Jenny Hval
With her new album, The Practice Of Love, Jenny Hval takes an intriguing look at what it means to grow older. The Norwegian artist talks songwriting experimentation, making a live performance memorable, and why clichés aren’t necessarily a bad thing…
Did Alice know she was in Wonderland? One of the many questions posed by the Norwegian art rocker.
Jenny Hval’s seventh album, The Practice Of Love, finds her continuing that most intriguing of prog quests: asking questions about the human condition through fiction and semi-fiction. This time, these questions asked are from the perspectives of older versions of characters from her previous albums. And she’s not worried if she doesn’t come up with any answers.
Hval has a fascination for how sounds, and even frequencies, can be harnessed to express feelings, and so her musical output is best consumed open-minded. Those of a certain age may find themselves transported back to the late 80s or early 90s via the sounds and beats she’s used this time – and while that’s her intention, she doesn’t mean it to be nostalgic.
“When we ask questions about what it is to be an adult or what our role in the world is, are we really asking superficial or stereotypical questions that don’t really go that deep?” she wonders. “It doesn’t sum up the thoughts and emotions of anyone. It’s like the Hollywood romance – you found the one; great, that’s it! The over-simplified version of what a grownup human being is.”
Hval takes us back to a small-town dance club scene in High Alice, the first track she wrote for this album that she felt was “important sonically”.
“It had this sort of, not clubby, but arpeggiated sound, that had something very rhythmical but something very light to it,” she says of the song. “I sort of saw that as this kind of rabbit hole to go into – what do these sounds mean and what do they mean if I revisit them?”
That first moment in a noisy club – we didn’t realise it was fun to be a lost, scared teenager when it happened to us. “No, you never do. Did Alice ever know that she was in Wonderland? In the book, she’s always being very sensible when she could have had so much fun…”
Bringing it back round, Hval notes: “There’s a lot of value in having experienced certain sounds over a good amount of years; what you can do with those sounds changes. It’s like with dance moves – if a choreographer revisits the choreographies of herself as a 13-year-old, that would be a really, really interesting project.
“Did Alice ever know that she was in Wonderland? In the book, she’s always being very sensible when she could have had so much fun…”
I always find it interesting putting old and new together.”
Hval prefers an organic approach to composition, including stages of almost random experimentation, improvisation and automatic writing.
“I have periods where I feel like I’m digging and trying to get somewhere; if it gets too clear then I’ll avoid it. I try to use the weirdest things I can find, and if I manage to write something with, say, a synth, a beat, a vocal effect, it’s about getting somewhere. Not just finding a verse-chorus structure, but finding that I actually did unravel something, or managed to get to another level of something in a song or a piece of music.”
She has no problem with being influenced by other people’s works, although she says she’s not the type of person who feels the need to constantly listen to music.
She’s found herself compared to Kate Bush, Björk and Jean-Michel Jarre; and while she feels they’re “very nice references”, she wants to ensure she’s done something notably different than simply sounding like someone else.
“When I wrote High Alice, I was only thinking of one song – Kylie Minogue’s Confide In Me!” she points out. “I love that song, but I would never sound like that. As long as I’m not trying to write the same song with the same intention and the same tone – that would be too much. It’s more like wanting to reach out and touch someone’s hand from a very different position.
“If people really want to know what I’ve really been listening to as a vocalist, it’s all Paul Simon, but it’s maybe not so easy to hear. Especially the song Accident on this album, I almost felt like I was going too far with the Paul Simon influences.”
But as she says,“I’ll never be an American man born in the 40s. I’ll always be quite far away. In my mind, I’m always as far away from Kate Bush and Björk as I am from
Paul Simon, because I’m not those people either. But it’s always interesting to see this kind of little game of what people can hear, and it’s nice that people can hear something. I don’t care – I love a lot of music and I don’t mind if people find something that I didn’t think of. Sometimes it’s quite informative for me.”
The Practice Of Love is a very different animal to her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch. That was a semi-biographical piece set against a background of 70s vampire and exploitation movies, and she used that language to express her ideas. Since then she returned to work as an author, and those writings led to the idea of using sounds from her young adult years to explore how she – or a fictional version of her – may have been changed over time.
“It’s a memoir thing but it’s not necessarily my memoir,” Hval says. “It’s more like my writing’s memoir in a way, or a memoir of many people that are all my characters. I want them to be like you and whoever’s listening as well.” That’s why she felt brave enough to include a reference as “spectacularly common” as Lewis Carroll’s timeless Alice In Wonderland – it’s a reference everyone can work with, but because of that it was almost like cheating.
“It’s so dumb – I think it is anyway!” she admits. “Then, as soon as I’d done it I thought, ‘I’ll go for all the clichés!’ All of a sudden I started singing about the ocean of these things I’ve always tried to avoid. It was really fun to see that something could actually happen with these characters and the inclusion of things I’d been avoiding. I think from that came this kind of conviction that I could produce it as something that was much closer to my demo landscape – my actual writing landscape – so that was a really interesting progression for me.”
As befits an album that was in part inspired by writing, there are spoken-word elements across The Practice Of Love, some provided by collaborators Vivian Wang and Laura Jean. And as befits an album that’s therefore multimedia at least in intent, Hval aims to present a live performance that includes much more than just music.
“I would really like to make something that somehow manages to feel more open than any specific art discipline, so that it kind of feels like a very open experience,” she explains. “But I also love seeing live music so it’s a very odd thing to want something very open and also want things to come together.”
However, at the time of writing, and with the dates booked, she admits the process remains “in a very confusing phase,” adding: “I think it’s necessary. I’m very unstructured; I’m not really a theatre director, so it’s a very open process.
“It’s a never-ending conflict, a never-ending juxtaposition. I don’t know if I’ll ever solve the puzzle – but I’m not sure I have to. Sometimes the puzzle can be an experience in itself. I’d really like to get where it feels like I really did try to explore something, and that magic happened because it seemed so open. If not really magical, then on a level that seemed beyond music – as well as doing the music!”
The Practice Of Love is out now via Sacred Bones. Visit www.jennyhval.com for tour dates and more information.
“It’s a memoir, but it’s not necessarily my memoir.”