During the Hellfest this year, I had the joy to interview Eivør. This show was part of her summer tour following her latest release Enn. We did talk about it but not only!
I would like to start this interview with how I discovered your music. It was back in 2017, It was the very first time I went to the Faroe Islands and I was in Tórshavn. There was this Tutl (Faroese music label) shop and I bought the record of Slør.
– Oh my God, I got these goose bumps on skin! *laughs* So you came to my country and you found my music there?
Yes, I went to this Tutl shop and I was like “…There’s so much there”. As it was my very first trip there, it became its soundtrack.
– Oh really?
Yes, and this trip itself was inspired by another band from the Faroe Islands so I’m thinking, maybe you’ve inspired and you will likely again inspired people whol like your music to visit your homeland. So I wanted to know, how does it feel?
– That touches me very much. I think it’s amazing that music can connect people to each other and to places. Yes, it’s great.
Would you have, in concrete way, any recommendations here like places to see or things to do?
– Oh, my god. There are incredible places to see, wherever you’ll go it’s gonna be be beautiful. *laughs* There are some very special places you can go to like Mykines, Saksun… And you can also go to the caves, you can sail into these big caves under the mountains. Yeah so there are many many beautiful places to go and also great restaurants. If you want to try some special Faroese food like initially the Faroese food, you can go to a place called “Ræst” in the old Tórshavn. It’s an amazing experience to eat there. And there are many great restaurants in the Faroe Islands. Yes, it’s a very small place but full of adventures.
Oh, yes! You’ve always had a very defined identity all by being aware and opened to every journey you went on. Regarding your past albums, do you see them as memories? Like something comparable to photo albums to show you and remind you that at that time, you were here and you were this person…
– Are we talking about album covers?
Ah, it could be album covers, it could be listening to an old song again…
– Yeah I think that my music, and for many artist the music they did, they see things like that. And it’s a time stamp of who you were at that time and you change over time. And for me, also hearing old songs or seeing old, old covers, that’s something that takes me back in time. so I think it’s a very interesting thing to think about. And I think about all my albums, I believe, can help. […] I see them and I think “Oh, I went…”, I about how I felt when I see this album. And it’s very important for me, when I make albums, [for] my music to be truely to myself, about where I am today. I always try to make my music based on, as honest and truest as possible so it reflects where I’m at today.
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That’s funny because I went through interviews you made recently and you said that making music you want to make and you want to hear is how you stay honest to yourself. I was wondering, how did you get this philosophy? Was it naturally or did you just witnessed other artitsts having unfortunate relationship with their music?
– Yeah. I think, if you wanna stay in music for a long time you have to be that because if you try to play this music, or if you want to be here, try to be popular, try to, you know… If you have all these braces [?] in your head, you’re gonna lose you fondamentals somehow, you’re gonna lose yourself. I’ve been playing music for 25 years now, I’ve been beyond that. That’s the way you’ve come to be. And also to keep my creative fireplace on fire, so the fire doesn’t go away, I have to stay curious. Like the child you want to stay. When I make music, when I’m writing something, I feel like that. It feels playful and if I don’t feel playful, I know there’s something wrong. *laughs*
– Yes. I wanted to go back to my roots to write this album. On my ealier album Segl when I wrote it, I was more like outgoing in the world, I went to L.A to write with some musicians there and travelled the world with those to do something, anything around the world… And for this album I felt the opposite, I felt I needed to go back to my tiny circle, back to my roots to a little village even smaller than the village where I grew up. Fifty people live there and it was just incredible to kind of reconnect with something inside of me. I think musically that I was missing a little bit. And yeah, this album was made like that, in my very small circle of people.
– Yeah exactly and it also brings you something that you can use later. Because I felt I had so much bubbling in me like a new landscape of music that I wanted to work on and create. And I needed to just be alone, to be far away from everything to kind of fish out all these elements that I had in mind. And I think this album is like, my whole journey back from when it started when I was a child. It has a lot of the Faroese’s roots, folk music and it has those pastes. But then it also explores with new landscapes and yes, sounds, sounds in general. So for me it’s a very exciting album, it was an exciting one to work on.
