The first time I heard Elliphant was last spring at a friend’s place getting ready to go out with my girls and “Shoot Me Down” was the anthem of that night. Ellie was the voice behind it. Never in my wildest dreams would have any of us ever predicted that I get to meet her face to face just few months later. I was so nervous, but with a second she made me feel like it’s just a chill chit-chat between two girl friends. Read on, ‘cus you don’t want to miss out on Elliphant!
Who is Ellinor Olovsdotter?
No one. ‘cause I never called myself Ellinor. But Ellie is a girl who was born on a south island of Stockholm 30 years ago and I mean, I’ve been doing my thing as a free person. Born free, doing what I can with that opportunity.
Tell me a bit about your childhood
I’ve been thinking about that a lot right now actually. It was a bit messy for sure. There’s a messy childhood in my story, but there’s nothing that is black or white in this life, you know. It’s a grey zone. There was a lot of hard things. I know I need to work on some things when it comes to trust. I share something with many-many girls in the world and that’s the lack of dad when you grow up. That’s gonna hurt you a little bit when it comes to relationships, when it comes to trust and things. And also I had like a really messy mom. But at the same time I’ve been really experiencing supernatural love from the world and from my sister and at the moment, couple of years back me and my dad became best friends, and my mom has gone more and more healthy every day. I mean it was hard, it’s was complicated, full of drugs, full of party, messy. But it was also the base of Elliphant. That’s who I am.
“I risked my life 16 000 times.”
I don’t remember so much (laughs), which is a bad thing I guess. But what I really remember from my childhood is the playing. I was playing so much. If I look at the kids today, they don’t know nothing. When I was eleven I already climbed six floor buildings from the outside, I risked my life 16 thousand times. I had so many scars on my legs, I was out there all the time. I had my own little business where I was selling shit to drunk people in the park. I was a businessman from like I was four. Constantly finding new ways to earn money. I was out singing in the parks. Got money from the drunk people and there was a lot of drunk people at my side of Stockholm. It was a big social security kind of neighbourhood and a lot of kids were in the same position as me, so I never felt like an outsider or lonely in my life, there was so many people who had the same kind of crazy family situation that I had.
When did the music come?
The music came later. I started making music when I was 26 (She’s turning 30 in October). When Elliphant came. So I’ve been doing music for four years now.
Remind me of your first gig.
My first gig was a private show for only 50 people and I sang maybe 4 songs there. It was real fun. I puked before, ‘cus I was so nervous. I remember my boyfriend was there, everybody was there and even the people who wanted to sign my project were there and they didn’t know yet if this was gonna be a thing. Because a person can be amazing in the studio and write a lot of cool songs, but everything can fall on the live expression. So everybody was super happy about that gig and after that I got signed with a booking agency and record label and everything.
What has been the best concert so far?
They are all so cool. It’s cool when you have to work with it. It’s cool when you come to a place where you expect it to be full and you go up there and there’s like 14 people and you are like ‘really?’, and you have to do something with that and then you invite all those 14 people on stage and you have the show from the floor and you have an amazing show. Or you have 6000 people making ‘Hoo-He-He-Hey, Ho-He-He-Hey’, bubbles in the audience and you are getting so baffled that you can’t even sing, ‘cus there’s so much energy coming from the floor. Sometimes it’s like last night in Helsinki – just an amazing vibe, it feels important, it feels like many artists with my expression hasn’t been talking to the youth in that particular city. And I felt important. I’m not political, but I turn political in the way I percept myself, because I am not holding back. So that’s amazing. Every show is amazing, it’s amazing to get booked for some weird company show in Germany and you just get there and you live in a hotel of gold and you have like four rooms in your hotel room, and you’re lying there smoking the best Black Shadows in the world and then you go to the show and there’s drunk people and you are like ‘did you really spend all this money on me and gave me all of this for this’. But it turns out to be great anyway. I don’t have favorites.
How did your summer go? Any great memories?
It has been really intense summer. Meeting up with old music friends at festival season. Obviously I’ve done this for four years so (sarcastically) super old, but you never have a chance to meet. Maybe I go on a tour with Twin Shadow and I think we’re gonna be like best friends and hang out all the time and we send messages to each other and then one day you realize you haven’t seen each other for a year, and then you go to a festival and you suddenly see that Twin Shadow is playing. And you can hang out with your old friends again.
I love the crew experience, I am very social.
The summer is always festivals. I have like 7 nightclub gigs for the hole summer, it’s mostly only festivals and that’s special in a way. The shows are not maybe always as exciting, but the whole experience of going out to some weird countryside place and when you usually just see the big cities, then now you see the countryside of places and you are coming out to a really well organized festival and you hang out backstage and you almost feel like you’re 14 again. Being at a festival, you sit there and you have like all your people drinking beer and smoking and talking to other musicians and making contacts.
I had a chance to meet couple of people: me and Angel Haze had a really good time, I went to Australia together with MØ this year for a small minitour – that was fucking cool. We had two shows together and we did stage dives together and shit. So fun!
I love the crew experience, I am very social, I like to meet up again with friends. To hang out with Ms Dynamite this summer was really cool. We have a song together, but I never met her. I met Azealia Banks twice this summer at festivals, we also have a song together and she’s really intense, but fucking cool and I love her. Yeah, that’s the funniest thing, meeting people and talking. I love that.
I was at Positivus festival in Latvia and the energy on stage was so awesome! What gives you power?
