke, the hit producer accused of rape by Ke$ha (Luke denies the allegations and claims Ke$ha invented them to get out of a Sony contract with him. Further to Ke$ha filing the claim against Dr Luke, a New York court recently refused to release her from this contract).
“I believe it’s karma,” she says of the case. “I won’t be the one to say whether he raped her or not because I don’t know.” However, she makes a wider point about rape: “Too many women are not being believed when it comes to this. And to be honest, whether he’s a rapist or not, he’s not the nicest guy. He’s very talented, you can’t take that away from him, but where do we draw the line? I think Chris Brown is very talented, too, but I won’t support him because he’s an asshole.” Larsson says she’s thankful she doesn’t work with Dr Luke any more.
Since she has turned 18, Larsson says, people are seeing her less as a cute novelty and more as an artist in her own right. She might be more chilled out now than when she was 10, but her run of hits – she has only really known chart success – can make her edgy. “I’m just waiting for the day when my songs aren’t flying,” she admits. “Because I kind of believe in Murphy’s law – if something can go wrong, it eventually will.”
Pessimism doesn’t come naturally to her, though: “I also believe that if something can go right, it will. So that means if I can’t have a No 1 on Billboard now, then I will still have one when the time is right. I mean, my life is kind of a fairytale. I work so hard, but … everything just goes my way! It’s insane!”
So if life really does begin at 25, where does she hope to be by then?
“Ummm … I would love to have a world tour, or two, or three. No, two, not three. Whatever! And maybe a couple of Grammys. Some No 1 songs ...” She exhales, stumped for the first time. It seems the thought of a time so distant is almost incomprehensible to her. “I don’t know,” she sighs: “I mean, 25? Maaan!”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion