Tail Spun Tale
S Magazine, Issue 13, 2011
MINUTES BEFORE her South by Southwest festival debut in March 2009, Danish musician Oh Land was stillen route to the Austin, Texas,club where she was scheduled to perform. It was a long, transatlantic haul from her hometown of Copenhagen, and she hadn’t factored in the time it would take to clear customs, or how exactly she and her back-up singers were to get from the airport to the venue. Just as the show was about to be cancelled, they arrived.
Oh Land, whose given name is Nanna Øland Fabricius, had begun performing only a few months earlier at the behest of a cousin who was playing a show at a tiny basement bar in Copenhagen’s midtown and who needed an opener. For her SXSW audience, Fabricius stuck to her usual performance art theatrics (e.g., wrapping instruments in flowers, dipping her face in glitter, using a soap-bubble machine), and donned a giant baby pink bow on her head that her mom had made. Meanwhile, her bandmates wore blinking hats shaped like houses, courtesy of her boyfriend, artist Eske Kath. There were also umbrellas and Mary Poppinsesque dance choreography. The sight had a sweetness that, when combined with her strange melodies, moody choruses, and occasional tinny piano, elicited a darkness akin to a 1930s horror movie.
Only a handful of people were in the audience, but from onstage, it didn’t matter. Fabricius, who makes it a point never to wear contact lenses during her performances, looked out and saw only a fog hanging over the room. There was the bored-looking sound guy, the family she was crashing with, and her boyfriend. She steeled herself, thought about the distance she had travelled, and decided to put on her most brash, impassioned concert yet. As she proceeded to perform the hell out of the place, a fairy tale began to unfold. Miraculously, half of those in attendance were reps from Epic Records. One of them was Amanda Ghost, the company’s then president. When Oh Land finished, the unthinkable happened: Ghost and her colleagues invited her out to lunch for the next day.
Oh Land, whose given name is Nanna Øland Fabricius, had begun performing only a few months earlier at the behest of a cousin who was playing a show at a tiny basement bar in Copenhagen’s midtown and who needed an opener. For her SXSW audience, Fabricius stuck to her usual performance art theatrics (e.g., wrapping instruments in flowers, dipping her face in glitter, using a soap-bubble machine), and donned a giant baby pink bow on her head that her mom had made. Meanwhile, her bandmates wore blinking hats shaped like houses, courtesy of her boyfriend, artist Eske Kath. There were also umbrellas and Mary Poppinsesque dance choreography. The sight had a sweetness that, when combined with her strange melodies, moody choruses, and occasional tinny piano, elicited a darkness akin to a 1930s horror movie.
Only a handful of people were in the audience, but from onstage, it didn’t matter. Fabricius, who makes it a point never to wear contact lenses during her performances, looked out and saw only a fog hanging over the room. There was the bored-looking sound guy, the family she was crashing with, and her boyfriend. She steeled herself, thought about the distance she had travelled, and decided to put on her most brash, impassioned concert yet. As she proceeded to perform the hell out of the place, a fairy tale began to unfold. Miraculously, half of those in attendance were reps from Epic Records. One of them was Amanda Ghost, the company’s then president. When Oh Land finished, the unthinkable happened: Ghost and her colleagues invited her out to lunch for the next day.
They took down the address of Fabricius’s host family, and nothing else. They said, “At twelve o’clock, there will be a car to pick you up.” Fabricius was dazed and sceptical. She would wake up around 11:30 a.m. and act as if it were just a regular day. She had breakfast in her pyjamas, checked her email, and didn’t discuss the subject further with the others. Her subconscious was trying to protect her from being let down. Suddenly, from the bathroom, one of the back-up girls started shouting. Through the window, there was a driver in a tuxedo waiting with his town car out front.
Fabricius quickly got dressed, screwed up her eyeliner in haste, and headed outside. Her boyfriend wanted to join to make sure she wouldn’t be taken advantage of, but she insisted on going on her own. At lunch, Ghost would tell Fabricius that she wanted to sign Oh Land and make the best record possible.
