IR staff writer Tobias Munthe sits down with Icelandic songbird Ólöf Arnalds to discuss the pleasures and terrors of performing live, motherhood, botched school recitals and playing well with others.

Published in the 2008 autumn issue of Iceland Review – IR 46.03. Interview by Tobias Munthe, photo by Páll Stefánsson.

Tobias Munthe: You just got back from a concert in Athens where you were playing with Björk. How did that happen and how was it?

Ólöf Arnalds: I just got an e-mail from her manager asking me to do it. It was short notice but I decided to jump at the opportunity and it was great fun. We played at the Indoor Olympic Stadium and there was a crowd of around five or six thousand people.

TM: Isn’t it intimidating playing in front of such a huge crowd?

ÓA: Well, it’s not the biggest crowd I’ve played for. There were around 25, 000 people at the Náttúra concert in June [held in Reykjavík with Björk and Sigur Rós]. I just look into the crowd and try connect with, say, ten or 20 people that I choose, who look like they are listening well and who I can feel I’m relating to.

TM: Would you say you’re an extrovert?

ÓA: Shyness has never been an issue for me, although being an extrovert has sometimes been very much of an issue!

TM: How did your relationship with music start?

ÓA: It started by learning to play the violin and it was very painful for me to perform at school concerts because I was such a perfectionist. I didn’t have a quiet enough mind to practice as much as I would have wanted to, but I still wanted to do well, which is a little bit of a contradiction. If I played a false note at concerts I would literally see red and my knees would begin shaking and the bow would start jumping on the strings and I would leave the stage crying. I think I went through a continuous catharsis with this between the ages of 13 and 16. Finally I stopped being terrified of the stage.

TM: Are you still a perfectionist?

ÓA: I am still a perfectionist and my aesthetics revolve a lot around detail, but then again I am no longer dealing with music that’s written by other people. Now I’m playing music that I write myself. If there’s a wrong note I can just improvise around it, I use it and turn it into something else. I think I’ve just found a genre that suits my abilities much better.

TM: At what point did you decide you’d make a career in music?

ÓA: I was 12 years old when I decided. Of course I had my doubts. It’s a bit like believing in God, you believe and then you have your doubts and then you believe again.

TM: While you’ve been on the music scene for several years, the release of your album Vid og vid last year brought your own music to a much wider audience. Was this a landmark for you?

ÓA: Yes. Just to get through that barrier of finding that what you make—your creations—are worth showing to other people and to start believing in that. Immediately after that, I began to think of the next step, the need to learn more, understand more and investigate. I saw this as just the first step on a very long road.

TM: Your sound on that album is acoustic, folksy and quite unique. Is that a style you’re going to stick with?

ÓA: When I was making and writing the songs I wasn’t thinking in styles. That comes afterwards. The recording style was very determined; I wanted to use tape and wanted to set the rules up against me a little. I recorded both singing and guitar at the same time to make it as live and immediate as possible. I like the danger of whole takes. In the future, the style of my recordings might change because I want to add more musicians and to deal with different things, but I think that the core is the singing and the storytelling.

You can read the remainder of this interview in the 2008 autumn issue of Iceland Review – IR 46.03. New subscribers to the magazine receive the highland guidebook Adventure in Iceland as a gift. Click here to subscribe.

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