ionnalee's Personal Best
With a new mixtape out on Christmas Day – her third album of 2024 – Swedish art-pop shapeshifter ionnalee talks Alan Pedder through five of her personal highlights from the past 15 years.
The internet was a gentler place in 2009, before the rot of content farms, schismatic algorithms and monetisation at any cost really started to set in.
Back then we counted attention spans in minutes rather than seconds, and our iPhones hadn’t yet evolved into fully realised content machines with front-facing cameras and app multi-tasking. The music industry, meanwhile, was well into its wild west era by that point, desperately groping around for a new business model and finding it in the greedy green embrace of Spotify, fresh out of the gates internationally, and look how well that’s working out.
In hindsight, the conditions were perfect for Swedish singer/songwriter Jonna Lee and producer Claes Björklund to emerge with their cryptic, high-concept creation iamamiwhoami. YouTube was only just starting to establish itself as a launchpad for artists – this was pre-Lana and in the time before Poppy, remember – and the rise of Lady Gaga had left the mainstream thirsting for theatrics. Pop-by-numbers was out, weird and wayward was in, and A&Rs were scrambling to keep up.
But the major-label machinery moves slowly, and music blogs – then in their golden age – were always several steps ahead. So, when mysterious videos began to show up in their inbox from iamamiwhoami@gmail.com, starting in December 2009, each one was forensically examined for clues as to what these ‘preludes’ could mean and who might be behind them.
Amateur cryptographers and semiotics nerds had a field day, dissecting every scrap of evidence – which, in at least one package mailed to MTV, included a lock of Lee’s own hair – and pointing fingers: at Goldfrapp, at Björk, at The Knife, at Madonna, and (the biggest curveball of the lot) at Christina Aguilera, who was teasing a “futuristic” comeback at the time. That iamamiwhoami’s virality prompted at least two of those artists to issue a denial is proof that folks were really paying attention.
Even when Lee’s identity was uncovered in the summer of 2010 by a sharp-eyed Swedish music blogger, the conversation continued. By the time iamamiwhoami completed their first project bounty with the epilogue songs “; John” and “Clump”, a PopJustice forums thread on their music ran to over 500 pages, filled with wild speculation and a few astonishingly well-developed theories.
Looking back on that time 15 years later, Lee says she is full of “so much thankfulness and love” that things turned out the way they did. “A lot of what happened at that time was so organic, and perhaps couldn’t have happened at any other time,” she tells me over a video call from her home in the Östergötland countryside. “Not just the virality of the whole project but also the creative aspect, because we made so many decisions on the fly and I’m so happy that we did what we did.”
As pivotal as those earlier steps and creative risks were, Lee is thankful, too, for all the progress she has made since then, which currently includes three more iamamiwhoami albums and four under her solo-ish project ionnalee – including this year’s soaring and sanctuarial CLOSE YOUR EYES and its companion piece BLUND, Lee’s first Swedish-language record. “Each and every move has felt like a good one for me,” she says happily. “Even if not commercially the best move at all times, I still feel like I made the decisions that I wanted to make.”
Often, Lee’s music is borne out of a need to be made. That was true of bounty, where she and Björklund wanted to make a clean break from the more traditional singer/songwriter route she had taken up to that point. It was true of iamamiwhoami’s BLUE, released 10 years ago in the winter of 2014. And it’s certainly true of CLOSE YOUR EYES, which she describes as a sequel of sorts.
One thing that ties them together is that both BLUE and CLOSE YOUR EYES were written in “a very heavy emotional space”: the first after a painful separation, and the second in the wake of a terminal diagnosis of a close family member. “Life can get really, really dark sometimes,” says Lee, looking down at her hands. “You can go for years where nothing really happens and then all of a sudden you are plunged into this dark tunnel that seems to go on forever, and that’s where I was, in that tunnel, when I started to write.”