TWO YEARS after the fated SXSW performance, Fabricius comes through the double doors of the penthouse at a trendy New York City hotel, dragging a hefty, rolling suitcase behind her. Onstage and in videos, she is an unmistakably classic Scandinavian beauty. Here, with her hair pulled tightly back, face make-up free, and eyebrows bleached out, she looks almost extraterrestrial. Yet her distinctive sense of style is understated: a sheer, extra-large tee and nude tank top over bedazzled denim shorts; mint green socks with floral print Doc Martens. She’s been on tour since November of last year, rarely having the indulgence of spending the night at her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, home, where she moved in January 2010. Even now, she has only a few hours before heading out of town again. The photographer quickly pulls her aside and explains her motivation for today’s shoot. “Trust my eyes”, he says.
Fabricius pulls herself up onto the make-up chair. Her hand is weighed down by chunky gold rings, which, on closer inspection, are connected by a miniature city skyline that stretches across two banded fingers. “I’ve learned a new meaning of the word busy”, says the 26-year-old, as the stylist wraps her hair in giant curlers. She slouches down, hooking her feet around the legs of her chair like a gangly child. “I often think, ‘Wow, this could be so fun if it were just somebody else.’”
She gamely puts on a revealing one-piece and moves into a glass corner of the penthouse, which offers a vast view of downtown Manhattan. Fabricius seems painfully conscious of her image, lest the reason of her act be misconstrued. “For me, I don’t ever want people to think that you get somewhere because of sex appeal. My interest is to do good music.” For someone who doesn’t believe in selling sex, she does sexy very well. In a minute, the photographer has her kneeling on a sofa, arching her back, and staring steadily into the camera.
“Pippi Longstocking was my idol when I was a child”, says Fabricius, who had worked with Danish indie label Fake Diamond Records to produce her first album, Fauna, in 2008. It’s a couple weeks later, and we’re backstage at Boston’s House of Blues. Outside, summer is still throwing around its muggy, New England weight, but inside the cavernous club, it’s cool, dark, and mostly empty. Oh Land is still on tour promoting her second album, eponymously titled, which is decidedly more up-tempo than her first. She’s waiting for sound check, so we take a seat in a room with all the food to talk about what it’s like growing up with her organ- playing father and opera-singing mother.
“I could relate to her”, says Fabricius of Astrid Lindgren’s freakishly precocious children’s book character. “Pippi Longstocking was a very lonely person. I’m also a lonely person in many ways.” Fabricius was raised more or less as an only child, since her siblings are both over a decade older. “I think Pippi accepts that. She has a dad, but he’s on the seven seas, and her mom is dead, she’s in heaven. She has two friends who are very normal and happy and pretty and doing well and who have lovely parents. She comes to their houses and gets jealous or sad sometimes that she doesn’t have her mom or dad. At the same time, she wouldn’t want to change it, because some things you can’t change. It’s just the way it is.”
Fabricius’s musician parents hadn’t gone completely missing, but they were away most evenings performing. They were around enough by day to be crucial in forming her appreciation of music. As a child, Fabricius’s father tried to teach her classical piano scales, but she resisted. “I always thought, ‘Why do I need to play a scale? It doesn’t really sound that good.’” For her, music was emotional, not intellectual. When she’d hear her father play a melody such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, she’d insist on learning it. “I had no idea what keys or chords I was playing. I was graphically remembering his fingers’ movements and how that sounded.” If her father tried something that she didn’t want to do, she’d leave the room.
Anecdotes pile up revealing her unique instinct for art. “It was never an urge to rebel or be problematic, because I was always quite interested in pleasing people, and I never really wanted to let people down”, she
says. “But if there was something that was the truth to me, I couldn’t see the other sides of it.” At the same time, she was happy to discuss music history with her father, incorporating a game where he’d play different classical songs and she’d guess whether the composer was, say, Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev or Rachmaninoff.
“Is that fun?” I ask.
“That was quite fun. I never remembered the dates. I just concerned myself with little details — like some composer had a cat — that had nothing to do with history.”
