INTERVIEW: Agnes on her return with remarkable new album 'Magic Still Exists': "Music is a space where there's no limit, you can do and be whatever you want to and for me that is magic."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Swedish singer-songwriter Agnes (full name Agnes Carlsson) has been releasing music since 2005 when she was just 16 and over the years has scored 12 top 40 hit singles in her home country, including two number ones as well as two number one albums. Globally she is best known for her global breakthrough smash hit ‘Release Me’ in 2008 which peaked at number 3 in the UK and number 26 in Australia.
In October this year she released her fifth studio album, Magic Still Exists, her first studio album in almost ten years. It is a triumphant return and has been heralded as her greatest album to date. Melding disco, funk and electropop interspersed with experimental, atmospheric interludes and closing with the majestic piano ballad title track, the album is a joy to listen to from beginning to end.
Lyrically the album explores humanity and spirituality to form a genre Agnes has coined ‘spiritual disco’. “Mixing spiritual lyrics with disco felt both tempting and necessary,” she says. “Disco is freedom, to express oneself and not be ashamed. But the music was also something I needed to do to grow spiritually and strengthen myself. It was an opportunity to take what I have within me, multiply it and just play with it.”
One of this year’s most outstanding comebacks, Agnes has proven she is one of the most assured, confident and smartest artists in Sweden’s exceptional pop landscape today. The album has been worth the wait, and we recently caught up with Agnes to find out more.
Agnes, how very exciting is it to be chatting with you. And how even better is that you are singing us onto the dance floor once again
Oh, thank you so much!
Obviously you have just released like the most killer album Magic Still Exists, which is being applauded across the globe as one of the albums of the year. Can you talk me through your initial desire when creating this album? Because there's just audio and visual insanity going on there
Actually, it's been a pretty long process, it started in 2015. I was 26 and I decided to take time off from music. I started [music] when I was 16, so at 26 I felt so strongly I was at a crossroad in my life. I was doubting and I was not knowing what I was doing. I felt I needed to grow as a person, but also as a creative being and to do that I just needed to have some time off. When I was like a teenager I didn’t have time to just go out travelling or do whatever I wanted to do. So at first it was just travelling, or doing other things that didn't have anything to do with music or feeling like I have a spotlight in my face. Also, I didn't know if I was going to come back to music. I didn't know. But after two years, I felt ‘no, I am an artist, I want to make songs, but I just have to find my way of doing it’. Then it was a journey to go into the studio and to write and create without being on a schedule, because earlier in my life I was always on a schedule. I wrote like 100 songs and none of them will see the light of day, but for me that was a really healing process to just get to know myself and what kind of lyrics do I want to write, how should it sound. I tried so many different things, and bit by bit, piece by piece, everything fell into place. And I understood I want to make an album where I sing and talk about this process of who am I? What do I want to do? What are the scary things? For me, this album is so much about liberation and to try to get away all those fears. The visuals were a big part of it as well. I wanted to make costumes that were too much so I felt like I had space to just be you know?
That's incredible. I'm so glad you bought in the visual element of it as well. I’m getting these beautiful Xanadu Grace Jones kind of vibe. It's just power in all its femininity, It's gorgeous. You mentioned owning that discovery and who you want to be and I want to talk about ‘Selfmade’ because as a track, all over it the melody, the beat, you're morphing that parallel space time. Can you talk me a little bit about that song and where it sits with you?
I haven't performed it live yet, so I'm looking forward to being on stage and perform it. I started singing ‘Selfmade’ on the beat of ‘24 Hours’. I do that pretty often, I take instrumentals from other songs or my own songs and then I write a new song on top of it. We live in the era of being self made, for me it's been a process, a lot of people said to me, ‘oh, it was so brave, when you when you decided to take time off, wasn't it scary?’ And I was like, ‘No, that was not scary to take that decision’. The scary part is to be in a process of you want to make something, you want to do something, but you don't have a clear vision of what you want to make. If you are a creative being, when you know what you are doing then your energy just gets focused, and everything is going in the same direction. But when you don't know, you don't have a clear vision, that energy just doesn't have any focus. And that can be so painful. It can also be very shameful for a lot of people to talk about it and say ‘I don’t know where I'm going, I don't have a clear vision’. It's so important to talk about it, because that is a healing process. We live in an era where people are supposed to know what they're doing, they are supposed to know ‘this is the next step in my life’. And if you don't, then 'bye, bye’. For me, I think it's beautiful if you're brave to be able to stay in that process, you don't have to release anything until you feel it's ready. If you can stand that, going out on the other side it's gonna make you so much stronger. So ‘Selfmade’ is the frustration of everything is supposed to go so, so fast. I believe that it's so important sometimes to just calm everything down and take your time. It’s so important.
