Bjork: Foraging for inspiration

BJORK: Well, I know I listen to it when I’m a troll. I think we’re all a troll sometimes—we sometimes feel like a delicate cat or bird or something, and sometimes a troll. And when we feel like a troll, we want to just jump up and down with our fist in the air and get some cathartic release. It’s important to dance regularly, all the way to your old age, as part of your lifestyle.

I get very excited when I hear something [new]. Nature has made us in a way that we change every seven years—we have a totally new set of cells, we’re different people. And I think it’s important to push our emotional and psychological growth all the way until we’re 85—or however long we live— to be aware of it and open, and to throw away enough garbage in our lives that we can keep growing. Scientists who have studied the brain notice that if you listen to a new song you’ve never heard before, your brain makes a new territory for it. If you only listen to your old favorite songs, the music part of your brain doesn’t grow.

think all music has no limits— it’s about your imagination and your mindset. I think you can do any genre in a stagnant way, and you can do every genre in an imaginative way. So maybe that’s not about the genre so much as whatever you put into the song you are making is there, but if you don’t put it there, it’s not there.

To be honest, I’ve always done that, since I was a teenager. I was in punk bands, and we were on an indie label in Iceland—it wasn’t about making money. If somebody needed a poster, I would make a poster; if somebody needed an album cover, somebody made an album cover. I come from this DIY background, since I was 14 years old, where you don’t have to sell your soul to the corporations to be a musician. This kind of mythology of the corporate record company coming on a white horse to sign you and [save you], but then if they drop you, you are a loser . . . it’s a fiction. It’s a totally fabricated drama that has nothing to do with music. I feel very blessed that I was 14 and surrounded by people who were older than me, so the philosophy from the beginning was: It’s better to have total creative control and sell three copies than to compromise.

To be honest, I’ve always done that, since I was a teenager. I was in punk bands, and we were on an indie label in Iceland – it wasn’t about making money. If somebody needed a poster, I would make a poster; if somebody needed an album cover, somebody made an album cover. I come from this DIY background, since I was 14 years old, where you don’t have to sell your soul to the corporations to be a musician. This kind of mythology of the corporate record company coming on a white horse to sign you and [save you], but then if they drop you, you are a loser... it’s a fiction. It’s a totally fabricated drama that has nothing to do with music. I feel very blessed that I was 14 and surrounded by people who were older than me, so the philosophy from the beginning was: it’s better to have total creative control and sell three copies than to compromise.