Music had been a diversion anyway from Fabricius’s first love, ballet, a calling that she had taken up with singular devotion. By ten, she had begun a professional career dancing with the Royal Danish Ballet. She quickly earned a reputation among her teachers for dying her hair inappropriate colours and being difficult to control. Once, she was banned for a year from going to the theatre.
“I had invented this game with my friend, because we were forced to
watch Wagner operas that were three hours long”, she says. “We were eleven, so we couldn’t care less.” Her mother, who sang with the royal opera, was infuriated. “She would walk from rehearsals to the school’s principals in full Carmen costume, with wig and makeup, and just be like, ‘How dare you ban my girl from watching Tannhäuser, which an eleven- year-old is not supposed to see!’ And then they got really ashamed.”
“Now I think it’s cool, but back then it was embarrassing”, she says of her mother’s reaction. “I wished they would be like all the other parents: go to museums on weekends and have dinner at the same time everyday. But my parents were kind of anarchistic. There was always some crazy creative project in my home, like, let’s rebuild the house.”
AT SIXTEEN, fully committed to a dance career, Fabricius decides to leave home and move to New York. As a compromise to her parents, she joins the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm instead. After years of intense training, she fractures her spine and slips a disc. She is eighteen and can barely walk. And so she moves back to Denmark.
“Time passed by quickly, because all the days were the same”, she says. There was waking up, spending half an hour to get down the stairs, and then lying on the kitchen floor until it was time to go back upstairs again. Despite endless treatments and visits with various doctors and experts, nobody had answers. Most of the time, she was hopped up on so many different painkillers, she felt numb. That’s what her song “Break the Chain” is about.
After two years of suffering from pain and depression, and holding on to the hope that she’d recover, a doctor finally gave her a straight answer: she’d never dance again. “Then I was like, okay, I want to try for once in my life to be unambitious”, she says. She got a job at a café and started making coffee, trying hard not to be too obsessive about making the perfect caffè latte. Six moths later, in the middle of winter, Fabricius was on her way to work when she drove past a travel agency. In the window, a poster of Thailand beckoned, advertising a tropical beach with palm trees and smiling tourists.
“It was the picture of clichéd happiness”, she says. “I thought that this was a perfect, neutral place to go. I could be a new person and nobody would ask me, ‘What went wrong with the dancing?’ I wanted to go somewhere to find what my qualities were if it wasn’t dance, because I felt that the only thing I was good at in life was dancing.” Fabricius went inside, explained how much money she’d saved up, and two days later she was on a plane to Southeast Asia. All she knew about Thailand was that it was far away and there were beautiful beaches. The journey was transformative. She made new friends, never having to explain herself
nor even having to say her name. When beach life became too easy, she sought a more challenging landscape and moved into the jungle.
“Nature is pretty hardcore”, she says. “I could’ve been killed three times an hour, by insects, plants, trees you can’t rub against.” One morning, she went for a swim at the foot of a mountain. She was completely alone, and to hear her explain it, it was the swim of a lifetime. About thirty minutes into it, a guy came running down to her, yelling about poisonous water snakes. When she returned to Copenhagen, she promptly quit her café job.
“I gained the confidence that I could do something with my life”, Fabricius says. She was now 20 years old. For the next few years, she tried everything, trying to find something new to be passionate about. She got into painting and theatre acting. She landed a role in a feature movie called White Light. She became a host for a Saturday morning children’s show. Meanwhile, she lived on bananas and Cup Noodles soup, crashing at her friends’ and parents’ places. At one point, she was so poverty stricken, she ended up on welfare
.
“Isn’t that weird, in Denmark, to be on welfare?”
“Yeah, it’s a little weird, but I didn’t feel ashamed of it”, she says. “I knew it wasn’t permanent. I’m not going to waste my time with a job I don’t care about. I’d rather be completely poor and getting good at what I want to do.”
During this period, Fabricius would typically wake up, go to the computer, and start recording in her pyjamas until she realized it was dark outside and she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet. Then she’d run out to see friends. Repeat. “I’ve always written songs in my head, and I’ve always sung, but it had never been with the purpose of being a musician”, she says. “Then I suddenly felt like I started to have my own identity in the music. I knew what I wanted it to sound like and be like — instead of just enjoying singing whatever song.”