It wasn’t just her grief that left her grasping for music as a way to find a path back to the light. She was also feeling her way through the first year of being a first-time mother – something she never expected to be – and trying to create a safe space for that. “I felt like a stranger in Stockholm then,” she explains. “Because I’d moved away from the city after 22 years, I had to rent an apartment to be able to stay there and write. I’d see my old neighbours in the street but of course they weren’t my neighbours anymore, and I felt quite isolated.
"I needed music to be able to lift me out of my own worries and problems, and hopefully to be able to lift other people out from theirs. That’s why I wanted the album to sound like a lucid dream, uplifting and hopeful, and not to lean too much on the dark. Because I know how to get there really easily.”
Just as BLUE was a reboot for iamamiwhoami, CLOSE YOUR EYES is a reboot for ionnalee – and this time it feels different. “The creative process of making an album can be really intense for me, and then when I finally get to release it I usually feel quite empty and disconnected from the work, like I’ve given it away,” she says. “With CLOSE YOUR EYES and BLUND, what I’m feeling is more a nice kind of relief. I’m relieved that they are finally out, and I feel really good about the music too.”
As a gift to the fans, many of whom are still following along from the very first ‘prelude’, this Christmas Lee is dropping a second mixtape collecting a dozen studio outtakes and alternative versions of songs from throughout her 15 years as iamamiwhoami/ionnalee. She did the same in the spring of 2020, during the pandemic, pulling together the first KRONOLOGI mixtape and a special 10th anniversary livestream concert. “I just have so many versions of the songs!” she says, laughing.
“Claes and I will often try a lot of different productions, and some of them have real potential but just go in the wrong direction or become too ‘hit-ty’ so we scrap them for the purposes of whatever project we are doing at the time. They might not have been for that moment, but it has been fun to revisit them and work with them a bit more to make what I think are interesting versions, and then let those versions have a life of their own too. With the new KRONOLOGI 2, I feel like it’s become more of an experimental project than the first edition, because I’ve got into this space where I am doing more substantial remixing.”
In a lot of ways, KRONOLOGI 2 brings things full circle for Lee. Some of the tracks were finished only days ago, bringing back the immediacy of the bounty era and running in the direction of wherever that leads. Fifteen years into her unique career, Lee knows by now that she can trust her instincts completely. In choosing the five songs that represent her Personal Best, a commonality emerged in that several were important points of departure and change. “There’s an aquatic theme to them as well, I think,” she says. “And that’s something that’s been ongoing in my music, right from the start, so it felt like a nice little story to tell.”
"t" by iamamiwhoami (2010)
IONNALEE: This was one of the earliest songs that we wrote for bounty, and it’s kind of playing with the idea of ending the project. With everything that we released, we would say “This is the last bit that we’re doing,” but then we’d end up doing another song anyway. That’s why in the lyrics you have lines like “Water fill her lungs and she’s inhaling” and “Before I depart into the deepest blue.” It was intended to be the end, and that we would go into this world of water. But then we didn’t do that, and I kind of saved that part of the storytelling for later.
That’s why “t” belongs on this list. It’s the first sort of interaction with a concept that later became mouth of a river, my [unreleased] solo album, and then ended up being BLUE and now extending into CLOSE YOUR EYES. But there’s another song on this list, “down by the lake”, that was actually written before any of those.
At the time we wrote “t”, there was a hunt going on for the identity of who was behind the project, and I think that’s what the core of the song is about: “There’s a hunt / for they seek the whom.” I remember making the demo on my laptop, recording all the vocals just using the laptop mic and making, like, a thousand overdubs of that. It sounded really crappy but also kind of amazing. When Claes started working on the song, we decided to keep the demo vocals. Some of the bounty vocals were recorded using great equipment, and some were just me and the laptop.
I liked that sort of mayhem, because our way of thinking was that we could do anything with nothing. That’s what I needed to prove to myself with iamamiwhoami, and that’s the spirit of how the project was made in the beginning. Sometimes it became a kind of manic expression thing, and we went really far with it. But then, after bounty, things changed a lot, I would say.
