he Invisible Woman: A Conversation With Björk

Following a rupture in her personal life, Björk returns with her most exposed album to date,
Vulnicura. She talks to Jessica Hopper about finding clarity and liberation amidst incredible pain, and
reclaiming herself as a woman, artist, and feminist.

Andrew Thomas Huang courtesy of One Little Indian

by Jessica Hopper

Contributor

INTERVIEW

ELECTRONICPOP/R&B

JANUARY 21 2015

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With each album she makes, Björk immerses us in a fantastical universe of her own design. Now, on
Vulnicura, she’s letting us in to her world—though it is not necessarily one of her own choosing. The
album outlines the dissolution of Björk’s relationship with her longtime partner, the artist Matthew
Barney. She confesses the devastation with candor. By the third song, “History of Touches”, she’s
lying awake in bed, indexing the past with startling intimacy: “Every single fuck we had together is in
a wondrous time-lapse with us here at this moment,” she laments over glistening synths. She details
her struggle to keep her family intact, limning distance, rejection, and the death of their covenant.
The blunt force of her words is striking. And damning.

The cast of Vulnicura is limited to a “you” that is only Barney, Björk, and their child; the “we” of it is
fleeting. There is a joyous, striving before, which only makes the familial fragmenting that plays
across these long, dramatic songs even more wrenching. She tries to staunch the ruin with love, but
it’s no use. The album ends with Björk’s reclamation of herself, her voice, and her music, turning
Vulnicura into a document of salvation, albeit a fraught one. “When I’m broken I am whole,” she
sings on closer “Quicksand”, “and when I'm whole I'm broken.”

Sitting in a hotel room in London’s East End on Halloween, Björk, casually clad in a flamingo-pink
kimono, red tights, and platform high tops, is as eager to talk about Vulnicura as she is reticent to
talk about what inspired it. The love, struggle, and dissolution are all plain in the lyrics, which are
uncharacteristically diaristic; singing about a desire for “emotional respect” is more what you’d
expect from Mary J. Blige than an artist whose previous album considered the world atomically. The
few metaphors that do arise involve natural, immovable objects like stones, a lake, quicksand—dark
forces, being consumed, certain destruction. The album’s centerpiece, the 10-minute “Black Lake”, is
the relational post-mortem, a litany of incompatibilities over rising strings, before Björk spits the
rhetorical “Did I love you too much?” as if the question curdled in her mouth as she conjured the
words.

As much as this record is about him, it is also about Björk returning to herself. In motherhood, one
quite literally becomes a vessel—a role that often continues postpartum. The young family takes
precedence, and ambition takes a back seat; a mother can become the net around her loved ones,
their needs veiling her own. It is the natural exile of domestic life. And it is a strange and powerful
thing to imagine that one of the most singular vocalists in modern music could lose the tether, just
like any of us. But here, Björk opens up about coming back to music from such a scene, filling her
house and her days with loud songs.

Over the few hours that we talked, she became emotional whenever we broached the album’s core
themes. The pall would lift immediately, though, whenever she touched on the music that had
pulled her back into the light: befriending and exchanging ideas with the album’s Venezuelan co-
producer, Arca, waking up to mixes by anarchic DJ Total Freedom, her lifelong love of Chaka Khan,
Joni Mitchell, and Kate Bush, her desire to stand up for her female peers. Vulnicura may be the most
tender-hearted work Björk has ever issued, but it also finds her most sure of her power as a woman,
a producer, and an artist; all of her invisible work made clear.

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An extended version of this interview will be featured in the next issue of The Pitchfork Review, due
out at the end of February—subscribe here.

Pitchfork: How does it feel to be putting out a record this personal?

Björk: I’m a little nervous. Definitely. Especially coming from an album like Biophilia, which was
about the universe. This is more of a traditional singer/songwriter thing. When I started writing, I
fought against it. I thought it was way too boring and predictable. But most of the time, it just
happens; there’s nothing you can do. You have to let it be what it is.

Pitchfork: Did you know this was the record that was going to come out of you?
B: No, no. With most of my albums, I don’t really know what I’m doing for the first year or so. It’s
afterwards, when it’s almost ready and I start mixing and doing the photographs, that I can see it for
what it is. With this album, it was a big surprise. When I listened to the songs, it is almost like a diary.