The audience. It’s the reflection, it is the mirror, like a sexual experience. If you’re fucking with a guy and you’re faking, 100% even if he looks like he’s having a good time, he’s faking too. When it comes to these kind of things, giving and taking in this special room where a show or a sexual experience is – it’s like it’s here and it’s now and give everything you’ve got. It’s very 50:50 thing.
“If you’re fucking with a guy and you’re faking, 100% even if he looks like he’s having a good time, he’s faking too.”
You need to be in tune with your audience. Sometimes I have really drunk audience for example and these are the shittiest shows. If I have a really drunk audience that’s like talking to each other when I’m singing I’m not eager to perform, but I do it anyway. I get energy from somewhere and I just do it, but that’s because I’m provocative and I never wanna feel shame, so I’m always giving everything I’ve got. I’m closing my eyes and I’m just giving it.
I have nothing to lose. We don’t have to take life so seriously. We need to do good, we need to do our best, but we can’t hold ourselves inside of this skin. We need to explore our bodies. I am lucky I have a pretty phase this time around, but I don’t look at myself as my body, I really look at myself as a spirit and I think everybody needs to do that. I think it’s the first step to become healthy, to realize that you are not a girl, you are not a boy, you are a living energy that’s been circulating this planet since the big bang. I think spirits, we are everything, and we need to accept that. That’s all. And when you do that, you can be so powerful and so brave. Because you know that nothing matters.
What someone writes about me, what someone thinks about me, I don’t care. I really don’t. The only thing I care about, that I get really upset with, is when I feel like I don’t express myself enough. If I feel like I don’t have time to be creative, when I make a video and I don’t like it and I release it anyway, because I don’t have time to make another one. That’s annoying for me.
How do the shows at nightclubs differ from the ones you do at festivals?
I think the Lativa show for me, like most festival shows, are a little bit more promotion. It’s more like ‘Hi, I’m here, I am Elliphant, I am glad you came and watched my show’. Some people have heard some stuff, most people have never heard anything. It’s just different. But this one becomes very physical, you’re getting really close in a club like this and also the sound experience. Festival really is meant to look at Beatles and stuff like that, or Amy Winehouse. Sitting on the grass and listening to Amy Winehouse in the summer time on a festival smoking weed. That’s a dream, you know. But a Major Lazer show or Elliphant show should be in this sound, because the sound is half of the thing. It’s more than an half. The bass and everything, you can’t build that in an open space like that.
You have collaborated with so many different artists, but is there someone else you dream of collaborating with?
Yeah, I do dream. I really would love to get something down with Leila K, also A$AP would be amazing to do. I would like to do like a ballad with A$AP, like an LSD song with him. Prodigy, Massive Attack… I’m a bit old school. I like the old stuff.
I read somewhere that they call you “the chameleon of genres”, which genre would you like to try next?
I think it would be really cool to do a country song (sings). It would be really cool. It would also be really cool to do like a Swedish prog song, like prog rock song… I don’t know. But it goes like Rnb-ish with me, but I’m more classic really. If I see myself doing music in 10 years, it is definitely gonna be something like that. I’m gonna do something proggy, full punk, with some influences of dubstep and country. Imagine country lyrics on dubstep prog rock.
What music do you listen yourself on a lazy Sunday?
Billy Holiday!
When preparing to go out with friends?
I don’t really do that, but if I would I’d listen to a lot of mixtapes from Soundcloud. I like mixtapes, my DJ is really good, he knows good Soundcloud mixtapes. So we listen to that a lot before we go on stage. When I’m with my girls we usually listen to really stupid songs, like Swedish old songs, stand in the kitchen drunk and screaming. That’s pretty powerful, you get happy when you sing together.
What about when walking around town with your headphones on?
If I’m gonna be honest, I only listen to myself in headphones. Only like new tracks I’ve done or mixes I need to listen through. I think it’s a good thing and I think artists should do that more often. Start evolution with themselves, get inspired by your own album instead of getting inspired by some other albums. You easily steal, copy stuff, and that can sound good, because people are used to that sound. Many people that take that road, but the name of their project is not going to be remembered as something that changed anything.
Describe your sense of style in clothing.
(Showing me the grey sweatpants and hoodie she’s wearing right now). I like big-comfortable stuff. I get most of my things from other people and I don’t really do so much shopping. I only shop maybe ten pairs of underwear every month, because I don’t have time to wash my clothes. I am not so interested in clothes either. On stage I have like sports clothes, aerobic clothes. I don’t need to have pink hair or do anything. That would be like cookie on cookie. I try to be very natural, not use so much make up.
We have some real sneakerheads reading. Do you wear sneakers and do you have personal favorites?
All the time. I have lot of Nike shoes, but I must say I really love Fila shoes. Reebok sometimes and Jordans.
I think in the future we are going to laugh at the shoes that girls wear now. “We had so high shoes just to look sexy. That was so weird, we didn’t know that a movement was sexy.” Okay, sometimes it even looks good, but I wouldn’t switch for a second. I really don’t.
When I was teenager I had high heels and I tried so hard to expose my female side. I didn’t have like a proper booty or boobies. I was a late bloomer and for me it was a very insecure thing. I know girls who put their high heels on for very different spirit, but for me it was very uncomfortable and unhealthy place. My sneaker life is better.
Autor: Keilit Aedma @keilit
Pildid: Laura Vahter @lauravahter
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