Emiliana Torrini - The Elf Princess

“What is your favourite song of all songs?”

If, for her father's fiftieth birthday, Emiliana Torrini had thought of buying the usual tie, perhaps her life would have turned out differently. Instead, the petite eighteen-year-old Icelander decided that her gift that year would be something special: a CD recorded especially for the occasion, on which Emiliana sang a handful of jazz, rock and blues covers.

When we say a gift was a success, we're usually satisfied just knowing it made the recipient happy: in the case of Emiliana's gift, success meant thousands of copies sold and months at the top of the Icelandic charts... Because that CD, recorded almost as a game, ended up in the hands of a friend who worked for a local record label, and before long Emiliana Torrini found herself being hailed as the new face of Icelandic music at the dawn of the new millennium.

With a name like that, it doesn't take much to guess that Emiliana Torrini's roots stretch all the way to Italian shores: indeed, her father is an Italian restaurateur who ended up marrying and starting a family right there in Iceland. The kind of pairing that seems tailor-made to tempt journalists into the worst clichés, like "Nordic ice and Latin fire"... But clichés are far too small for someone like Emiliana Torrini.

Born in the fateful punk-revolution year of 1977, Emiliana grew up on the outskirts of Reykjavik, but got used to traveling the world from an early age. As a child, she spent her summers at her grandparents' house in a remote corner of eastern Iceland, "in a region that can't have more than twenty inhabitants at most." Her grandfather was a jazz pianist, and it was in that house that young Emiliana first got close to old records and the piano.

At seven she joined a choir as a soprano, and at fifteen she decided to enroll in a school for opera singers. Then came MTV, and it was like a revelation: "We were the first in town to have it, and I'd stay up all night watching the alternative music shows, then go to school and tell everyone about my discoveries."

In 1994 Emiliana won a music competition for local students with her rendition of "I Will Survive" and took part in the Icelandic production of the musical "Hair". That same year, she also joined her first band, Spoon, with whom she only managed to complete a single, rough-edged record.

It was in 1995 that the covers collection recorded for her father's birthday hit Icelandic record store shelves. It was titled Crouçie D'Où Là, a pun based on the French transcription of the Icelandic term of endearment krúsídúlla, roughly meaning "adorable little girl". With its soft pop flow tinged with jazz inflections, the record anticipated the kind of soft sound that, a decade or so later, would conquer Europe and America with the Norah Jones phenomenon.

The atmosphere is engaging, if a little too well-suited to serving as inoffensive background music for cocktail hour. The reliance on certain hammy excesses still seems to betray Emiliana Torrini's insecurity about the originality of her own interpretation, leading her more than once to settle into rather predictable piano-bar moulds.

The least convincing moments are the more exuberant tracks, where Emiliana's voice goes searching for easy emphasis, as on the opening "I'm A Bad Luck Woman" or on the unrestrained "The Dirty Dozens" and "Find It". The best moments, instead, come from the hushed sweetness of Van Morrison's "Crazy Love", brushed by barely-there chimes, and from the dreamy contours of "Tomorrow". Not shying away from a trendy dip into Japanese with Pizzicato Five's "I", the album arrives at the floating mysticism of the closing vocalizing on "Aaaa....", leaving the impression that Emiliana Torrini's true potential still had to be discovered. "Listening back to that record today," the Icelandic singer notes, "is embarrassing on one hand, and funny on the other: that's really me, all chirpy and happy, singing purely for the joy of singing..."

The following year, Emiliana Torrini tried to repeat the feat with another album built on the same blueprint, Merman. Her expressive growth is evident, reflected in the record's more singer-songwriter-oriented atmosphere, though it failed to match the sales success of Crouçie D'Où Là.

Emiliana's voice appears full of soul over the soft, keyboard-dotted rhythmic bed of Stevie Wonder's "Blame It On The Sun", before tackling the murky verses of Lou Reed with candor in the Velvet-style music-box rendition of "Stephanie Says", and letting down all her guard in the sweet piano-and-acoustic-guitar reworking of Tom Waits's "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You".

