Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.11.2016, Síða 23

White sun
Jófríður started doing low-key shows
under the new moniker of JFDR last
year, and from the very first perfor-
mances it was apparent that some-
thing special was coming. Her solo
songs seem to possess a more devel-
oped poetic voice than before, and
they’re delivered with a subtle but
noticeable sense of belief and assur-
ance. From the opening notes of the
dreamlike “White Sun,” to the spine-
tingling, pin-drop quiet “Anything
Goes” and the cyclical chord progres-
sion of closing track “Journey,” the al-
bum—entitled ‘Brazil’—is a wonderful
collection.
It began almost by accident. “I’d
never had that vision of being a solo
artist until I met [producer, drum-
mer, multi-instrumentalist] Shahzad
Ismaily,” says Jófríður. “He said, ‘I
feel like you shouldn’t be in a band,
you should do something solo.’ I just
laughed, I had my bands and my proj-
ects. Then we met one day walking
down the street, and we said: ‘Hey, we
were going to do something together,
shall we just go and do it?’ We went to
his studio in the middle of the night
and recorded ‘White Sun.’ That record-
ing is the version on the album.”
The two worked on the record in-
tensively, with Shahzad encouraging
Jófríður to take control in the studio.
“We put so much into it,” she contin-
ues. “Shahzad and I put everything we
have into that record—we allowed our-
selves to do that. We did sessions in the
middle of the night, and invited differ-
ent people to contribute. I learned that
you gain so much when you let people
be themselves inside your music.”
The dominant themes of the album,
which was written during a twelve-
month period of near-constant travel,
are journeys and cycles—whether it’s
the journey undertaken in the course
of a year, or the opening and closing
cycle of a relationship. The lyrics are
littered with insights, small revela-
tions, and quiet, unassuming wisdom.
“I write a lot of lyrics, and I keep
learning things about myself from
them later,” says Jófríður. “One time,
there was this strange thing… when
I wrote ‘White Sun’ in 2014, I was at
the very beginning of a relationship.
We were living in different countries,
so it’s about waiting for someone and
having this ‘parted heart’ you have
when you want someone to be there,
and you’re very much in love. It’s also
about finding a path, and having a
home, or not having a home; having a
heart, but not really having the heart,
you know?
“But around that time, I had a jour-
ney from the Keflavík airport into the
city for a few days,” she continues. “I
was watching the sun—it was white,
and I started thinking about that, and
it became lyrics. Exactly a year later,
that same relationship was fading. It
had been a journey of tumbling, learn-
ing, experiencing; finding things and
figuring things out. There was a verse
in the song that I wrote, not knowing
what I meant by it at the time: ‘The
sun will be white tonight, tomorrow
will be red and bright.’ I had an eve-
ning flight in the middle of summer,
and the sun was literally bright red—
so very bright. I stared at it, I thought
about everything: how it had been
a year. I started crying. It was this
strange feeling of me telling myself
something from the past to my future
self, and knowing things I had no idea
I knew at the time. I just knew that the
relationship was over. It was the end of
the cycle. I’d seen the sign.”
Heart record
Jófríður speaks fondly about the col-
laborative, easygoing and spontane-
ous process of making ‘Brazil’. Writ-
ten and recorded during a personally
challenging time period, the resulting
record is something special—an ac-
complished work that captures and
expresses a complex range of feelings,
moments, experiences and thoughts.
“I didn’t think I’d be a person who
sang about love,” Jófríður says. “But
there’s something very human and
beautiful and inspiring about it. I
think it’s important to do a love re-
cord. It’s a heart record! It’s about the
heart. Breaking something, starting
something—doing something, that
then melts away. It’s about the cycles
opening and closing. Maybe wherever
you are in the cycle of a relationship,
you can place yourself in those songs.”
The album, with its themes of jour-
neys and cycles, endings and begin-
nings, marks the start of an exciting
new chapter for Jófríður. “Pascal Pinon
was about getting material written in
my bedroom out of there—anywhere,”
she says. “Samaris was finding that
the bedroom wasn’t fearless enough—
we wanted to dance and wear wonky
costumes. GANGLY is a collaborative
project between myself and two oth-
er songwriters. It’s anonymous and
highly conceptual.
“JFDR is combining all these and
finding my true voice,” she finishes.
“It’s tender and pure, like it was in the
bedroom; it’s fearless and wild like the
sixteen-year-old me who wanted to
crank it up and dance. It’s elegant, like
the carefully curated songwriting and
production of GANGLY. I want to pres-
ent all of this in my solo project. It’s a
new and long journey I’m entering.”