Interview by Luisa Mercier
After listening to her third album “We Become Ourselves”, I was truly entranced by Rebekka and it is with great pleasure that I got the chance to interview her.
Hi Rebekka, I really adore your latest record, one of my most listened albums of 2012. Since most of our readers are not familair with you or your music, would you like to introduce yourself?
Thank You- I´m glad you like it! I am a Norwegian musician living in Stockholm, Sweden. I make music for films, theatre and modern ballet, and tour with my own records all over Europe. I´ve released four studio albums, two solo albums.
In comparison to their previous records, maybe this is more minimal as far as music is concerned? Was that a conscious choice?Yes, I wanted to simplify and let the stories and the voice have more space and emphasis in the sound picture. I think simplicity also is a matter of courage for me, to dare to leave the music naked, to trust that the songs are strong enough in them selves. That took me a while.
What’s your songwriting process made up of?It is a compilation of my diaries; stories and dreams and impressions in my head. Small sentences or excerpts from poems, books, articles that inspire me and trigs something. So the lyrics are gathered over an extended period, the music comes more rapidly. My composing process is at first quite based upon intuition, as if i´m shooting an arrow into the darkness. Then the intellect and system and structure has to come in, and that´s when i go out in the darkness and search for the arrow and try to figure out why it landed where it did. I often feel I don´t understand what i´m writing about before long after I wrote it.
Thanks! I wanted to have an organic, hand made instrument on the cover, and the idea is that the organ that I am playing, which is made out of branches and stones and nature elements, is like a human heart, a human organ. The organ itself is built by swedish artist Gustaf von Arbin.
I also love the video for “Use My Body While It’s Still Young”, what’s the theme of the song?I don´t like to explain the meaning of my songs, that only takes away the magic. But I can tell you that it is a “memento mori” – remember that you will die one day, so embrace your life right now.
What are your main influences?My childhood, the stories and songs told and sung to me by my grandmother and my mother. The nature. People.
How does your past experience as actress affect your music?I think it affects my way of telling stories. The lyrics need to have a story, layers of meaning to me, they can’t just be word games.
It probably also affects my way of working with visuality on stage, with set design and costume etc, quite a lot.
Yes, I intend to follow up “We Become Ourselves” with an album with solely female voices, some sort of an answer, -as this one was circling quite a lot around masculinity and the male voices. I´m also adapting songs and ideas from the album into ballet pieces and special theatre concerts that will premiere in 2014.