The folk lullabies of "The Boy Who Giggled So Sweet" and "Old Man And Miss Beautiful" lend themselves to fairy-tale orchestrations, while the suspended flutterings of the title track foreshadow Emiliana's openness to new musical dimensions. Once again there's no shortage of jazz numbers ("Chelsea Morning" by Joni Mitchell above all), though only the circus-like "Red Woman Red" feels out of place.

In Merman, in short, Emiliana Torrini's sensibility emerges in sharper focus: yet it's clear that this girl from the northern lands is already searching for something more.

"It shouldn't hurt me to be free"

Increasingly drawn to the electronic scene, Emiliana Torrini kept building her profile by lending her voice to various tracks by local artists and appearing on a number of Icelandic rock compilations. The album "Stone Free", in particular, finds Emiliana taking on classics of the caliber of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence", the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit".

One evening in Reykjavik, while wandering the streets after one too many drinks, she was approached by fellow Icelanders Gus Gus, who asked if she wanted to take part in a short film they were shooting. Emiliana agreed without a second thought and began working with them, appearing in 1997 on the band's debut album, "Polydistortion". Gus Gus asked her to join the band on a permanent basis, but for Emiliana, being in a band meant too many compromises to accept.

Singing around restaurants, bars and hotels across Iceland, Emiliana Torrini kept performing wherever the opportunity arose, with no particular career ambitions in mind. "I never really thought about what or where I was singing, the only thing I knew was that I loved doing it." It was on one of those occasions that she was spotted by a scout from the British label One Little Indian, which, as it happens, was also home to a certain Björk.

"I wanted to go to India and then to Bulgaria, become a gypsy and learn new ways of singing... instead I went to England to record a pop album," Emiliana recalls with irony. So, in 1999, she moved to London to work with Roland Orzabal of Tears For Fears as producer. "Actually," she confesses, "I barely knew a couple of Tears For Fears songs..."

The young Icelander suddenly found herself thrown into the far from benevolent world of the music industry. "Since I barely wrote songs and didn't play any instrument, they put people next to me to act as my mentors, to help me write. They'd bring in guys with a clock-in, clock-out mentality, who treated music like a nine-to-five office job." Alongside Orzabal, the co-writers on Emiliana's international debut therefore include names such as producer EG White and former Sugarcubes drummer Siggi Baldursson.

But despite the inevitable bumps of colliding with the music business, Love In The Time Of Science, released in October 1999, can hardly be dismissed as a chart-chasing product: its charm lies in the interplay between a natural pop instinct and a nocturnal atmosphere, where the electronics take on trip-hop shades. Somewhere between Portishead and Morcheeba, Emiliana Torrini moves sinuously over a bed of keyboards, chasing the off-beat rhythms then so fashionable in English electronic music. "It's a melancholy record, but it's also warm and joyful to listen to," she reflects. "The first album is always the most sincere."

From the cover onward, with a close-up of Emiliana's freckle-dotted features, Love In The Time Of Science presents itself as an alluring blend of sensuality and innocence, with blue-tinted hues lending it a veil of mystery.

The first single from the album, "To Be Free", accompanied by a dreamlike, subtly unsettling video, floats on clouds of keyboards, downtempo rhythms and Morricone-esque samples, while Emiliana Torrini's voice, as seductive as Alison Goldfrapp's, shapes an immediately gripping chorus.

From the lunar-safari-like pace of "Wednesday's Child" we move to the rarefied orchestral intensity of "Dead Things", interrupted by flickers of digital beeps and a burst of Radiohead-esque distortion. But there's no shortage of more overtly radio-friendly moments either, like the barroom rock guitars of "Baby Blue" or the catchy melody of "Easy".