Pitchfork: It sounds like an album about partnership, motherhood, and family—things that bond us
—and your worst fears about them...

B: [chokes up] I’m sorry.

Pitchfork: The minute your children are born, underneath every thought is: How do I protect them?
How do I keep this family surrounded in love? Then you quickly figure out that you can’t always
protect them. All of that is on this album, very nakedly.

B: That’s why I was nervous. I’ve never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi
Annan—I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal
job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I
could express that was by comparing it to the universe. If you can make nature and technology
friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That’s what women do
a lot—they’re the glue between a lot of things. Not only artists, but whatever job they do: in the
office, or homemakers. Biophilia was like my own personal slapstick joke, showing I had to reach so
long—between solar systems—to connect everything. It’s like the end scene in Mary Poppins, when
she’s made everyone friends, and the father realizes that kids are more important than money—and
[then] she has to leave. [chokes up] It’s a strange moment. Women are the glue. It’s invisible, what
women do. It’s not rewarded as much.

When I did this album—it all just collapsed. I didn’t have anything. It was the most painful thing I
ever experienced in my life. The only way I could deal with that was to start writing for strings; I
decided to become a violin nerd and arrange everything for 15 strings and take a step further than
what I’ve done before. I had like 20 technological threads of things I could have done, but the album
couldn’t be futuristic. It had to be singer/songwriter. Old-school. It had to be blunt. I was sort of
going into the Bergman movies with Liv Ullmann when it gets really self-pitying and psychological,
where you’re kind of performing surgery on yourself, like, What went wrong?

Then I got really lucky. I’m not religious but I must have earned some good karma at some point,
because as one thing got taken away from me, Alejandro [Ghersi, aka Arca] came. [smiles, tears up] I
don’t want to brag, but I get a lot of requests to work with musicians and a lot of time I say, "I’m very
flattered, but it’s not right.” But he approached me almost two years ago, and it was just the most
perfect timing ever. I’d just written like a scrillion songs and done these string arrangements, and the
subject matter was so difficult that I wanted to move away from it. Then he came on a visit to
Iceland, and we just had the best time ever. He’s the most generous, funny person I’ve ever met. It
was such a contrast, the most fun music-making I’ve ever had, with the most tragic subject matter.
Somehow, he could just take it on.

Usually I do half of the beats and then I will get someone like Matthew Herbert to help me with the
chorus of the song, or another guy to help me do other bits. But this time around, maybe because
it’s a relationship album about the duality between you and that person, doing a whole album with
just one person made perfect sense. Towards the end, we needed someone to mix it, so the only
other person who came into it was a guy called Haxan Cloak. Literally, just the three of us. Really
simple. That’s been really fun.

Alejandro knew all of my albums from his childhood—apparently, I’m big in Venezuela. [laughs] He
knew my songs better than me. I would say, "Oh, can you make that third beat like…" And he’d say,
"Oh, you mean like the third break of song five of album two?" He was like a library of my music. At
first, I was really defensive; I’m not good with people who are fans. But it just wasn’t that energy at
all. It was a really healthy energy, like a student. Suddenly, I got to be a strange kind of teacher. I
would literally sit next to him and, for the first few songs, the heartbreak songs, I would be the
backseat driver. I would describe all the beats, and then he would do them and add stuff. We did it
together. I’ve never done that before. So I just sat next to him for weeks, and we did the whole
album. It’s the quickest I’ve ever worked. He’s so incredibly talented and so eager to learn. It’s one
of those crazy things in life where people from opposite ends meet, and you’ve got so much to teach
each other. It’s really equal, what you’ve got to give to each other. It’s been a strange album—the
most painful one I’ve done, but also the most magic one.

Pitchfork: In the first two songs on the record, you’re singing about wanting to find clarity. Does
writing a song about something that has happened bring you clarity on the other end?

B: Yeah, I think so. When it works. I go for a lot of walks and I sing. That’s when you find an angle on
things, where it makes sense for that particular moment. It’s more that feeling. In a way, I also
rediscovered music, because [chokes up]—I’m sorry—it’s so miraculous what it can do to you; when
you are in a really fucked situation, it's the only thing that can save you. Nothing else will. And it
does, it really does. I’m hoping the album will document the journey through. It is liberation in the
end. It comes out as a healing process, because that’s how I experienced it myself.