BEST FIT: There’s a lot of symbolism and foreshadowing in “t”, and, visually, you’ve talked about how the bounty series was intended to dig into female stereotypes. How does that come across in the video for “t”, do you think?
There are a lot of layers of symbolism in the video for “t”, so it’s kind of hard to go into. There’s an aspect of it that’s about portraying the emperor with no clothes and how, as a woman, you are often packaged into these different stereotypes. That’s part of the reason for the display of the women on the Volvo, which is covered in foil. And that’s about as much as I can say on that…
You were also playing with the concept of the mandrake with the bounty project. Perhaps you’ve explained this before and I’ve missed it, but how does the mandrake aspect tie in with “t”?
Well, actually, we didn’t talk about the ideas behind the songs or the visuals so much in the past, because we all agreed in the early days that we weren’t going to. It was all so sensitive. Of course, I have my songwriting and my personal feelings that I’m willing to share, because otherwise it would be weird and I wouldn’t be able to do my job, but yeah…
The focal point of bounty and behind the project sprang from the mandrake, yes, but I think that’s all I’m going to be saying about that, because it feels true to the project’s origin.
“t” was the first iamamiwhoami video to really show your face, without it being concealed or disguised somehow. Would you say that was an important step for you?
We were still warping my face throughout the whole of the bounty project, so I do look a little different. But obviously, in the beginning, with the preludes, obviously my face was covered. We didn’t think anyone would recognise me anyway, since no one knew who I was outside of Sweden and, for whatever reason, Swedes didn’t seem to really be aware of what was happening on the internet at the time. No one in Sweden was really interested in it, but there was one Swede who had a blog and recognised my face – and that was that.
Definitely by “t” there was an awareness of the fact that I was involved in the project, so we just let all that mystery go.
“fountain” by iamamiwhoami (2014)
IONNALEE: Out of all my songs so far, “fountain” is the one I feel like I take with me everywhere. Blue was the first album where I allowed myself to just sing with my voice. It had been so important for me to distort myself and not be visible in the beginning, and that was amazing because I’d wanted to escape from myself. But after a while, you know, I just wanted to write songs that I could sing as myself. I’m a quite good vocalist, I would say. I mean, it’s something I have practiced my whole life and I really love to use my voice. I wanted to write songs that I could play live and not have to conceal my talent, if you know what I mean. Maybe it sounds strange, but that’s how I felt.
“fountain” came from wanting to write something that was really uplifting. I remember when I had written the melody for the chorus and played it for Claes, he said something like “That’s the song!” – something that an industry person might say [laughs]. We had a lot of fun making it, and “fountain” still lifts me up whenever I play it live. It might not lift others up, but I think that a lot of people do find comfort in it and that feels really nice.
BEST FIT: Was that drive to write songs that you could play live influenced by your experiences of touring the kin album? I vividly remember seeing that tour at the Royal Festival Hall in London with the enormous white cube.
That night was so amazing even though I was really terrified. I hadn’t expected everyone to be sitting down, but people did stand up and it turned out really well.
There was a lot of stuff going on when we did that tour. We were so many on stage. We were bigger on stage than we could afford, and it was really a whole operation. I’d just been playing my songs on guitar in bars before that, and now I was on the kind of stages I’d only dreamed about playing. It was both incredible and quite overwhelming, because it really demanded a lot from us, technically, with building the cube for each show and so on. It was the amazing interaction with the audience that I took away from that tour, besides the absolute fear of being exposed like that. I really did find something there, and then I got to practice that touring with Röyksopp for many years. And I’m still using those abilities today, I would say.
The video for “fountain” shows you setting fire to a white cube, and it’s very symbolic in terms of departing from the past. Not just in the poppier, more streamlined sound of BLUE but also in your personal life. Did you feel like you were cleansing yourself of something?
