Interview: First Aid Kit

There are those who’d insist Swedish sister-sister duo First Aid Kit are just the perfect band. Wise, winding, and fit to burst with country-tinged folksy sweetness, Johanna and Klara Söderberg — 21 and 18 respectively — seem incapable of making a bad song. Or at least if they are, they haven’t made it yet: new album The Lion’s Roar is a charm from start to finish, each tormented ditty as swooningly delightful as the last, evoking Fleet Foxes drifting into Enid Blyton’s back garden on a crumpled oak leaf. We dialled in shortly after they touched down from the States, following a string of dates supporting Lykke Li in unprecedentedly large venues, to chat Elliott Smith, bastard Youtube commenters and growing up on the road. Also, they’re looking for a European sound-person to replace their dad. They wanted me to mention that.

* * *

I was reading is that your mother spent five years in Middlesbrough as a child. How did that come about?

J: Our grandfather’s a seaman’s priest, so he went around a lot of different places. Our mum spent part of our childhood in the Netherlands, too.

Do you think the fact your parents travelled about a bit has had an effect on how your music sounds?

K: Not really. I mean, our dad was a musician in the eighties, so we’ve always had a lot of music around us, and we’ve always lived with the idea of having a music career as a possibility. We have very creative parents and we listened to a lot of great music like The Velvet Underground and Patti Smith and Elliott Smith when we were kids. So I think that moved us in the right direction.

I think a lot of young people, before they hit 15 or 16, tend to listen almost exclusively to pop music. I know before that age I certainly would’ve seen something like Elliott Smith as a bit too deep and depressing.

K: (laughs) We still think it’s quite depressing.

J: It’s one of the most depressing things you can listen to, but it’s so good. Our parents listened to Elliott Smith when we were growing up, so I think we have a different approach to him than other people have.

K: Yeah, but at the same time, when we were 14 emo was very popular, so that kinda music really was what people our age listened to.

J: Not saying that Elliott Smith is emo. I don’t really know what that is.

K: Me neither, but that kind of depressing music was popular at that time. And Bright Eyes was counted as emo too.

Was there ever any possibility of making music that wasn’t down quite such a windy and forlorn path?

J: I think there are definitely parts of our music that are like that. I was actually thinking of something Elliott Smith said — this is not a direct quote — but it was that his music had to have sadness in it, so that the hope and the happiness would stand out. And I can agree with that. For us, music is a therapeutic thing. We write about stuff that we’re going through that’s hard and that helps us get through it. And it’s the way we listen to music, too. It’s a helping hand. If our music can make someone feel less alone or make them feel better, that means the world to us.

One thing you can’t avoid when reading about your music is that the idea that your wisdom seems to surpass your years. Are your songs very autobiographical?

K: This record is more autobiographical than the first one. Simply ’cause we’ve been going through more, and we’ve changed a lot since those songs were written.

J: For us, though, there’s not one song that we can’t relate to. It’s always about us in some way. We can tell a story about a middle-aged woman looking back through her life and regretting things she didn’t do, and still relate to that feeling. And also our fear of becoming that woman. It’s us dealing with the fact that that might happen.

K: It’s more interesting to view subjects from different perspectives and have different personas in songs, than just always being from our young girl perspective.

Cool. And you said you’ve changed as people. Are there any specific changes you can pinpoint?

K: I dunno, it’s hard to say yourself. But we’ve obviously grown up a bit! I hope so. There’s a lot of pressure and responsibility when you do this. I mean, we quit school 2 years ago, and I feel like not being in school makes you different people.

J: We’ve learnt so much from travelling around the world and meeting people. It’s really inspirational getting to do that, it beats sitting around at school.

And if the new record’s from a more adult perspective, is there anything, listening back to the first one, that you find immature or naive?

J: Not really. Lyric-wise, the last record was more about nature, it had more metaphors, we were relying more on that kinda stuff. Whereas this one we wanted to be more direct.

Is that because you’re more confident as songwriters?

K: It might be. There is a charm in having lots of nature references too. I just feel we’re trying to do something different — that’s the route that we chose.

‘The Lion’s Roar’

Do you think you have something to lose by not being at school?

K: (sighs as if this is perhaps not the first time she has been asked) I feel like we have a lot to lose by not doing what we’re doing right now. ’Cause this is such a rare opportunity. Not a lot of people get it. And we get to travel the world, and in a year, we’ve already seen more things than other people will in an entire lifetime. So I think that we have nothing to lose right now. If we wanna study we can do that later. I definitely wanna study, I wanna learn, I’m interested in the world and there’s so much I want to know. But I feel like we should do this when we have the possibility.

Is your musical upbringing where that drive came from, and if so, can you talk me through growing up and any defining moments where music became closer to being the be-all-and-end-all of your career?

K: Yeah, I think so. Just knowing that [our dad] had been a musician and that he had done that professionally was very inspiring to us. We’d form these little bands when we were youngsters, for fun. And whenever we had guests at our house we would always perform for them. I remember I performed at school — we had a competition, we were supposed to sing a song in French or Spanish. And I sang Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’. And I won the competition. And that gave me a feeling that this is what I was meant to do.

J: Yeah. I mean, I was the girl who sang, that was what I did. People knew me in school because I sang all the time, and I sang at the end-of-term ceremonies and stuff. I would always be singing. It’s always been something that has defined us; we were always the girls who sang.

Was singing cool when you were at school?

J: Yeah, I think so. I mean, we weren’t, like, the most popular girls at school —

K: Woah, shh, stop!

J: But I think people looked up to us, definitely. Our music taste was a bit different from the rest.

K: Yes, definitely. We went to an English international school, and there were people from all over the world that went there. And most of them listened to hip hop or R&B, stuff like that. I can say I was pretty different, sitting there with my headphones, listening to The Louvin Brothers when all of them were listening to Rhianna or Beyonce or something like that. I was a bit of an odd character, in that way.

One other thing I noticed was that on all of your Youtube videos — as opposed to others where people tend to shout at each other in caps lock and act unpleasantly — on FAK videos, everyone’s saying you made them cry or changed their life.

(laughter)

J: Well, we’ve seen our fair share of nasty comments. But we’re probably pretty lucky. I dunno, maybe we’ve just found good people who are nice to each other. I mean, I can never relate to people who run around and argue with people on Youtube. Or write nasty comments.

K: I’d rather have someone have an opinion of hating us than not having heard of us.

Any idea why your music might bring out that nicer side in people?

K: We just heal people. (both laugh)

K: We try not to read comments.

J: But it’s always entertaining, reading when people write really bad stuff, they’re just trying to get at you. It’s mostly just funny. And I also think the more you read that kinda stuff, the less you care about it, and the stronger you get. So it could be a good thing.

K: It’s depends on your mentality and if you can handle it.

J: Yeah. We can never… we just write our songs, you know? That’s all that we can do. To try to start to analyse it, why people like it, I mean you can’t do that. That’s gonna kill the creativity if you’re like, ‘OK, what do people like about this, what should we do more?’ It has to be about what you want to do yourself, always.

Related: