Sweet Swedish sisters
JOHANNA Soderberg is explaining how three minutes of grainy home video changed her life. “Me and my sister went into the woods near our home in Stockholm with a camera and played a song. We put it up on YouTube. That was the last we thought about it. Now it has two and a half million hits. It is incredible. Who could see that coming?”
In the clip, Johanna and younger sister Klara perform Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, by the Seattle folk group, Fleet Foxes. Stripped down and ethereal, the video has brought the pair, who record as First Aid Kit, global attention. Still in their teens, they are being touted as one of 2012’s brightest hopes. Reviews of their new album, The Lion’s Roar, have been swoonful. Still January, one critic declared it the album of the year.
“It is an amazing feeling to have all of these people listening to your music,” says Johanna, her Valley Girl twang more Santa Cruz than Stockholm. “I find it insane that social media can have that huge an effect. It was totally unexpected. We feel we are in a dream.”
From Abba to Lykke Li, Sweden is a hot-bed of pop. While it has a folk scene, Swedish-language artists dominate so international attention is rare. First Aid Kit may upset the status quo. Their sonorous voices entwined, Johanna and Klara perform otherworldly torch songs suffused with teenage melancholy. Think of Mazzy Star, Joanna Newsom, and Vashti Bunyan. Yet there’s a strain of Nordic pathos that ensures they sound like nobody but themselves.
The success of the Fleet Foxes cover has opened doors. Last year, First Aid Kit were invited to the prestigious South By South West music festival in Austin, Texas. In the sweltering early spring heat, they were a sensation. In addition to stunning journalists, the sisters came to the attention of the Nebraska folk group, Bright Eyes, heroes to Johanna and Klara since childhood.
“I’ll be honest, meeting them we were sort of stage-struck,” says Johanna. “We grew up listening to those guys. To have them come up and say they like your music — I mean, wow.”
The admiration was mutual. Bright Eyes guitarist Mike Mogis was smitten. He had a proposition: would First Aid Kit join him at Bright Eyes’ Omaha studio to work on material? They agreed without hesitation.
A few weeks later, First Aid Kit found themselves in the American midwest, laying down the tracks that would become The Lion’s Roar.
“Nebraska is like Sweden in some ways and very different in others,” says Johanna. “The winters are cold. We were there in May. And it was very warm. It was an unusual experience for us. But such a fantastic privilege.”
Folk was not the sisters’ first love. At school, they listened to the same music as their friends. Johanna even fronted a punk band. When she was 14, however, she stumbled upon so-called ‘alternative country’ artists such as Wilco and Midlake. It was a discovery that changed things forever.
“Growing up, we listened to all sorts of things,” she says. “I would say we absorbed influences from all over. It was a very wide-ranging musical education. Then, you get to a certain age and your tastes start to develop and mature. That is what happened to us, I think. All of a sudden, we got into folk in a big way.
The sisters had been singing together since they were very young. However, their new-found love of folk convinced them to take things more seriously. With Johanna on guitar, they started to play around Stockholm, building a reputation for their searing performances.
“People in Sweden had heard of us,” says Johanna. “Before the Fleet Foxes thing, it is fair to say we’d had some success at home. It was confined to Sweden, though. Only after posting our video on YouTube did we start to receive attention from elsewhere.
“I have lost count of the number of times someone walks up to me at a concert and says, ‘I saw you on the internet — then decided to check out the rest of your music.’ It snowballed from there.”
Barely out of school and with two albums under their belts, Johanna and Klara are nothing if not precocious. It helps that their father played in an alternative rock band in Sweden. His experience of the music industry has proved invaluable, alerting the girls to the many pitfalls of the business.
“His band was popular,” says Johanna. “However, late in their career they started to change their music, because that is what people advised. It was to their detriment. They changed, not because they believed they should but because others were telling them to. I think there is a lesson there: that you should always be true to what you believe in. It’s something we are determined to remember at all costs.”
While musical siblings don’t always get on, the Soderbergs are close. Johanna can’t imagine singing with anyone other than Klara.
Having her sister beside her has made the difficult part of the music business more bearable.
“It is great to have someone by your side you can trust,” Johanna says.
“We get on really well. More than that, you are aware your sister is not going to abandon you. In this line of work, there is definitely a lot of pressure. It can feel lonely at times. With so much responsibility on your shoulders, knowing you have someone to share the pressure with makes a huge difference.”
* The album The Lion’s Roar is out now. First Aid Kit perform at The Workmans Club, Dublin on Saturday, Feb 25.
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