– I think I started writing it I didn’t even know that I was writing a new album because I just wanted to go somewhere and just like completely just create music that I wanted to hear in my head. And it was all very spacious, it was almost like a space opera, like the first song on the album. And when I had written that song I was like “Wow, what is this ?” *laugh* But then I was like “Yeah, I think this is the beginning of my new chapter” and I just went with it and I kept writing songs and this album came out of it. Sometimes it’s nice not to touch the ground for a while because then if you are not in familiar territory, you discover something new.
– Exactly! And often when you do something when you are so sure and it feels so easy, often maybe you are repeating yourself, you’ve done it before…So you know so for me it was very exciting and sometimes even hard because I thought “Oh my god, I’m floating… Where am I ?” *laughs* But it was also a place of new discoveries.
On the opposite did you ever experience like the equivalent of the writer’s block when you wanted to compose something but literally nothing at all was coming to you?
-Yes, I’ve tried that many times. Writer’s block is something every artist experiences from time to time but over the years I’ve become more and more like routine. Routine is nice, that works. When I decide that now I’m gonna create, I go to work. I go to the office. *laughs*. I wake up in the morning and I start writing. Some days, nothing happens and I try to not be so hard on myself like “it’s okay, we’ll try again tomorrow…”. I think it’s about not giving up on the ideas and sometimes you’ll just have to leave them for a little bit and come back to it. Then, when you come back to it you can hear whether it’s interesting or not. Sometimes you hear it then it’s like “this is shit” and then you just throw it away and start something new. But I think the older, I get the less I believe in writer’s block. I don’t believe so much in it, I think you just have to like, know how to deal with it. To be patient on yourself and don’t like go to the victim song like “oh don’t know…”. It’s just it’s okay and even if you just write one line a day, that’s great.
– Yes, and then one day will come when you get to feel extremely inspired. But I don’t believe that you sit down and wait for inspiration. I think you have to go, it’s like going out fishing. You fish you’d always get a fish. But sometimes, because you went out that day, and you didn’t sit home and say “I know I won’t catch a fish”, you go out every day and then eventually you will catch the fish. *laughs*
Inspiration or just anything we’re looking for can be very stubborn and almost playful, we can be played by it.
– Yeah, exactly. So you go out and you fetch it, instead of waiting for it to come to you.
At some point you made live albums when you had, it seems to me, a break in your creative process. Is it something you would do again?
– Oh yes, I enjoyed that! For me my live albums have always been like a check mark of a journey that I’ve been on and they often come right before I’m ready to move on from something. Then I feel like “Okay maybe now I should do a live album” just to kind of embrace the music that I have played live. And before I go into a new phase of new album and stuff. It’s also because my live albums, my songs they change a lot from the album when I’m playing live. I’ll change them because songs are like living mechanisms. You know, you play them live and on stage I like to keep it open and sometimes I feel like “Oh! Let’s go there now!” and then the band comes with me and we’re like “Oh, there’s a whole new side to the song now !”. You know I like my songs to be alive not to be a lockdown in the cage. I use the same way every night I enjoy this moment of “What’s going on ?” *laughs*. But I do like to to keep it like that and and that’s why also I feel it makes sense to do live albums because the songs are very different on my live albums.
So, this is my last question of the interview. Also in recent interview, you said you are trying to create something that can awake some feelings in people’s heart and Enn has a special focus on nature, both environmental and human. So was this intention an natural answer to the state of the world or do you feel there is an emergency for people to reconnect themselves both to nature and their own emotions?
– Yes. I think so, and that’s very much what this album is about for me. It’s about nature as a whole you know, our earth, our only home here, on this planet. And also yes, seeing what’s going on in the world I mean, it’s always been. The world has always been scary at times, and dark. But in the times we live in, you see so much suffering and so much darkness around us. And I’m hoping with this album that people find something on there that will connect them somehow to the Earth more and to people to each other. I hope that they can find an openness towards each other although we’re all so different, we have different beliefs, different religions and all that. But at the end of the day we’re all just some big family on this planet and that’s what I hope at this album can reflect somewhere.
That’s all for me, thank you very much for your time.
Header image: Sigga Ella
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