Yeah, I suppose I did. It didn’t feel so dramatic at the time, but symbolism can become very meaningful when you’re looking back. BLUE was a departure and that was really scary, because we didn't know what it was going to become. I guess it could have been an ionnalee album if I’d been at that stage, but I had to do things step by step. It was an important chapter, definitely.
BLUE was also your first album to be made using fan-raised funding through your GENERATE platform, which has become such an important thing for you. That started out just as an experiment, right?
Yeah, because I didn't want to use Kickstarter or other platforms for that kind of thing. I didn't want to tell people what I was going to do either, because I wanted them to donate only if they were willing to take the risk, if you know what I mean. I wanted to be creatively free. I didn’t want to be like, “Here’s what I’m going to do. This is the outline. This is the pitch,” and then, inevitably, someone would be disappointed because we were doing something so different.
With BLUE, I stopped GENERATE after just two videos because I felt like I needed to have a clear space in front of me. These days, I feel like relationship with the audience is so much stronger. The people who want to contribute to GENERATE now are aware that I could go in whatever direction, and I feel like they have a sort of faith in me. That’s mind-blowing to me. I feel really humbled, and also a little embarrassed in some sense, because it’s kind of a crazy thing that people feel this urgency to give something of themselves to what we are doing.
Of course, I wish I could just make things and didn't have to rely on anyone's support. But, at the end of the day, as an independent artist, there has to be some kind of working relationship and I would much rather have that with my audience than have to go to labels. I do feel a huge responsibility to give back more, creatively, so that’s probably the hardest part of working this way – that there is no end to my workload. But that’s also very much on me. I don’t feel like I am being forced. I guess I just never feel like I am doing enough and I want to give more.
Going back to “fountain”, you performed this song with Imogen Heap via video link during the pandemic and then last year you were finally able to play it together in person. How did that friendship come about, and what significance does “fountain” have in that story?
Like a lot of artists during the pandemic, Imogen was playing for people on livestreams and as part of that she was taking requests to play other people’s songs. I suppose a fan of mine must have requested “fountain”, and she played a version on piano that I thought was so beautiful. I listened to Imogen a lot after discovering her through the Garden State soundtrack 20 years ago, with the Frou Frou song “Let Go”, and so I ask her if she would like to be a part of the KONSERT live audiovisual album.
When we finally met last year, it was pretty surreal. I feel like artists who got their break in the early 2000s often have this sort of larger than life feel that artists coming up today don’t necessarily have, because you can get so close to them on social media. So I was really taken by her, and I got to sing one of her songs too, which I loved. She has her whole world with her on stage and it’s so amazing to watch.
Imogen is on my new albums, too. She's singing on “darkness is a real place” and “askan och elden”, together with Zola Jesus, Austra, Nina Kinert, Jennie Abrahamson, Tess Roby and Sophia Somajo, who is a Swedish singer/songwriter. They're all on there as the choir of my dreams. Imogen is also playing some loops on it, which makes me really happy.
"down by the lake (KRONOLOGI version)” by ionnalee (2020)
BEST FIT: With the first KRONOLOGI album you experimented again, releasing the songs track by track each week from April to June in the early days of the pandemic. Had you planned to do it another way before Covid changed everything?
IONNALEE: We had a ten-year anniversary tour booked under the name ‘KRONOLOGI’, with the flights and some of the accommodation already paid for, so we were kind of panicking as the pandemic hit. But we soon realised that there was nothing we could do but stay home. I had just bought an old, rusty cabin from 1841 so I stayed there and worked on the songs. It was, by far, one of the calmest periods of my life.
You mentioned earlier that “down by the lake” is a much older song than the others you’ve chosen for this list. How did this song come into being, and what made you decide to bring it back for this project?
“down by the lake” was written back in 2009, together with “y”, which was called “little hope” at the time, and a few other songs that I have. There is a demo somewhere of that song that, in my head at least, is really lovely, with kind of a tropical vibe to it. The version that I recorded for KRONOLOGI is much more straightforward pop, but it’s a lovely track too.