That's incredibly gorgeous to hear coming off such a such a euphoric dance album. You've pretty much just answered my next question, but I was curious, when you took the break, was there ever that risk for you thinking will my creativity just wash away? Or will it be there if I quietly cultivate it?
No, that wasn't my fear. For me, my fear was more about…when I started to have the vision of what I wanted to make in the beginning, I knew what I wanted to do, but when I went into the studio, it didn't sound like I wanted it to sound. So that was a frustration, and it was my fear. Will I ever get to the point where I feel like, I'm satisfied? Will it sound like what I have in my head? And bit by bit it started to sound like I wanted it to.
It's an album with such integrity, and I'm sure that’s because you really held out and you cultivated it. Latest single ‘24 Hours’, which you just discussed, hammers to the heart, it's such a call to attention. Can you tell me a little bit about the creation of that track?
When I started to work on the album, and when I started to know what I wanted to do, I wanted to have lyrics that were more soulful, spiritual. And for the production, that's why I love disco, because for me, disco is the light in the tunnel. I wanted to make an album for myself, where I felt like I can see the light in the tunnel, I don't want to stand here and just dig my own grave. I want to make music where I feel strong afterwards. I feel like a big part of me is drag. I love to take a little percent of myself and just turn it up to 1,000%. I played a lot with that with ‘24 Hours’ and especially for the video. The production was actually completely different in the beginning, in the end I just kept the chorus. I wrote a new verse, and then we changed the production to it. It sounded completely different in the beginning.
You can definitely hear that on the album how you experiment with sound. Your sound has come a long way from when you started, which is what we do as humans, we evolve. It's natural. I want to talk to you a little bit about title track ‘Magic Still Exists’ because it closes the club with a piano that feels as if it was just cast off stage from Phantom of the Opera. I love it. And then there's your voice, it's such an interesting, but perfect, choice to end the album. Was that song always due to be recorded so bare, so final heartbeat as it is?
Yes, ‘Magic Still Exists’ was the last song we wrote for the album. I knew the title [of the album] was Magic Still Exists and I was like ‘we have to have a song with the title’. I've been thinking about the lyrics for it for a long time and we did three different songs with the title ‘Magic Still Exists’ and two of them were up tempo, but I didn’t want to end the album with an up tempo song. A lot of the songs, there’s a lot going on, a lot of things happening and I wanted to have one song where you just focused on a piano, the voice. Also for me that song is like going back in time 100 years like you’re coming out of a war and you just came out on the other side. Everything just fell into place, all of us have been in this weird corona place and no one knew what was going to happen. That song, it's like we came out on the other side, you know and it felt beautiful to end the whole album with that.
As you were saying, that's what disco is for you. It's the light at the end of the tunnel. And suddenly I'm seeing all the Marvel Avengers standing outside of a catastrophic tunnel with that song playing. That's brilliant!
We were so nervous because it was me and Salem [co-producer Salem Ak Fakir], Salem is playing the piano. When we recorded it, we did everything live. From the start to the end it was one take, and we were like, ‘if we if we fuck it up in the middle, we have to go all the way back!’ Both of us were so nervous in the studio, it felt like we were going live. I don't know how many takes we took. That doesn't happen very often now, when you record songs often you go in and you do takes but sometimes you go in and change the verse or something. But this was from the from the beginning to the end.
You can definitely hear that in the recording as well. There's so much weight behind such a bare song it's incredible. On that note, what is the magic that still exists for you? Is it music? Is it life? Is it continuing on?
Music for me is a space where there's no limit of what you can do. You can play so much and for me that is magic. There is no roof, you can do and you can be whatever you want to. All of us have that in our lives, if it's music, or I love to go out in the nature, that is magic for me, all of us. It's so important to find that in our lives where we feel that magic. Sometimes the magic is in the small things like, ‘today the sun is up and I just feel it's magical’. I do believe that magic still exists and we can find it in different places in our lives.
We can find it in different places and we can definitely find it on your album. Agnes, before I leave you, the album is well and truly out. I'm dancing, I'm crying, I'm listening, so is the world. What is coming up for you next?
Right now we are planning a tour. It's going to be next year and we're going to go out with it in a couple of weeks. And I will just try to make time to go into the studio and write more songs. That's what I want to do. I just had to remind myself, okay, you're an artist and it's not only about writing songs, there's other pieces as well! I just feel like a lot of things happened while I was making the album and I just want to continue writing new songs.
Magic Still Exists is out now. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Agnes you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
