| w mag | | A wooded suburb a half hour outside of Manhattan is the last place anyone would expect Björk to call home. As one of the world’s most eccentric pop stars, the is an unlikely resident of a community where a giant banner promoting the local Presbyterian church strawberry festival greets passers by, and where banker’s wives power-walk with their Baby Joggers around the hilly terrain. Even more surprising, however, is that the 1920s stone cottage she shares with artist Matthew Barney and their 21-month-old daughter, Isadora, first right in. An old-school bicycle with a baby seat is propped against the house’s entrance. The sprawling backyard holds an oversize rubber baby pool, a lush pink rose-bush, a gazebo and a hummingbird feeder. There’s not a swan in sight, just the neighbour’s strutting peacock, a frequent visitor. At the kitchen table, strewn with the Sunday edition of The New York Times, the fair-haired Isadora, under the watch of her Icelandic nanny, munches on an egg in her high chair, which is littered with Cheerios. Aside from a set of turntables next to the stove and a photograph of waxy male genitalia propped against the kitchen wall (flanked by two pairs of baby galoshes, no less), it’s the portrait of domesticity. Until, that it, Björk appears, fresh from a photo shoot to promote her new album. The spritelike singer is wearing a rainbow-coloured thrift-shop dress, torn black fishnets and black elf shoes. A small army of Icelandic friends, who moonlight as hair and makeup stylists, swarm around her with a camera, documenting her architectural hairdo for future reference and chattering furiously in Icelandic. Björk fires up the cappuccino machine, then leads the way up a winding staircase, past her recording studio, to the living room. Though Barney is nowhere to be seen, his tastes are reflected in the room’s décor: walls painted pink, a gigantic white and pink glass chandelier, and a dining room table set with two candlelike sculptures and a pair of white owl paintings over the fireplace. Taking a sear, Björk nervously coos a few birdlike bars. So has the Icelandic superstar, who wore the infamous swan dress to the Oscars and spent the summer of 2001 living in an aluminium igloo in Greenland, forsaken her oddball ways for suburban bliss? “I woke up one morning and I had this mania”, says Björk who was living in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District at the time. “I was like a woman obsessed for two weeks. I just had to find a place in the front or in nature or I would die – now I found this place in a matter of days. Afterwards I found out I was pregnant, and I was like, Okay, that’s why.” Famously shy, Björk is an extremely thoughtful interview subject, pondering each question and giving long, meandering answers. At 38, she has been in the music business for 27 years, having released her first record at 11. In her teens, she formed a series for punk bands, including the internationally successful Sugarcubes, while also features her ex-husband, Thor Jonson, with whom she has an 18-year old son, Sindri. Her sixth solo album, Medulla, will bow in late summer, and true to form, she has veered toward the experimental. The album is strictly a capella. Drew Daniel, one half of the San Francisco electronic duo Matmos, who has worked with Björk for more than three years, says she arrived at her decision to use only voices late in the recording process. “I remember her rocking out to the section of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’ that was just mouth noises”, he recalls. Along with his partner, M.C. Schmidt, Daniel and Björk tried “beatboxing”, or singing the instrumentals into one of her compositions. “We could just tell it was closer to what she wanted”, Daniel says. “With Björk, emotion is absolutely key. She’ll sacrifice a full orchestra if she thinks it’s clogging the mix. This record is the extreme example of that.” “I just got really bored with instruments,” she says, licking her lips in a giant circle, one of her quirky by endearing facial tics. “I started doing everything with my voice. The suddenly I didn’t want to work with any musicians, which is a bit weird. I only wanted to work with vocalists. She was inspired, she says, by paganism, and the rather esoteric idea of returning to a universe that is entirely human – without tools or religion or nationalities. “I wanted the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh,” she says, pumping her fist. “We could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and another person would sing a beat and then the next people sing a melody, and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave. It’s quite rootsy,” she adds, rolling the “r” for emphasis in her native fashion. The resulting Medulla is pure Björk – minus the club vibe. Gorgeous layers of her warbly, angelic voice complement the guest vocalists, including Rahzel of the Roots, Japanese beatbox artist Dokaka, and the Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, known for her breathy intonations. Björk counts her 2001 move to New York from London – an escape from her relentless paparazzi who would sleep in her bushes – as an influence on the album’s isolationist feel. The intensely patriotic reaction to the United States to September 11 also played a part. “It was like wherever you stood, you would turn your head looking from left to right and you’d see at least 27 flags,” she recalls. “It was just so scary. Being from somewhere else, it kind of reminded you of Nazi time.” Although Björk doesn’t mention Barney as a factor, it’s hard to imagine that the 37-year-old art-world darling – whose Guggenheim exhibition, “The Cremaster Cycle” (a nine-year creation of his own alternative universe), drew rave reviews last year – hasn’t affected her artistically. She insists his influence is not as literal as outsiders would like to think. “Id you are happy and you are in love, obviously it’s going to have an effect on your work”, she says. “I think we probably influence each other on a very human level, the way any boy would affect any girl. Not sort of, ‘Oh, now I’m going though a pink period, and you’re going through a pink period’.” She says, gesturing to the pale-pink walls around her. “Nothing artificial or literal like that. It’s more nourishment and me doing my work and being nourished. It’s a very different place than to be malfunctioning and then having to make something.” Björk then begs off any more Barney questions. “I don’t want to be stingy,” she says apologetically. “We’re quite selfish about what we have”. A topic she will delve into, however, is acting – and her determination never to do it again, following the oft-brutal making of Dancer in the Dark. “There was a lot of cruelty, not just to me but inside that group, to each other,” she says. “Really nasty and backstabbing”. She’ll also talk about the Olympics in Athens, where she has been invited to perform at the opening ceremonies. “I’m trying to write a song where the words don’t say ‘We Are the World,’ or ‘Ebony and Ivory,’” she says with a laugh. Of course, the song Björk composes might not be a commercial hit. She’s never had a smash hit in the States, but she’s perfectly happy to keep it that away. “I never out to please anybody or lick anybody’s ass or anything,” she says, adding that she’s grown accustomed to being misunderstood. “There are a lot of people who just don’t get me, but there’s also a lot of people who do. So I don’t really feel I have the right to ask for more.” | | |
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