With the plasticity of the bassline in "Unemployed In Summertime", the album reaches its sunniest moment, perfectly captured by a video with a colourful, carefree feel: “Unemployed in summertime / I’ve only just turned 21, I’ll be ok / Unemployed in summertime / Don’t need money ‘cause we’re young”. That dreamy smile is probably the best snapshot of Emiliana Torrini: "My philosophy is: number one, be happy; number two, be happy," she declares firmly.

Love In The Time Of Science reflects all the disoriented wonder of a young woman facing the world, weighed down by her own confused desires, in search of a freedom that isn't simply an escape (“But if it’s so good being free/ Would you mind telling me/ Why I don’t know what to do with myself?”). "I fall in love very easily," Emiliana admits, "but not necessarily with people: I fall in love with everything... I love observing things, it's amazing."

Emiliana's unmistakable Icelandic accent and the electronic dress of her music inevitably invite the fateful comparison with Björk: a parallel that becomes especially clear in the vocal tour de force of "Telepathy", but one that ended up turning into a real obsession for the young Icelander. "At one point, all this constant talk about Björk had made me paranoid: when I had to choose clothes before going to an interview, I kept wondering if Björk might be wearing a similar top... A real nightmare."

Emiliana Torrini has no interest in playing the electronic chanteuse: what she's after is her own personal path toward a more classic singer-songwriter style, in the vein of artists like Beth Orton. You only need to listen to the acoustic embroidery of "Summerbreeze", co-written with guitarist Mark Abis and placed near the end of the album, or the stripped-down b-sides, among which her collaboration with Slowblow on "Flirt" stands out.

“Home alone and happy, nothing brings me down”

Love In The Time Of Science has no trouble winning over critics and audiences alike, establishing Emiliana Torrini as one of the rising names on the trip-hop scene. The Icelandic singer, however, has no intention of being pinned down by such a narrow label: "They tried to pass it off as a trip-hop album," she complains, "but that was absurd: sure, I used a few trip-hop passages or sounds, but mine was a pop record."

Emiliana toured with Thievery Corporation and in 2002 collaborated with the American electronic duo, lending her voice to a couple of tracks on their successful "The Richest Man In Babylon" ("Until The Morning" would also become the theme for a popular advertising campaign).

Also in 2002, Emiliana Torrini sang on a track from Paul Oakenfold's "Bunkka" and made her film debut performing the haunting "Gollum Song" for the soundtrack of the second instalment of "The Lord of the Rings". An ideal setting for Emiliana's voice, which, drawing on Tolkien's pages, captures all the sense of mystery of her homeland: "the real Iceland lies in the magic of solitary nature, in the secrecy of certain places: you have to respect the elves and never trespass on their territory, or there's trouble..." Her love of cinema would even lead her, in 2005, to sit on the jury of the Venice Film Festival chaired by Dante Ferretti, which awarded the Golden Lion to Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain".

The following year, her record label asks her to write a song for none other than popstar Kylie Minogue. Emiliana writes, just for fun and in barely half an hour, a languid electro seduction titled "Slow", convinced it will never be used. Instead, the track ends up as the lead single from the Australian singer's new album, earning a Grammy nomination in 2004.

But a painful rupture marks Emiliana's life, in the shape of her boyfriend's sudden death. The role of pop singer that everyone expects of her suddenly seems to make no sense anymore. Emiliana moves to Brighton, far from the frenzy of the capital. "In London I felt caged like an animal. Brighton is more like Reykjavik, you can go down to the seaside and be on your own for a while," she notes.

Emiliana meets producer Mr. Dan (born Dan Carey), already a member of Lazyboy. And it's precisely in the intimate, cozy atmosphere of his basement studio that the new songs by the Icelandic singer, co-written with Mr. Dan himself, begin to take shape.

Having left her relationship with One Little Indian behind, Emiliana Torrini pitches the demos of her new record to various labels, and Rough Trade is the first to say yes. Fisherman's Woman is thus released in early 2005 on the new label, accompanied by the single "Sunny Road", with a captivating video built around an animated fairy tale of loneliness and messages in a bottle.