I wrote this song after watching a French movie called Ne le dis à personne, or Tell No One in English, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to the iamamiwhoami project because it had its own little story. I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere with it, and I couldn’t just rewrite the lyrics to fit the project, so I just had it sitting around. I actually have another song that I wrote based on that film, “Lake Chermain”, from one of my singer/songwriter albums
When “down by the lake” came out [as the third weekly instalment from KRONOLOGI], it seemed to be really loved by the fans, and I do think it deserves to have more of a life. That’s one of the reasons I chose it for this list, as well as fitting in with the watery theme.
Is it a song that you’ve played live much?
No, but I probably should. I did include it in a small live session that I recorded in my garden, also in the pandemic years, because it had only recently been released on KRONOLOGI.
“don’t wait for me” by iamamiwhoami (2022)
IONNALEE: “don’t wait for me” has something in common with some of the other songs on this list in that it’s a departure. It’s the first track on Be Here Soon, which was a departure in terms of its sound, but it’s also about a departure. It talks about something that’s a recurring feeling for me when going into something new, a feeling of having one foot on the shore as you’re heading out, you’re leaving everything behind, and there’s this big, blank page waiting to be filled with something new. It’s similar, in that sense, to “fountain”, and I think “down by the lake” also has that feeling, and “t” as well. I think those songs are connected in that way.
BEST FIT: What are your memories of putting this song together, having rebooted the iamamwhoami project with Claes?
I remember that we worked with my vocals as samples. I had recorded a melody, just a cappella without any instruments, and applied some reverb and delays on that before giving it to Claes. We have two different studios in the same complex, so we often go to each other’s rooms to switch songs and work on each other’s stuff, as well as sitting and working on things together sometimes. With “don’t wait for me”, Claes took the vocal melody I’d recorded and sampled it so that it became almost like a brass orchestra, which sounds so beautiful.
We built the production on top of that, then added in the live drums and timpani and stuff like that. We’d never recorded live drums for iamamiwhoami before, so the whole Be Here Soon album was an experiment in itself.
You’ve said that Be Here Soon is “a story about meeting memories with new eyes while creating the present,” and I feel like that theme really comes through in the video for this song.
Yeah, we filmed that in an old wooden house in Stockholm that had these big church windows, and it’s basically about returning to the past and the storage of the past. I’m looking at all these objects that I always have to carry with me from the iamamiwhoami project. It’s something I do dearly, but it can also be kind of heavy to carry all that symbolism and sometimes I just want to be free of it. But at the same time, even if I made a great album I know I would be so bored if there weren’t 100 layers of meaning behind it.
A lot of the emotional rawness of Be Here Soon came from responding to the physical and psychological changes that you were going through as a first-time mother-to-be. What was going through your mind at the time, in terms of how you might have to change your process?
It’s funny because I’d never in my life wanted to be a parent. I had a pretty rough childhood and I was of the belief that no one should ever have to go through the kind of things that I went through. I’d always been about my work and my creations so this sudden new role really came as a surprise. I was almost 40 at the time and I thought, ‘Okay, yeah, I think I can do this now.’
Part of that was deciding that being a mum would just sit on top of my work and everything else. I didn’t want to have to stop everything and change my lifestyle completely, because, you know, I don’t think I can do anything else or be anything else other than what I am. But the reality of making this album while my son was growing inside me was so hard. I’d thought that I could do it with no problem but it was heavy going, and not something that I would choose to do again.
I recall from various Twitter exchanges that some people were really provoked by you showing your pregnancy bump on your album cover and in your videos, which seems pretty standard for Twitter even in those days, but I really liked how you took a stand and doubled down on it.
Yeah, that whole thing was obviously stupid as hell. I mean, I’m not a stereotypically beautiful woman and I’ve been photographed and filmed doing the weirdest stuff, so what’s so weird about being pregnant? I don’t think my audience has ever seen me as a sex object, but for some reason me just stripping back everything as a heavily pregnant woman was really provocative for some people. Honestly, I thought that was super because I’m not here to please people, you know?
