Listening to Susanne Sundfør’s latest album, Ten Love Songs, makes it tricky to predict what kind of artist you’re going to meet. Will it be the high-minded composer who scored the orchestral fantasia on the album’s 10-minute centrepiece, Memorial? Or the synth-laden Scandi-pop star behind Fade Away, who just wants to party like it’s 1989? The vulnerable lyricist admitting “We have different heartbeats but all the same heartbreak” on Slowly? Or the unhinged victim-maker of Delirious, singing amid the cracks of firing ammunition? As it turns out, when we meet in a north London coffee shop, the artist in question is one who has worked so tirelessly on all these different guises that she has practically burned herself out.
“After I finished the album, I got ill,” she says. “Both physically and mentally. I was getting flu all the time. Depression, anxiety. It’s taken me a long time to get back again. I was wobbling and …” she pauses. “I’m still struggling with it.”
It was the first time Sundfør had experienced depression and she believes the crash was partly a result of the workload: she collaborated with others on Ten Love Songs, but threw herself into the centre of almost every aspect of its making, from writing, recording and mixing, right down to editing drum sounds in the studio (“Boom boom boom for fucking 12 hours,” she grimaces). But it was also a result of the record’s themes, in which she delved into her own life to examine the links between extreme love and violent hatred.
“Joni Mitchell says it’s like peeling your own onion, and that’s how it is,” she says. “I felt naked. Without skin.”
So was it worth it? Ten Love Songs is one of the year’s best albums, and possibly one of the nerdiest, too. Sundfør can talk at length about reverb boxes and vintage drum software she tracked down in order to replicate a particular Italo-disco sound. In need of the sound of a plane crash for Kamikaze, she went as far as to sign up to the six-month waiting list for a Swarmatron synthesiser, before building it from scratch herself; when it didn’t work as she hoped, she ended up Skyping the machine’s inventor, Leon Dewan, for advice. “He said I was only the second person to have ever contacted him about it,” she says, laughing. “The other was Jean-Michel Jarre!”
Despite all this, the real effort in making the album came when writing melodies, the area where she perhaps pushed herself the most.
“Making a pop song is the hardest bit, it’s like an algorithm,” she says. “I read about how people’s brains feel comfortable with patterns, but even better if it takes a little turn, so that you have surprise but also familiarity. It’s like an orgasm for the brain.”
Listen to a song such as White Foxes, from Sundfør’s 2012 album The Silicone Veil, and you can see what she means: it has all the hallmarks of an archetypal modern synthpop song but occasionally throws you to unusual melodic places before guiding you safely back, like an elegant dance step. It’s a song inspired by everything from Abba to opera, something you can trace in her musical background.
Sundfør grew up in Haugesund, a small Norwegian town so widely known for its fishing industry that friends are known to call her “the Herring queen” (“I love that,” she notes, perhaps sarcastically). Her musical life has always been one marked by a desire to break out of imposed limits: first from the “restrictive” violin, then from the rigours of opera, which she studied from 12 to 18. “We would learn coloratura, where you stretch one word, one syllable, over many notes,” she says, humming Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria. “It’s good for training your vocal control … but restrictive also.”
Her father’s folk collection was what first pulled her towards pop music, and she has gradually evolved from the piano-led singer-songwriter music of her 2008 debut Take One through the eclectic, more singular styles of 2010’s The Brothel and The Silicone Veil.
Sundfør has spent the past seven years finding her voice in other ways, too. In 2008, at a Norwegian awards ceremony, she collected a prize for “best female performance” and, suddenly struck by the implied sexism, delivered an impromptu speech about not wanting to accept an award based on gender. “I am first and foremost an artist, not first and foremost a woman,” she said. “Yeah, I fucked up,” she laughs now. She’s joking: the speech may have caused controversy but it kickstarted important conversations about sexism within the Norwegian music industry.
“A lot of the old guys, music journalists, hated me,” she says. “I got a lot of bad reviews and comments in the papers. But I felt confident. It was more: ‘Yes! The fight is on!’ So I will never regret it.”
Sundfør thinks that the industry has since changed for the better, but that the recent wave of artists embracing feminism is still something to be wary of. “I feel it’s become another part of the branding. It can be just a word, like an accessory you put on, and not necessarily something to think about.”
How does she feel when she sees Taylor Swift bring female friends up onstage with her?
“Well, I wish they would play something,” she says, but is quick to point out her huge admiration for Swift herself. “She’s really cool, a great songwriter. That one with Max Martin” - she starts humming Blank Space - “is great.”
Despite things moving in the right direction, Sundfør finds it easy to pick out problems women still encounter in the music industry. “Like, every time I need to fix my Fender Rhodes there are 10 guys coming over and I’m like: ‘Actually, this is my instrument, I can look after it.’ But you have to remember these guys have been doing it for years, then suddenly there’s this girl who’s like: ‘Fuck you, get out of here!’”
She recalls meeting a well-known Norwegian actor while working on Ten Love Songs and him refusing to believe she was in the studio to mix it. “He was convinced I was there to make food for everyone. He was awful.” In general, though, it’s the less blatant things that still niggle her, “like, being called a female artist when men don’t get that … you become a separate genre to these guys, which implies you’re not as good.”
Sundfør’s own list of influences needs no such barriers, ranging as it does from the film scores of Philip Glass to the love songs of Carly Simon or Roy Harper. Lyrically, too, she cites a range of poets and authors who were brave enough to put themselves on the line: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, whom she thinks was “quite insecure” behind his macho facade.
It was through following their paths and exposing herself emotionally (“You took off my dress, and you never put it on again,” is one particularly vulnerable lyric from Memorial) that Sundfør ended up struggling to cope with Ten Love Songs. In the past, writing personally had been “heavy”, but this was different: “I discovered that if you push yourself too far it can get to a point where it changes you. It can change your mind.”
When Ten Love Songs was finally complete, Sundfør was expecting to feel elation. Instead she faced a black hole, where her exhausted but hyperactive brain suddenly had nothing to focus on: “It’s like walking off a cliff,” she says.
But you sense that it’s something she would put herself through again in pursuit of such sublime pop music. “To write the perfect love song you have to be heartbroken,” she says towards the end of the interview. “It needs to be naked. That’s how you write the best.”
Susanne Sundfør plays the Haunt, Brighton, on 26 October, then touring. susannesundfor.com
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