They started out as a bunch of low-key songs filed away in the back of his mind, but but the time Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi Birgisson completed his solo album, the energy levels were an awful lot higher, he tells BRIAN BOYD
For a squirm-inducing look at how not to conduct an interview with four reticent and bemused Icelanders, see the YouTube post of Sigur Rós’s appearance on on NPR’s Bryant Park Project in the US. It’s an interviewer’s worst nightmare come to life.
JÓN “JÓNSI” Birgisson has a lot of compartments in his head. “There’s one for ambient stuff, one for electronic stuff, one for acoustic stuff and one for rock stuff,” says the 35-year-old Icelandic singer. With his band Sigur Rós on downtime at the moment, Jónsi (as he’s known to everyone) took the time to flick through what he had stored in these compartments over the years and to his astonishment he found that he had 27 songs. A solo album was already there.
“It’s funny, but I do put songs into different categories, it’s the only way I can remember which song is in which category,” he says. “These are songs which I would have written over the past 10 years of being in the band but were never going to be Sigur Rós songs. With the band we do everything together, we’re like a very democratic small commune. You don’t arrive in the studio with Sigur Rós with a song already written – that never happens. That’s just the way it works. So I had all these songs – some very old, some very new – ready to go.”
The only thing he really knew about his Go album was that he wanted to get away from, what he describes as "that sort of floaty, dreamland sound Sigur Rós are associated with". He's been angered of late by how he feels the band's Hoppipollasong has been "raped" by TV. "We allowed the Planet Earthprogramme to use it, but it seems that TV in Britain doesn't have to ask permission to use a song if it's in the background – and it seemed to us that every single programme was using Hoppipolla."
He thought the best approach for his solo album would be a folky/acoustic affair. “This was mainly because most of those 27 songs were from the ‘acoustic’ compartment,” he says. “However, things didn’t quite work out as expected.”
Two people were vital to the final shape and structure of Go– producer Nico Mulhy (who comes from a contemporary classical background) and the drummer Samuli Kosminen (who, although Finnish, plays with the Icelandic band Múm).
“The first time I met Nico he came around to my place and he had this laptop with him. All the songs I had were written either for acoustic guitar or a simple piano, but he started messing around with strings, brass and woodwind – but using these sounds in a very different way – and we did up the basis of five complete songs that night. So, already, the album had altered from how I initially thought it would sound,” says Jónsi.
The biggest difference, though, came with the arrival of drummer Kosminen. “Samuli had no idea of what the songs were like when he turned up at the studio,” he says. “He arrived with this big suitcase full of toys and suddenly there was this big rhythmic energy to the songs thanks to what he was doing. He’s really spontaneous and inventive and he gave this album a real sense of energy and propulsion. At this stage, I was far away from where I thought I’d be, but really enjoying how the songs were being changed by the percussion.”
Go is divided into upbeat and downbeat songs. “It’s funny the way it worked out, but all the quicker songs seem to be about this joyful and youthful sense of spontaneity – that sort of spark of youth which means you’re not afraid of doing anything and you think you’re capable of doing whatever you want to do. It’s a real sort of ‘realise your dreams’ sentiment. But with the slower songs, they’re all about the fear we all have inside ourselves about trying to realise our dreams. And the older you get, it seems the less spontaneous you get – you no longer have that ‘I can do anything’ feeling you have in your youth,” says Jónsi.
There's a real sense of giddiness to the album – it's a different beast entirely to the more ponderous and orchestral-laden work of his main band – and there's a real pop-rush feel to the proceedings. "It does get a bit frenetic at times, but in a good way," he says. "I suppose a feeling of release, a feeling of just doing this to see how it goes and not really worrying too much about it. It really does rock along at times and there's urgency to a song such as Animal Arithmetic– which is a very different way of doing things for me."
With Sigur Rós, Jónsi has written almost exclusively in Icelandic and his own made-up language, Hopelandish, but most of Go is in English. Jónsi lives in Iceland with his American boyfriend, the artist Alex Somers, and the two communicate exclusively through English.
“I suppose it was a challenge for me to write lyrics in English – which was in keeping with the challenge of bringing out a solo album,” he says. “It’s like a mental exercise for me because you have to get your mind ticking over in English. I do decide beforehand whether a song is going to be in English or Icelandic, and maybe writing lyrics in English is good for me because I’m going to be using the language in a different way. Look at Abba lyrics and you can see that.”
A tour to support Gowill see Jónsi travelling around the US in April for a month or so before hitting the European festival circuit. "I'm trying to get as many people as possible who played on the album on to the tour, and, just like Sigur Rós shows, I want to make the show different from the traditional rock show. We'll be doing a lot of projections and visual stuff and I've been talking to this really cool video designer called Leo Warner about how far we can go with this. I still don't know exactly how it will turn out though – I just know it will be different," he says.
He’s wearily aware that the release of the solo album will prompt many a “Sigur Rós to split” story. “No, there is no split, none at all,” he says. “We’ve already planned out the next Sigur Rós album – it’s going to be a back-to-basics affair. And we’re recording it in a swimming pool.”
Go by Jónsi is out today
