Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.04.2016, Blaðsíða 26

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HOW DO YOU SAY
DELICIOUS
IN ICELANDIC?
COME FIND OUT
When you think of the spectral
music of Sóley Stefansdóttir, folk
is perhaps not the first genre that
springs to mind. But the more you
think about it, the more her pres-
ence as a headliner at the recent
Reykjavík Folk Festival starts to
make sense. Sóley is a singer-song-
writer who sometimes performs
onstage alone—when we meet, she
has just returned from a UK tour,
opening solo for John Grant—and
her eerie, spidery songs contain
stories that seem to offer half-
glimpses of other worlds, whether
dreams, dark imaginings, or tall
tales from a faraway past.
“I do like to tell stories, more
than doing personal lyrics,” says
Sóley, who’s friendly, warm, and
not at all spooky in person. "I’m
getting into a routine when I write
lyrics where I'll read a lot of poems.
I like poems because they’re short,
and they get to the point right away.
I’m actually planning on writing a
book—I write poetry and stories,
and have since I was young."
Weird voices
Sóley has never identified primar-
ily as a folk musician. But as we talk
about what folk music is—from its
historic roots through to the post-
modern age, where boundaries be-
tween genres are continually dis-
solving—connections start to form,
and doors open in her memory.
“Actually, now that I think about
it, before I started making music I
was working at Café Hljómalind,”
she recalls. “It was a not-for-profit
café, where Brennslan is now, and
Hemmi og Valdi before that—a
beautiful old house. I heard ‘The
Milk-Eyed Mender’, the first Jo-
anna Newsom album, and it totally
opened my mind. I’d been listen-
ing to a lot of male musicians my
whole life, and some female, but
hadn’t really found that thing that
I love. Hearing that weird voice and
that harp, and the weird songs with
beautiful lyrics… I’d never heard
anything like that before. It pushed
me into making music. It was a real
turning point in my life."
Sóley was fascinated by Newsom’s
thoroughly individual take on tradi-
tional folk songwriting, constructed
of spiralling song structures and
poetic lyrics that can be pithy, per-
sonal, or epic in scale. “I guess people
were calling it freak folk,” says Sóley.
“It wasn’t the same four chords all
the time, like Bob Dylan and all that
stuff… it was an evolution of folk
music. But still acoustic, and still a
person who just sits down with an
instrument to play a song, and tell a
story.”
The big subjects
Iceland’s literary culture is long and
rich, but it’s not something that Sóley
taps into directly. “I’ve been trying
not to go into the whole ‘inspired by
Iceland’ thing,” she says. “People ask
about that all the time. But, some
of those old stories really are very
dark, like ‘Sofðu unga ástin mín,’ in
which Halla, wife of the bandit Fjalla-
Eyvindur, threw a baby over the edge
of a waterfall. It would certainly be
somewhere to get inspiration for
some dark and horrible lyrics.”
And while Sóley’s signature
sound is similarly gothic and spooky,
it’s something she’s thinking about
moving away from. She has just
bought a grand piano that’s squeezed
into a garage space at home, and has
been composing new material.
“I’m going to try and turn a little
bit away from darkness,” she says. “I’m
not going to depress myself by writ-
ing lyrics that make me sad. It’s good
to get that stuff out, but when you’re
always thinking about it, your mind
and soul end up being nourished by
that fear. Because life is scary."
We end by discussing Sam Ami-
don, another musician who has
moved folk music forward by decon-
structing and reworking traditional
tunes and lyrics into new composi-
tions. Sóley remarks that the lyrical
inspirations of the past—love, loss,
journeying through life and staving
off death—are ever present. “I guess
those big subjects haven’t changed
over the years,” she finishes. “On
those, we never get to a conclusion.”
SHARE: gpv.is/soley
Deep Roots
And Freaky Folk
Sóley talks about her musical beginnings
Words JOHN ROGERS
Photo ART BICNICK
26The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 4 — 2016