INTERVIEW: Becky and the Birds releases new EP 'Trasslig': "It's about being able to be yourself and express yourself fully and truly. It’s so hard for women to be just themselves."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Julius Hayes
Sweden’s Thea Gustafsson, who performs under the name Becky and the Birds today releases her new EP Trasslig. Written and produced by Gustafsson, the EP is a magnificent collection of seven quirky, left of centre tracks which riff on R&B, soul, pop and trance. Latest single ‘Paris’ brilliantly subverts the typical pop song with distorted vocals against a distant yet utterly captivating electronic, almost gospel background, while ‘Pass Me By’ is rich in soul and R&B with lush, full multi-tracked vocals and a rolling beat tying the soaring melodies together. Second single ‘Wondering’ is still as fresh as ever with it’s call-and-response melodies and smooth, 90s inspired sonics and ‘Do U Miss Me’ intrigues with its minimal chiming beats, single guitar plucks and ethereal vocals which halfway switch between vocoded anonymity to dreamy, full-bodied passion.
Gustafsson grew up in the small Swedish city of Örebro. Her introduction to music started at age 7 when she first starting learning violin, which lead to her performing in orchestras. It wasn’t until 2014 when she started attending Musikmakarna, a renowned music school in Stockholm, that she was first exposed her to pop music, including spending a year as an intern with famed Swedish producer Avicii during her second year of study. Becky and the Birds was born out of Gustafsson’s frustrating and fruitless encounters with producers and songwriters in the male-dominated music industry, releasing her first self-titled album in 2018. The release of Trasslig showcases her as one of the most intriguing and unique artists to emerge from Sweden, and we recently caught up with her to find out more.
Hi Thea. How are things in your life these days?
I’m in Sweden right now and you know we're not really in isolation here. But I've been taking the time to be as much at home as possible. Taking the time to be creative and also dig deeper into myself. It's been very therapeutic in a way to be honest. So it's very good I would say.
Massive congratulations on your EP Trasslig. It is such a beautifully woven collection of tracks. Incredible. Now I know this one is definitely for the women, but for our non-Swedish speakers can you illuminate us as to the meaning of Trasslig?
Thank you. The immediate translation would be ‘messy’ or ‘tangled’. I just thought that it was nice, because that's the way you could feel sometimes. You feel messy. You feel tangled. You feel like your ends are just everywhere and you're just tangled up, you don’t know what to do with yourself and you're a big mess basically. I thought that was a nice metaphor, especially for women because I feel like we don't have the space to be that. There's no space for us to be messy. Because then all of a sudden you are the drama queen or you're too much or you're too little or you're too complicated. Or you know, people can't work with you because you're blah blah blah. It’s so hard for women to be just themselves. Whatever that may be. You know? I will make a lyric video that will describe the whole thing in English, I will do a translation on it. But basically, it's just about being able to be yourself and express yourself fully and truly. But at the end of the day, it's not about you. It's about the society. It's about the structure and it's about the other people and whatever they might think and whatever they might say. That’s not on you. That's especially not on you because it's about women and it's about structure.
Speaking of that agenda for women your intro track on the EP ‘She's Already Crazy’, you've got that ethereal jazz and then your liquid ruby voice. It’s an absolutely delicious start, however I feel that there might be more particularly to that title. Can you talk me through a little bit about the significance of that track?
With passionate women and women who are burning for something. It's easy to be seen as crazy. And also when you have your period, and when you feel everything a bit more than, some days you're more passionate than other days and on those days, I feel like I sometimes come across either being cold or people calling other women that they're a bit crazy. Or there's something going on. ‘Oh, they're just crazy’. But when you say that about men, it's in such a different tone. So, when you see it about a man, he's probably a genius. He’s just a crazy genius. But when you say it about a woman it's not genius at all. It's not sexy. It's not nice. It's not beautiful. It's just crazy. So I like to play around with that both in being vulnerable in being crazy and owning it. I remember I was doing my laundry one day and I came up with ‘boy you’re going to make her mad cause she's already crazy’. I just came up with that and I was like ‘oh that's pretty nice’. That came naturally for me. I didn't think about that. Then I started to think about the subject and then it just took off from there basically. I couldn't really make a whole song from it. So I was like, ‘well it's a pretty nice interlude. It's a pretty nice start.’
Oh, it's a beautiful interlude. I think just from what you've said, I'm going to replace the word crazy with genius form here on in.
Yeah yeah, exactly. You got to, you know, because people are just throwing these words around but they are so different when you're talking about women. That's crazy.
Let's move onto ‘Wondering’ which I've played on repeat. I was hooked immediately on its summer afternoon beat with your incredible and seemingly easily attained high falsetto and then upon pulling apart the lyrics I learnt that it's about the loss of a loved one passing. Can you talk us through that one?
So with that one, I wrote that for my grandmother. She passed away I think it was like 2 years ago now. That was the first time I experienced loss really, and death. I'd been very privileged to not have that in my life until then. So that was a whole new experience for me and I didn't really know how to get through that because we were very close and I didn't have any tools or anything. I was really grieving at that moment and I was just like I really need some energy. I need to start living again because this is not healthy. That was very therapeutic for me and the song has gotten a second meaning now too. For me it's about loss and I'm singing basically about loss and going to heaven and stuff, but I think people have related it to not just death but missing someone. Or losing someone, the person might not die, but especially in these days we're so far away from everyone. I'm missing so many people around the world right now. It has gotten a. second meaning for me too.