At the same time, obviously, I don’t like it when people focus on my body at all. Like when you’re pregnant, all of a sudden people think that they’re allowed to come up to you in the street and touch you. What the hell is going on with that? [laughs] That was a journey for me, definitely.
“run wild” / “som regn” by ionnalee (2024)
BEST FIT: Why have you chosen this particular track from CLOSE YOUR EYES / BLUND?
IONNALEE: Because it's also about liberation, and because it fits with the theme of water. I often feel a bit drained in some relationships. I don’t think I try too hard to make other people happy but I think some people can easily feed off of my energy and that sometimes leaves me feeling a bit exhausted. Sometimes people really want to lift you and to see you be happy because they want to feed off of you, so “run wild” is a song I wrote to remind myself of that draining that can happen.
It's interesting because musically it's a song that sounds like its title, expressing an ecstatic kind of freedom. It sounds like the complete opposite of draining.
Yeah, I always find it interesting when you the sound of a song is in contrast with what it’s about. CLOSE YOUR EYES is obviously a hopeful record, but if you really listen I think many of the lyrics aren’t that hopeful. It’s more like a hope for hope. It’s a hopeless, hopeful album.
The title of the Swedish version translates to “like rain”, which is pretty self-explanatory from the English version. How much did you have to play around with the lyrics to make the translations work?
Well, some of the songs ended up being about completely different things. I started with a pretty direct translation. Not word-for-word, more like trying to find ways of saying things in the same kind of manner and with the same kind of attitude. But I think Swedish is kind of a strange language, at least when you compare it with the way that English works. It’s very fragmentary, or at least the way I write in Swedish is very fragmentary, so I really worked on those lyrics because I wanted them to have some kind of edge to them.
I think things can easily get really cheesy in Swedish, so when I worked on “innocence of sound” that became a song called “allting rinner ut in sand”, which has a much less hopeful approach to it. A lot of the songs are like that, but there are some where I've managed to make a really good translation for what I was intended the song to be about, and I hope I’ve still been able to maintain some sort of edge.
The song “not your cherry”, which became “ett minne”, is another good example. Trying to translate that title into Swedish was hilarious. I tried so many different fruits! [laughs] No, I’m kidding. Generally, I would say that it’s a softer record in Swedish. For example, the song “darkness is a real place” – I think the Swedish version is beautiful but it’s meant to be sung in English, which I think is really beautiful. You can underline that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your first Swedish-language song was “sommaren är min och jag kommer tillbaka”, which came out in the spring of 2021. Did the making of that song inspire you to really dig in more with writing in Swedish?
It did, definitely, because I’d never had any ambition to write in Swedish before that. English has been part of my life for so long. I was an anglophile as a very young kid and I’d practice with trying to develop the perfect British accent. Then, when I was a teenager, I lived in London and wanted people to think that I was English. Like, it was really important to me for them to not see me as Swedish. I let that whole thing go at some points. I suppose I just felt silly for not daring to be myself. When I wrote “sommaren är min och jag kommer tillbaka”, I suppose I just realised that I can express myself in Swedish without it sounding cliché, so there was a spark there.
I never thought that I would write a whole album in Swedish though, and to be honest I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t a translation of the English album. I don’t think I would ever do that and I don’t know who would listen to it.
It's funny, because “innocence of sound” got a lot of airplay in Sweden this year, which has never happened to me before and that’s great. But it’s also strange, because the Swedish version exists too and they choose to play the English one. It’s possibly also an awareness thing, since I’ve been writing songs in English for so long. I don’t really know. Either way, I didn’t make the Swedish album for commercial gain. Obviously that ship has sailed, and I’m not going to start my Swedish career now. But I really do enjoy singing some of these songs in Swedish, and I like the way my voice sounds. You get a different tone because you’re using the front of your mouth more. People here can understand me better.
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