In 2008, after secretly recording some songs using Garage Band, she borrowed her parents’ car to play a CD of her tracks she had burned, to hear it in a different environment, privately. “I was scared of being passionate again, and scared of—” she stops. “I’d just lost everything. I have a constant fear that everything can disappear at any second.” When Fabricius returned the vehicle, she forgot to take the disc out. “My mom called and said, ‘What is this music? It’s amazing.’ She doesn’t get impressed very easily. She’s been a musician that long, and it’s not like with other people who can play Itsy Bitsy Spider with their parents and they clap their hands. I think that that’s what I had needed to start taking it seriously.”
When she recalls Austin, Fabricius still sounds incredulous. “There’s no likelihood of this happening”, she says. “In Denmark, when you get admitted to a festival, you’re naturally going to play on a great stage at a great time. I didn’t know there were thousands of bands, and chances are that you’ll land an 8 a.m. slot on the outskirts of Austin. I was naïve. I just thought something amazing was going to happen.”
To explain the improbability of this scenario, Farra Matthews, a former A&R rep for Sony who first saw Oh Land perform in Denmark before giving her Epic colleagues a heads up, explains that because the festival has become so commercial, the bands that play tend to already be huge. “No one gets signed at SXSW”, she says. No one, of course, except Oh Land.
“There are three qualities for a great artist; it’s a face, it’s a voice, and it’s a song”, Ghost told The Guardian earlier this year, discussing Oh Land. “If she’s baffled as to why I signed her, she has all three.”
The first thing Fabricius did after being signed was pack up her bags and embark on a yearlong journey to write. Her label gave her one
dictum: write as many songs as you can. She skipped around London, New York, and Los Angeles, working with various producers. “I wrote a million songs, completely different, some very folky, some completely electronic”.
“So this could’ve been an entirely folk album?”
“It could also have been a really, really pop album, because I can write those songs, but I chose not to take those songs.”
Again, she was alone, perhaps the most alone she’s ever been. “It was both the loneliest, but also the most intense time. The time I spent with people was in making songs, where you just open up that much quickly. I got really close to a lot of people, but I didn’t have normal relationships with anybody. I didn’t have that kind of, can we meet next Sunday for brunch. I haven’t tried that in five years.”
“DENMARK IS a pretty small place”, says Fabricius. “You hear all these stories about the Americans, how you sell your soul to the devil. It’s a little bit like The Little Mermaid story: you sell your voice and then you end up unhappy.” In fact, in the original version that Fabricius grew up with, by fellow Dane Hans Christian Anderson, the little mermaid pays the ultimate price, sacrificing her life for the thing she loves. In Fabricius’s case, she’s managed to avoid certain tragedy. I point out that tragedy is avoided in the Disney retelling too.
“Yeah, she gets happily married and becomes a human being. I’d much rather just remain a mermaid”, she says, laughing.
Over a month later, back in New York, Fabricius is still touring as ever, headlining her show at the Bowery Ballroom. Her drummer Hans and keyboardist Tore, who alternately accessorize with animal masks and train conductor hats, flank her. Boyfriend Kath’s much-praised installation, a large bouquet of helium balloons with images projected on each one, makes its expected appearance. Behind Fabricius, the Nightingale String Quartet, a bevy of young Danish musicians, pull their bows across stringed instruments (they’re special for the evening). Like a true performer, Fabricius never squanders the spotlight. Her carefully self- selected costumes — she has a fondness for Acne, Adam, and Missoni, as well as custom pieces — are extensions of her body, moving naturally with her as she undulates and jumps across the stage. Dolman sleeves, flowing skirts, and extra-long fringe that follow her like a cape: her movements are gorgeous, evincing both classical training and rambunctious moods. A lift of her arms evokes a celestial spirit ready to float off into the ether. This is when you realize: ballet may be a thing of her past, but the girl is still dancing.
|
|