What I love about that is the video that you've created with it is just so beautiful. With the two ice skaters moving around each other on the empty ice rink. It is a pure feast for the eyes and the ears. You said you've come through it and people have now replaced that wondering for themselves. Was that your idea as well for the video to make it a little more whimsical?
Actually, the director Danica Arias Kleinknecht, she's a very creative director. I think she likes the thought of people being able to make up their own story to what they're seeing. I'm a little bit like that too. When things get too clear for me I lose interest pretty fast. I like to be able to like use my fantasy and dig deeper. Also it was important for us that it wouldn't get too related to death, you know? Especially in these times too, there's so many people who are losing people that they love and I didn't want to play on that. We just figured that it would be nice to have a looser theme have beautiful movements and beautiful skaters who did their thing. We had no choreography or anything. They were free and they were just doing the things that they felt. So, everything was pretty much just on the spot.
It's absolutely beautiful and speaking of adolescence, I want to talk about your childhood. What role did music have in your early years and what made you want to make a career out of it?
I think for me there was no other way, you know? That was all, because my dad's a musician and so I would play with him when I was younger and I would go with him on small tours that he did and I would sing with him on the stage and stuff. I didn't know exactly what route I would take. But I knew that whatever I would do it would have to do something with music because it's the one thing for me. I’ve had some other jobs in my life when I was younger and it just didn’t work out. I got fired from all of them. It's not for me apparently. I just feel like I'm living so fully when I create. And it doesn't have to be music either. I like visual stuff too but, music is so therapeutic for me and as a child too. Because I've always been a little bit of a loner. Not that I had a tough time among friends or something, but I've always liked to be by myself and so I would listen in my room for hours and hours and hours on my TV and I would go down to my dad’s music room, which was kind of a sacred room. He had this vinyl record player and then he had a whole wall that was just filled with different vinyls. I would pick out a vinyl just blindly and then I would put it in and then I would lay down on the floor and I would just listen. That was one of those small experiences that I had as a child that really kind of lifted my spirit and I think they had such a huge impact on my life. I felt like ‘oh, this is what life could be and this is what music does to me and I need it’. And then I just followed my heart and followed the opportunities that were given to me and and now I'm here.
Beautiful. And I want to ask you about Becky. Now the first track on your debut self-titled EP is that spoken introduction from Becky and then of course your stage name. But I want to know who is Becky to you?
I think for me the whole Becky and the Birds project has kind of become…I wouldn't say my alter ego because that sounds so cheesy, but it still is. You know? It's the one place where I feel I could really land and just be for a moment. Because I'm always out and about, you know? I'm always doing something. I'm very energetic. I like to be on. I like to be productive and I like to do stuff and I'm also a very social person actually. So, I hang around people a lot. I love people. But when I go into writing mode or when I go into singing mode or performing mode, when I just go into this Becky and the Birds world I can feel something happening, you know? It's like a meditative space really. It just feels very sacred to me. So, I think that's why I'm doing all of this stuff myself. I produce. I write. I sing. It's like a church for me really where I can just sit and be still and create and get everything out of me and then I can go about in the world.
I like that. I've never heard it described as the church. I think that's beautiful and like you said, you are doing it all by yourself. As an independent artist, what are the pressures of being it all on you, particularly, as you mentioned for working behind the scenes as a producer and a song writer and having your voice heard as a woman?
I'm very lucky that I came into this whole climate when things were starting to change. I started to produce in like 2016 or 2017. By then, I think people started to look more at ‘oh wait, there's no women here’. People had started to acknowledge that. So, when I started it, people - well, some people - were just happy to see a young woman producing. I don't know what it would have looked like if I would have been there 10 years earlier or even just 5 years earlier. It’s been overall a very good experience and I feel like people are excited for women. But there's also this whole thing with me always having to be ten percent more, you know? I need to be better than the male producers to prove myself. Because they already have space where they could show off and no one would question them because we're so used to male producers. But for us, for women, there's not a brilliant space for that. We still need to claim our space. We still need to prove that we’re supposed to be there. I've heard this a lot of times but people are like ‘well you just got that scholarship because you're a woman’ or ‘you're just here because they needed some women to be here to even out the whole gender gap’. That's why that is still there and I think that people are still a little bit unsure about how they feel about female producers. If they really believe in them. I think that if you give that some time and if you give that a couple of years and more and more female are starting to produce, I think things will change. I think it's just about doing good work, showing up and being there. When I'm in sessions, I could talk about the fact that I'm a woman but then I need to move on, you know, and then I need to start to go to work. It’s easy to talk about it but I'm like well that's not what I'm here to do, I’m here to work so let me work. But I've gotten a lot of the time when I'm having sessions with people, they're like ‘oh I thought there was this guy and a girl. Are you the producer?’ I'm like ‘yeah, that's me’.
Lastly... what is coming up next for you?
I'm focusing on writing an album which is so exciting for me. I will use a couple of months now to just focus on writing albums, getting a full piece out there. Doing it. Getting more and more songs. I didn't release anything from 2018 to this year, and that was what I needed back then, but now I just want to release stuff. It's such a fun experience. It's so fulfilling to see things grow. So I will focus on doing that pretty quick. And then I'll do a at least one music video for the EP that I'm filming and editing myself, that's my initial focus. Then I guess we’ll see, you know, how the world will change and we'll kind of change with it.
Trasslig by Becky and the Birds is out now through 4AD. You can download and stream by clicking here.
To keep up with all things Becky and the Birds you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
