FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Anna of the North - Dream Girl
_________
SOMEONE whose music…
I have been following since her debut album came out, I wanted to spotlight an Anna of the North album. That debut was 2017’s Lovers. The moniker of Norwegian artist Anna Lotterud, I actually want to focus on her second studio album. Last year’s Crazy Life is an amazing, but I want people to connect with 2019’s Dream Girl. Her finest album in my opinion, you do not hear many songs from it played om the radio in my view. In fact, Anna of the North is an artist not given enough exposure as she should. One of the most interesting voices in music, Dream Girl is a terrific album. It was a bit of a transition for Lotterud. Anna of the North was Originally formed as a duo with producer Brady Daniell-Smith in 2014. He left the group in 2018, with Lotterud continuing to use the name. I want to come to a couple of interviews before sourcing positive reviews for the terrific Dream Girl. At the start of 2020, NME featured Anna of the North. Its now-sole member was reflecting on a strange time. The break-up of the duo left Lotterud disconnected and unsure of who she was. That said, Dream Girl is a terrific album. I want to source a few parts of the interview:
“Her love of hip-hop, however, was something she fell into. “I had a weird approach to listening to music,” Anna explains. “I used to Google lyrics with things that I felt, and I’d write a sentence down and if I found a song that had those lyrics I would download that and listen to it.”
At 18 Anna first started writing her own music, when her Dad gave her a microphone, guitar and sound card for her birthday. Despite uploading a few tunes to Soundcloud (“one got 500 listens even though I never shared it!”), Anna hadn’t considered music a job until she moved to Melbourne for her studies. “I never had a plan to become an artist, I just loved music and deep, deep, deep inside of me there was this dream to be able to [be a musician].”
“You’re not a musician in Norway until you have a song out on Spotify with 200,000 streams, or you’re not successful until you can live off it,” Anna says.
This all changed when she went to university in Australia. “In Melbourne it was a totally different life. People were writers even though they hadn’t released songs, people were photographers without getting paid. People just spoke out loud about what they wanted to do. People were more like ‘yeah, I should do it!’”
It was there she met the other OG member of Anna of the North, Brady. The duo first released ‘Sway’ in 2014, which became an online smash and landed them a record deal with Honeymoon in the US. They then spent time touring the world, writing, recording and eventually releasing their breakup-inspired debut album ‘Lovers’.
Buzz around the duo grew, with Anna collaborating with Tyler, The Creator on his ‘Flower Boy’ album. The album’s title track ‘Lovers’ quickly racked up 20 million streams after being used in Netflix romcom To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
But everything changed when the duo split, with Anna suddenly finding herself as a solo artist. She had to return to the studio and find the type of music she really wanted to make, and tackle the fear of making mistakes with brand new collaborators head on. “At home in my room behind closed doors there are no rules, I can sing as loud as I can, and I can fail and I can try again without anybody judging me. You’re so vulnerable [sharing ideas in the studio] and I was so scared, it took me a lot of time before I dared to just sing out loud and try stuff.”
There were of course sessions that didn’t go well and people she didn’t click with, but after months of trying, she found the right collection of people and starting writing ‘Dream Girl’, a glorious collection of soaring dreamy pop, stuffed full of R&B rhythms and euphoric melodies. “I think you can hear in the music that I’m freer. The music is more positive, more energetic,” Anna says of the record, which came out at the end of 2019. And you’d have to agree. Tunes like ‘My Love’ are earworms of jubilant, 1970s flecked pop, whilst ‘Leaning on Myself’ is for those in the final stages of mourning a lost relationship (“It’s my own anthem, and if I ever feel shit, I’ll turn that up and just dance to it.”)
She’s grateful for artists like Billie Eilish, who have let Anna write the music she’s always wanted to. “I think it’s so good and so healthy to have a girl like her representing young women. She’s allowing me as a musician to write what the fuck I want, as I think now she’s opening up a whole new musical scene.”
Looking to the future Anna is just keen to keep making music her way. “I don’t really wanna be the biggest thing in the world,” she says honestly, “I just want to live a healthy life, and earn enough money to get a house and a car.” She’s also trying to do her part environmentally, ensuring she tours as sustainably as possible and releasing a vintage merch collection. “I’m trying to do what I can, and I don’t want to be too political about what I do, but I’m trying my best to help,” she says. “But sometimes I want to just sit down and cry and shoot myself in the head because there’s no way out of this mess! But I want to keep spreading my good values”.
The Line of Best Fit spoke with Anna of the North/Lotterud in December 2019. Thinking about things, this was only a few months before the pandemic struck. With a new album out, and an artist trying to find new direction and purpose, it was a rather unfortunate time in that respect. That being said, there was a lot of love for this incredible album. I think that people really need to check Dream Girl out, as it is undoubtedly one of the very best of 2019:
“Most of the album’s concept focuses on the idea of the ‘dream girl’ not being a real person, and rather is about just becoming comfortable in oneself, letting go of any expectations you hold yourself to, and not taking yourself too seriously.
“Dream Girl in itself, there’s some songs where I wish that the situation was different. I wish in my head I was thinking differently and there’s songs about how I wish a dream world or like a perfect world would be. The name of the album isn’t about a perfect girl with like a perfect body, like perfect doesn't even exist, it’s not anything to do with beauty either she's like what I wanted to be, my own dream girl, and I wished I was like happy with myself. My dream would be to be like, totally one hundred percent comfortable with who I am and my thoughts and like understanding myself and being zen. That would be awesome.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas
And with that, there’s an irony in the title, similar to how ‘Lovers’ was mostly a breakup album. But the dream girl concept became an alter ego for Lotterlund, in performance and in a way that allowed her to have more fun with her sound.
