Angels Woman...Frida Hyvönen

"Refreshingly imaginative, sexually upfront and impossible to second guess. Fun and peppy one moment, touchingly tender the next..."

Q Magazine

Frida Hyvönen (born January 1, 1977) is a Swedish singer-songwriter. She is from Robertsfors, a small place just outside Umeå in the north of Sweden. For some years Frida lived in Stockholm, but has recently moved back to Robertsfors. Her first record, Until Death Comes, is completely acoustic. It was released in 2005 on The Concretes record label Licking Fingers. Her first single, “I Drive My Friend”, climbed the hit-list in Sweden for a few weeks. The surreal self-exposing lyrics that are on the record figuratively go straight into the heart.

fryda hyvonen on stage

fryda hyvonen backstage

fryda hyvonen after show

fryda hyvonen, signing an autograph in the backstage

fryda hyvonen after show

Photo: Antoine Doyen

Frida Hyvönen - Silence Is Wild (2008)

If Frida Hyvönen’s debut, Until Death Comes, painted her poetry and fatalism in stark black on white, her impressive sophomore effort is all shades of grey. Largely abandoning the honky-tonk piano accompaniments that purposefully limited her early compositions, Hyvönen’s quietly grown into fully-realised pop star, her arrangements now lush where they were stark. Even on simple piano ballads, the Swedish songstress seems to have found greater confidence, a richer harmonic vocabulary, and a more coherent style. Which, together, makes Silence Is Wild a pretty impressive album.

Frida Hyvönen is not shy about chronicling uncomfortable experience. On “Once I Was a Serene Teenaged Child”, from her debut, she sang about the complex emotions of a young relationship: “Once I felt your cock against my thigh … I want to be one of you guys / But I don’t want your body so close … But the feeling of power was intoxicating”. The singer’s conversational writing style and forthright, even confrontational, subject matter is carefully calibrated—she must be counted a feminist singer-songwriter, but this isn’t what makes her unique, or special. That is a consequence of the skill with which she communicates commonly experienced but rarely-discussed ugliness to the listener . Silence Is Wild deploys its bombs with casual sweetness. Watch for the longing in “My Cousin”, when Hyvönen asks:

I’m not the marrying kind, and neither are you But still I am absurd enough To ask you: if we were the marrying kind Would it be my hand you’d ask for?

Then there’s “December”. The song, a companion piece perhaps to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, has the harmonic adventurousness of Soviet Kitsch-era Regina Spektor, but without the cuteness. It’s a devastating, drop-what-you’re-doing moment.

But for all that, Hyvönen is still only intermittently so forceful in her emotional imagery. “Dirty Dancing” opens the album in a warm haze of rejection painted in metaphor drawn from the movie, and a clipped refrain you might recognize. But a number of the songs here won’t work on many levels above the straight piano-pop song, catchy phrases hooking the listener in, with larger meaning mostly absent. Hyvönen’s best when turning that acute observation on herself—whether that be self-deprecating, as on “Scandinavian Blonde” (a rollicking Ben Folds-esque track that mocks the stereotype and also wonders how Hyvönen herself can simultaneously fall into it) or the haunting final track, “Why Do You Love Me So Much”. Sharing Paul Simon’s amazement from “Something So Right”, Hyvönen here asks “Did I win the Nobel prize? … I must have been sleeping”, and we can easily relate. “Have I by mistake been extra charming?”

In the past, Hyvönen’s songs worked as intellectual touchstones, but not necessarily always as songs. It’s the triumph of her new record that these two essential elements of her songwriting have been more or less reconciled. “Please call the boys”, Hyvönen asks her mother rhetorically on “Birds”, “Tell them to put on their dancing shoes now”. No need to ask, Ms. Hyvönen—we’re already dancing under your spell.

Hyvonen is a Swedish singer, pianist, and songwriter who is both musically and lyrically fearless. There's no gimmickry or artifice in her style, no elfin voice or concept album pomposity--just a woman with clear, proud pipes and a bold pen. ... Full DescriptionOn SILENCE IS WILD, Hyvonen largely shelves the honky-tonk style heard on her debut in exchange for a denser, more immersive sound filled out with synths, strings, and choral singing. But her lyrical openness remains intact: "December" deals with abortion, while "Pony" tiptoes around bestial S&M. The funny "Scandinavian Blond" turns the satire on herself.

VIVA VOCE!!

MONOCLE

My Working Life
Going solo
- Paris

Frida Hyvönen is a singer-songwriter with an intimate understanding of the grand piano and the great outdoors. Monocle went backstage with the Swedish chanteuse in Paris as she prepared to play songs from her new record, 'Silence is Wild'.

Credits
Writer: Robert Bound
Photographer: Antoine Doyen

Album Solo:
Until Death Comes (2005)
Frida Hyvönen Gives You: Music from the Dance Performance PUDEL (2007)
Silence Is Wild (2008)

"Hugs and Kisses...referencing high art and pop culture in a transcendent manner which masterfully puts Hyvönen at the top of a new international class of singer-songwriters."

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