More than five years on from Love In The Time Of Science, Emiliana Torrini sounds almost unrecognizable in the bare acoustic garb of her new record. Dan Carey's acoustic guitar arpeggios swirl like snow crystals in the air, settling on the soft blanket of Emiliana's pure voice. All around, the piano's song and the caress of brushed drums seem careful not to disturb the silent harmony of that wintry landscape.

Fisherman's Woman, which in 2005 scores a triumphant success at the Icelandic Music Awards, is a pilgrimage to the grave of Nick Drake in which Beth Gibbons meets Polly Paulusma. It's the secret diary of a girl in love, written in sepia ink with a small, precise hand, just like the one found in the elegant booklet.

You need only listen to "Today Has Been Ok", with its gentle percussive flutter and its filigree of pedal steel and glockenspiel, to be won over by the album's purity. If anything, the record's biggest flaw is its tendency to slip at times into excessive monotony, from which it's rescued by the livelier tones of "Sunny Road" and the delicate pop of "Heartstopper", chosen as the second single and accompanied by a video in which Emiliana operates a puppet theatre with a gothic flavour.

With an approach reminiscent of Jolie Holland's relationship with American blues roots, Emiliana Torrini pays tribute to the English folk tradition, including on the tracklist a cover of ex-Fairport Convention member Sandy Denny's "Next Time Around". Even the brooding Bill Callahan, better known as Smog, offers an unexpected ray of light with his previously unreleased "Honeymoon Child".

Emiliana Torrini imagines herself as the "fisherman's woman" who gives the album its title, waiting for her man to return from the boundless vastness of the sea. When he falls asleep after a hard day's work, listening to the ship's muted sigh, his only thought is for the wife awaiting him at the window, and everything finds its truth again.

The songs on Fisherman's Woman are odes to a distant love. But the more the pain of loneliness seems to pierce the soul, the more the hope of a spring just around the corner is reborn: “This time as one / We’ll find wich way to go / Now come and meet me on the sunny road”.

It's down that sun-drenched road that everything will finally become clear. And even if that moment is still far off, at times it almost feels as though it's already arrived: the windows are thrown wide open and a sweet music drifts through the air... "My love for you is ready / Nothing brings me down".

"Beating like a jungle drum"

Emiliana Torrini's latest change of direction comes under the title of Me And Armini, released in September 2008. "A transitional record," she calls it herself, though this time the break is less sharp than in the past and softens into a winking sweetness, which isn't quite enough, however, to shake off the impression of an effort that doesn't fully hit the mark.

"The difference between this record and Fisherman's Woman is that I feel much more confident with my songwriting," Emiliana notes. "I know what I want and what I don't want, things are a bit clearer now. I still have a lot to prove to myself, but I've decided to stop being too hard on myself. This time I relaxed... I took whatever came out without judging it, and that made the whole thing a much easier and more enjoyable experience."

And so the arpeggio of opener "Fireheads" seems to set off not far from the landscapes of the previous record, but soon ends up drifting toward gentler pop fragrances, which represent the essential imprint of the new album. Me And Armini thus returns to the sunniness and instinctive approach of Love In The Time Of Science, combining them with the personality honed on Fisherman's Woman. But in her search for new territory, Emiliana seems to lose, on more than one occasion, something of her gift for originality, scattering herself across a variety of directions without ever quite finding a truly persuasive key.

The songs on Me And Armini come from different writing periods, with plenty of conflicting experiences in between: it's no surprise, then, that the album shifts between such varied moods. The lazy reggae scents that inspire the sway of the title track and "Heard It All Before" sound a bit too conventional, though, while the delicate acoustic drapery of "Birds" seems unsure of which direction to take, stretching out into a soft psychedelia. And while tracks like "Bleeder" and "Beggars Prayer" (penned, as before, by Eg White) recapture that ethereal grace that seemed to have vanished, the bold ambitions of "Dead Duck" never go beyond being a digression for its own sake.

