Agnes Obel - There's something magical in Denmark

Forgive me for the obvious opener, but since I'm Italian I have to ask you about the bad luck you've had so far with your plans to come play this album live in Italy. First there was the November date cancelled because you got sick, and now this shift from April to May.

Yes, I'm really sorry about that, it's been awful. I love playing in Italy and it's always the worst feeling when you can't wait to go somewhere and then you can't make it. So now I'm really looking forward to coming back, and I think early May is actually a good time to visit you. It's going to be wonderful! I'm also really happy to be going to Turin, since I've never been there before.

It's a beautiful city. I hope you'll have time for a walk around town, because it's really lovely.

I hope so too, and we're actually trying to organise some free time. It's hard to say no to the chance of doing a bit of sightseeing in Italy, so I'm counting on enjoying Milan, Rome and Turin - it'll be lovely.

I'm from Milan, so live the only time I saw you was probably your first time in Italy, at that little theatre in the north part of the city. It was just you and one other musician on stage. Now you're coming back after a long time, with a new album that has a lot more musical elements in it. What should we expect, those of us who only saw you that one time? Are you still just the two of you on stage, or is there a full band and a bigger production?

There are three of us on stage now, and there's a piano - I think at Teatro Blu there was a keyboard.

Teatro Blu, impressive that you remember the name!

It really was my first time in Italy, so I remember it very well. Anyway, there'll be a piano, and violin, cello and viola will be played in turn, and in general what we've worked on is building a more dynamic construction of sound. We've also worked with loops and various effects, partly to try to recreate the arrangements from the new record, which are more complex and have a bigger sound. I think we managed to achieve what we were aiming for, and I have to say the part that gave us the most trouble was the harmonic structures.

When you made your first record you were much less known than when you made the second one. Did you feel that rise in popularity as a positive push, or did you feel some pressure knowing that a lot more people would be listening to the album?

It took so long to release "Philarmonics", and I had to do it on my own, without a record deal, so actually I was already working on some of the songs from the latest album even before the first one came out. Then it finally came out, and we found ourselves having to tour for almost two years, and in the meantime I was already thinking about this record and working on it. Once the tour was over I told myself I had to start recording straight away, otherwise I would have forgotten the songs… What I mean is that things with "Philarmonics" were so delayed that, on one hand, I didn't feel any pressure from outside, because the record had done well and the tour had just ended, but I did feel pressure inside myself, because I felt I had to make this record right away, so as not to lose the ideas.

From this answer we learn that you haven't had a moment's rest since "Philarmonics" came out. I wonder if you now feel the need to rest, and whether you've already planned a few months off once the dates you have scheduled are over, which I imagine will run through the whole summer.

Actually, I haven't been constantly on tour during this period, and even from the Italian dates onward I won't be playing continuously - the next ones should be at the end of June, so I don't get the feeling that things are moving too frantically. I'm not worried about a lack of rest, then.

Listening to the latest record, I got the impression that you wanted to put something extra into it compared to the first one, in every respect: the songwriting, the way you sing, the arrangements. Did you already have this urge to add more elements to your sound before you started working on these songs, or did you simply start working and realize along the way that you were adding things compared to the first record?

Yes, that's true, I already had some ideas before starting work on these songs - I'd told myself I wanted to try some things with the cello, in terms of how to record it too, how to make it interact with the voice, having it work more as a rhythmic element rather than just as a background element within the sound's texture. Then I wanted to try working with more people, and I also wanted to try new things when it came to songwriting, and to the way I sing - I wanted to try mixing spoken word with singing, and then I wanted to see whether I was capable of using my voice more as an instrument, and whether I'd be able to switch between the two approaches. Then I find that on "Philarmonics" the songs didn't reflect the state of mind I was in at the moment I was making them, but were about memories of the past, whereas on "Aventine" I wanted to try to capture the state of mind of the very moment in which I was making the song. I wanted something I could look at to understand what I was in that moment - that was a challenge too, and honestly I don't even know if I won that challenge.

From this answer it seems the lyrics aren't something you add to a song once it's musically finished, but that you already know what a song's lyrics will be about the moment you start writing it.

Yes, the melody is the thing that comes first, but once it arrives I immediately know what the lyrics of the song will be about. It then takes time to put it down in the right way, but I already know what it will be about and the feelings it will evoke.

Anyway, the record has now been out for about six months, and I'd like to briefly tell you what my colleague wrote in the review on our site. Basically he says the record confirms your talent, but leaves you with the feeling that you could have done something more. I imagine that when the record had just been finished you were convinced you'd given your all to make it, but now that a few months have passed, do you too feel that you could have done something more?

I always think I could have done more. What I actually want to do keeps changing, so I always have the feeling that I could have done something else. I've never looked at something I've made, once it's finished, and told myself it was perfect. I like to look forward, so even once "Aventine" was finished I started thinking about what I could do for the next record. Still, managing to make this record was very important to me, but so is starting to think about what I could do differently with the next one. What I would like to say to critics sometimes, though, is that making an album really is a huge amount of work.

You're probably right, in the sense that ultimately we think about what an artist could have done, but we're not artists, so we have no idea of the effort involved. I also wanted to talk about the instrumental interludes on both albums - tell me anything you'd like about them, about the contribution they make to the record as a whole.

Every album has different phases, different chapters, and each instrumental moment is the introduction to a chapter. Both records are divided into three parts, so the instrumental at the start introduces the first part, the one in the middle introduces the central part, and the one toward the end leads into the finale. Also, personally, I like listening to albums where there's a moment of pause from the voice.

So we can expect more instrumental moments in your upcoming work.

Yes, I like making instrumental tracks. On one hand, I think that maybe to make an album even more intense I shouldn't include them, but then the risk is that the record becomes too dense and the listening experience too exhausting, whereas I find instrumental tracks are the best way to create more space within the album and put the listener more at ease.

As for your immediate future, I've seen you're starting to be booked on the lineups of big summer festivals like Latitude, so I imagine you'll be playing in large open-air spaces or, even indoors, in much bigger venues. Do you have different live arrangements when you play in these situations?

The only thing that changes is that, paradoxically, we have fewer instruments on stage, because the acoustic ones wouldn't be heard. We know our sound needs to be as loud as possible, so we work out everything related to amplification to achieve that. The biggest problem is the piano, because it's hard to get a loud enough sound out of it in those situations.

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