iamamiwhoami From the end of 2009, several anonymous videos were uploaded to YouTube and ‘went viral’. Some suggested it might be a new project by Christina Aguilera, Goldfrapp or Björk. The teaser videos evolved into full-edged music videos, rede ning the genre, with the song titles spelling out the word ‘Bounty’. Gradually, the female entity in the videos was revealed to be Swedish singer/songwriter Jonna Lee, who had released two guitar-based pop albums before. More songs followed, as well as a concert staged for one very lucky viewer and her rst album Kin, released last year. On June 15th, the song cycle ‘Bounty’ was nally released on CD and DVD, and iamamiwhoami – consisting of Lee and her longtime producer Claes Björklund and video director Robin KempeBergman – have been performing live shows throughout Europe. We caught up with Lee after a soldout show at London’s Brixton Electric concert hall.
You’re not a conventional artist in the sense that you don’t do a lot of interviews, you’re not on TV, you don’t have a Twitter account. One would assume this could lead to a kind of disconnect from the audience, yet visiting an iamamiwhoami concert proved quite the opposite. Your audience seems to have a very strong connection to you. How does that work? I feel that connection to them as well. The channel where we have released all our work is a place where people come voluntarily. They haven’t been pushed there or directed there. Perhaps they’ve been tipped to go there, but still, if you’ve visited and followed what we release there, I think it’s because you really want to be there. The type of communication we have with the audience through the music and the videos is very much based in the now. What happens with the project and its development hopefully makes people want to take care of it and protect it, in a way. That’s the feeling I get when I’m on stage. When I see the audience, it’s almost like a reunion. Looking at the timeline, it seems as if you were still heavily promoting your second album This is Jonna Lee, at the time the rst teasers for iamamiwhoami were created. What was it like for you to do two projects at the same time?
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I had recorded the final album of the work I did before iamamiwhoami a year before it was released. I was very unhappy at the time, working the way you do when you’re signed to a label. The first songs that were written for iamamiwhoami were already in the making. I discovered something totally different and I felt like I wanted to explore that. I made a clean cut with everything, in order to be able to pursue it. I had to leave all the old material I released as Jonna Lee behind, because there wasn’t an understanding of what I was doing at the time. So it was a very schizophrenic period, which also meant there were a lot of sacrifices in terms of collaborations, people I worked with at the time and everything. I had to really, strongly believe that I could do something totally different. The beginning of the iamamiwhoami project was also a huge relief, because it evolved and grew so quickly. If it hadn’t, I think it would have been harder and maybe even impossible to pursue it. What has been the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far, working on the project? The financial side was definitely one. There was no budget at all, we had to create with what we had. I had a strong collaboration with a director, we both wanted to do something that came from the heart. Something that was creatively free without having to adapt certain rules of the music industry. I was a big part of that before, but I just hit a wall with it. I was asking myself why I was a part of it, because it wasn’t according to my values, really. Also, it was part of growing up; you find something that’s precious to you all of a sudden, and you just want to treasure that and everything else becomes unimportant. We put all of our time into it and all of my finances. Everything I had, I put into the project, to make it work. But there were also a lot of people that I used to work with, or even fans of the music I used to do, and people in general – they disappeared when I chose to pursue something else. There were people at the time who thought it was incomprehensible, because what we were doing was so vague. What’s your inspiration, what do you like to draw from? In the beginning there was inspiration from Swedish folklore. The director I work with and I have the same kind of inspiration from really old storytelling books with these wonderful sketches of trolls in the forest. That’s where I’m from, from the forest and the countryside, that’s close to heart. When we started this project and began to work on it, pretty quickly it came to life by itself. Now we feed off of that. I can get inspired by that