By Emiliana's own admission, the real protagonists of the record are the "crazy love songs": from the onomatopoeic play of "Jungle Drum", with its lively rhythm that instantly sticks in the memory, to the seductive melody of "Big Jumps", with its wink to the wild side of the street in true Lou Reed fashion.

The guitar of friend and mentor Dan Carey, once again at Emiliana Torrini's side in making the record, takes center stage more than ever, winding sinuously between the sighs of "Ha Ha" and the liquid blues of "Gun". And it's in "Gun" above all that you can feel the atmosphere of the jam sessions in Carey's Oxfordshire cottage: as the Icelandic singer tells it, the song was born out of an improvisation that the tape failed to record; the two of them chased it all night long, unable to remember it, until suddenly, at four in the morning, it came back as if out of nowhere.

"It's always like starting over again," Emiliana replies to those who ask her about her constant stylistic changes. "It's good to be free. To let yourself be free to express yourself however you want." But freedom, as she sings in "Big Jumps", has the certainty of falling in love, it's as simple as the road that leads home: “Sometimes I feel so confused / I’m under the illusion that I have to choose / I love you, always know the way / the way back home always is the same”.

Emiliana Torrini still seems to be searching for her own road: perhaps that's why she refuses to be caught standing still in the same place for too long. This time, though, her snapshot alongside the mysterious Armini doesn't seem to be entirely in focus.

Sales smile on Me And Armini regardless, and One Little Indian takes the opportunity to dust off the double compilation Rarities from the archives, which includes the singles from Love In The Time Of Science in a variety of versions that's not exactly essential (from acoustic takes to remixes handled by names like Rae & Christian and Tore Johansson). The only real points of interest lie in the collaborations with Slowblow ("Flirt", "7-Up Days") included on the disc.

"A song waiting to be sung"

It's pointless to look up "tookah" in the dictionary: for the title of her fourth internationally released album, Emiliana Torrini chose a completely invented word. A word that holds a very particular meaning for her: "It's the essence of each of us, your self as you were when you were born, before life decorated you like a Christmas tree. It's what connects you to everything and everyone." It's this essence that her music aspires to. Paradoxically, it's precisely Tookah that turns out to be the album on which the Icelandic singer's identity seems most uncertain and least defined.

What put Emiliana in touch with her "tookah" was one very specific event: the birth of her first child. The experience of motherhood, however, permeates the album not with the predictable joy of new life dawning, but with an anguished gaze turned toward her own reflection in the mirror. "I felt like I was split in two," she recalls. "It was the happiest moment of my life, and at the same time part of me was terribly depressed." Dualism and the need for unity thus become the crucial crux of a malaise whose echo inevitably spreads into the music as well.

Complicating matters further, the commercial success of Me And Armini loaded Emiliana with more pressure than ever before: "For the first time in my life I felt the urge to put out an album. I felt the need to make a successful product right away." This time, though, the magic didn't happen, and the first recording sessions with her longtime right-hand man Dan Carey were a complete failure. To Emiliana's ears, everything sounded familiar, already heard before. "At one point Dan looked me in the eye and told me I wasn't ready to make a record. It was an incredible relief to hear him say it. I took a deep breath and we decided to shelve the project."

The spark for Tookah came precisely from the decision to take a step back: "After giving birth I simply felt the need to go out dancing. So we started playing some dance music together. And we realized that could be exactly where the sound of the new album would come from." The choice, however, was to strip the songs of their most danceable elements: only the single "Speed Of Dark" dares to venture onto the dancefloor, with slightly tighter grooves than usual and languid electro ambitions. The rest of the album takes on much icier, more introverted tones, starting with the Bat For Lashes-like rhythmic bed of the title track.

