Spring always looks great, but this year it will even sound very good: two women with foreign-sounded names and whose music I really like, are going to release an album in May.
First Swedish artist Lykke Li is planning to release her new album in May, and she considers it as the third of a trilogy, following ‘Youth Novels’ in 2008 and ‘Wounded Rhymes’ in 2011. She explained this while talking to NME: ‘I see my albums as a trilogy, with ‘Youth Novels’ as the first one and hopefully this one as the last in this chapter.’ Hopefully, it’s not the last one of her musical career! Recently she played in a Swedish movie, the crime thriller ‘Tommy’, and when musicians have a double career I always wonder which path they may eventually choose. But she got more specific about her next album: ‘It’s always about me and the guilt and the shame and the hurt and the pride and the confusion of being a woman.’…’I always feel like I’ve been slightly misunderstood. As a woman you get judged for appearances or things like that I don’t really care about. If anything I want to be seen as a singer-songwriter rather than a pop artist. I really feel like I’ve found my voice.’
I really liked her second album ‘Wounded Rhymes’, and I was apparently not the only one, as I remember a huge crowd of fans waiting in front of the store for her performance at Amoeba. I have never considered her as another of these pop artists that pop up every year and disappear (or persist like a bad virus), no Lykke Li doesn’t even have an extraordinary voice, I am talking about the organ here, but she has a voice, a real and a very interesting one, mixing modernity and eternal classics. I can’t wait.
Then there is Sharon Van Etten who will release ‘Are We There’ in May according to NME. She is the one with the great stunning crystallin voice, but she doesn’t overuse it, she is smart and subtle, and ‘Tramp was one of the remarkable albums of 2012. To record this new and self-produced album, Sharon Van Etten revealed to NME that she used instruments used by two music legends, John Lennon and Patti Smith and invited guests including Torres’ Mackenzie Scott, Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Efterklang affiliate Peter Broderick. ‘I decided I needed to prove to myself that it was my songwriting’… ‘My writing’s getting better and the arrangements are getting weirder, in a good way.’
So fans should be delighted. A Tumblr dedicated to Sharon wildly speculates on the songs that may or may not be featured on this follow-up, songs that she sang live or during her tour with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, yep! Nick Cave, and that was probably an epic tour. So according to F Yeah! Sharon Van Etten, ‘Nothing will Change’, ‘Tarifa’, ‘Your Love is Killing Me’, ‘You Know me Well’, ‘Pay my debts’, ‘Afraid of Nothing’, ‘Break Me’, as well as a new song she performed at the Indie Roots Music festival Pickathon, and may be ‘This Is Too Right’, Tell Me’, ‘Heart In The Ground’, ‘Damn Right’, ‘Carry On/Oh My Love’ could be on the record. You can all find them on Youtube, but I prefer not to spoil everything in advance. The month of May us gonna be glorious.