Then again, with such a troubled gestation, it's hardly surprising that "Tookah" ends up being an unresolved record. What shapes the album's sound above all is the Torrini/Carey duo's fascination with the icy keyboards that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross used to accompany the images of "The Social Network". So the attempt to find a familiar warmth to hold onto, from "Home" to "Elisabet", remains wrapped in a veil of synthetic chills. And even when the beats round out into more openly pop shapes, as in the amorous outburst of "Animal Games", the result fails to seduce with the same melodic hooks as the previous record.

The heart of the album, then, is to be found elsewhere, in the moments when Emiliana draws closer again to the atmospheres of Fisherman's Woman, chasing the rarefied intimacy of the latest Goldfrapp. It's amid the guitar phrasing and synth reverbs of "Caterpillar" and "Autumn Sun" that the Icelandic singer confesses the feeling hidden within the folds of the songs: fear. Fear of losing part of herself, fear of losing the certainty of love, fear of losing the mysterious bond that ties a mother to her child. That uncertainty that makes you feel split in two, like the two-faced image chosen for the album cover. The time of unity, for Emiliana Torrini, doesn't seem to have arrived just yet.

“Here’s to all the roads that we’ve been down”

Ten years would pass before the artist returned with a record of new material. In the meantime, the long wait would be broken up only by a collaboration with the Colorist Orchestra, the Belgian collective led by Aarich Jespers and Gerrit Valckenaers, created with the aim of working time and again with songwriters to revitalize their catalogue or come up with new pieces. That meeting would spark a series of concerts that the live album The Colorist & Emiliana Torrini would capture in its vivid creative setting, lending a dream-pop tone to some of the most celebrated passages in the artist's repertoire. After wrapping up, in 2017, her role as performer and writer on Music To Draw To: Satellite, an inconclusive ambient-pop record helmed by hip-hop beatmaker Kid Koala, it would be the meeting with the Colorist Orchestra that brought Torrini back into the game with an album, the seventh of her career.

Realizing there was still so much left unsaid, what began as a tantalizing appetizer ultimately led to something even more exciting, an alchemy that had been waiting for the right moment to be properly explored. Torrini draws on the contribution of the Belgian collective for Racing The Storm, an album that finds her picking up the threads of her inspiration again and crafting a work of real authorial solidity. Above all, it's a work that finds her once more wholeheartedly embracing the most eccentric and surprising sides of pop music, playing with colors and taking wildly unconventional detours, moving between contexts and eras held together by a firmly confident creative hand.

The cover art hints at it, and the composition confirms it: the album's business is theatrical matter, an anthology of songs that, while still penned by Torrini, stands out for the specificity of its mood, for the variety of devices that mark an experience with a clear narrative arc. La corsa nella tempesta thus draws on the omnivorous curiosity that defined the masterpiece Love In The Time Of Science and adapts it to a decidedly more subdued aesthetic, without ever becoming tame. More incisive than she's been since 2005, the artist moves with ease across the singular arrangements of these songs: spare in its harmony yet capable of refined chamber-music interplay, "Mikos" is an awakening that unfolds as a continuous discovery, dewdrops tinting the atmosphere in new colours. "Hilton" brings in faint electronic touches, beefs up the percussive backbone, and lays the sweetest pop melody over a bed that manages to feel both urban and evocative at once, never quite resolving that apparent contradiction.

If a "Wedding Song" revives the bond with folk song from a Sixties perspective, the deft performances of the Colorist Orchestra on "Right Here" speak of a present to be breathed in with all its warmth, to be lived without any fear. There's also room for more disorienting reflections, moments where the Belgian orchestra's full timbral richness is left to blossom (the instrumental "A Scene From A Movie"), or where the music slips into a glitchy gait, playing with the purest kind of evocation ("Smoke Trails"). In a little over forty minutes, she proves an expressive language capable of bending to every shade she chooses, moving between fear and tenderness with equal ease. Breezy and refined, Emiliana Torrini proves she has recovered her old sparkle and can pair it with a sonic palette of great versatility. A comeback that has more than made up for such a long hiatus.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis ("Racing The Storm")

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