“I think I'm never going to be like a big, big, big pop artist. I love pop you know, I think pop is great and makes me happy and I don't know like, again that song, ‘Thank Me Later’, we went in the studio and that was what came out. I love that it’s funky and fun. I love the fun in it. I think to me as well I've always been a bit ironic with myself like I'm not not taking myself too seriously.
“I think that this album reflects me as a person way more than ‘Lovers’ did in a way. But I have the Lovers side as well. I have the dark. I think like remember I asked my mom once, I remember that I was in Melbourne where I felt like really lonely and really depressed, and was I just starting to be like ‘am I like really depressed?’ you know? And I just felt that it was so it was so dark and I called my mom and it's like, ‘have you ever thought that I'd be like more than normal?’ And she said, yeah. I think like I have both sides like I can be really happy and really really, really really dark and I think like the ‘Lovers’ part is like one side of me which is like bipolar, haha. But I think like I have both sides so like I can be energetic and then I could be like the darkest you know.”
The imagery surrounding the record is much more playful, in keeping with Dream Girl’s cheekier lyricism and funkier melodies. On the album cover she sits atop a crushed car bonnet, wearing angel wings and elf ears, as if in some sort of dystopian fantasy land (that acts as a brilliant descriptor for the social media sites she’d come to mock later on), and the single artworks feature cowboy hats, birds, flowers and more, all with colourful backdrops; a stark contrast to the minimalistic white clothing and walls of ‘Lovers’. It all adds up to Lotterlund appearing more confident and experimental in her artistic self.
“I just did a music video shoot with a guy in LA and he had this idea for a music video and he was like ‘you can do whatever you want’. And I was like, can I have elf ears? Like, yeah, let's do it. And that was it. So I got my elf ears. Like that happened before I chose the name for ‘Dream Girl’ like everything just organically fell together. The song and putting the elf ears on and the angel wings, it feels like we're not real anymore, you're not human, like no one can touch me, no one can hurt me. I feel that somehow a really good thing came together with just spontaneously throwing ideas out there, and I think that's who I am as a person as well; spontaneous and just like yeah lets do that, suddenly, you'd be like, wow, shit we have like a concept. I think that's really cool. I’ve learned this past year that nothing is wrong. We just have to try stuff and yeah, you never know and something really, really good can come out of it.”
It’s interesting that she’d mention this record feels like a more accurate representation of her, as she always comes across quite candid on her social media. Her Instagram name sits alongside the phrase ‘weird ass white girl’, and on various photos she’ll zoom in on a ‘flaw’ like a belly roll in a picture, for example. Breaking down the social media fourth wall comes naturally, and it’s like the freedom has always been there, just unlocking it artistically has taken some time.
“I think I have my flaws and everything and when it comes to social media, I'm proud of who I am and like my body and like being a woman, I have nothing to hide. Social media is weird anyway so why not just go with it? I’m never going to fake my identity or who I am, I’ve always been weird and always just claimed it before anyone says it. It's crazy, and of course I think about that you know, like, algorithms and stuff and like how crazy that things are and like, of course it would be cool to be the biggest user or whatever, but at the same time it wouldn't because I think everyone is struggling to be something and when they get to that point it’s not fun either. I mean, I think we need to like, just enjoy what we have, and that’s super cliché”.
I will finish off with a couple of reviews for the magnificent Dream Girl. This is what DIY observed when they sat down with an incredible album. I think Dream Girl confirmed that, in Anna Lotterud, we have this incredible talent who will endure for years to come:
“‘Dream Girl’ is a diamond: glittering and multi-faceted with edges and smoothness – enough to dazzle your eyes as it catches the light. ‘Lonely Life’ dips into jazz-influenced, expansive synth: a nod to the signatures of Frank Ocean. The infectious, lolloping pace of ‘Thank Me Later’ creates a blue-skies optimism, whereas ‘Used to Be’ slips into hip hop territory: astral and downtempo. ’When R U Coming Home’, with its trilling high-hats and summertime shimmer is Anna of The North’s approach to an R&B anthem.
The record deals with matters of the heart, meaning the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows. “Reasons” features the soft vocals of Charlie Skien, which makes Anna’s own ring sharp and true over the minimal, nocturnal instrumentals. The song gives a sense of balance to an album that is otherwise an open letter to a complicated relationship. ‘If U Wanna’ is a visceral closer, raw and exposed, and ‘Leaning on Myself’, with its lurching bassline, is a eulogy to the bittersweet taste of freedom and being lost. ‘Dream Girl’ is a canvas spattered with a thousand colours, as Anna of The North experiments with a spectrum of sounds and moods”.
I will finish off by sourcing what Classic Pop Magazine had to say in their review. It took them until December 2019 to give their assessment but, like so many, they were impressed by a singular talent and a phenomenal album. I have been listening back to Dream Girl, and it seems to get stronger and reveal new things each time I hear it. If you are new to Anna of the North, I would say t hear Dream Girl and then move on to her latest album, Crazy Life:
“If Anna Lotterud’s 2017 debut lacked distinction, that was partly down to the number of other Scandinavian women operating in similarly frosty fields. Lovers fetishised the 80s effectively, but lacked enough character to justify its debts to the era, its songs eager to please but more humdrum than hummable.
Still, what a difference two years make. Its follow-up, Dream Girl, is almost as flawless as its title suggests, a candied concoction of precisely engineered melodies, charming – and sometimes strikingly candid – lyrics, and a sound so crystal clear and smooth you could skate on it.
Furthermore, despite the fact she’s now 28, Lotterud somehow captures the innocent, nervous pleasures and pain of one’s early love affairs. As she sings on the playfully childish Interlude – a simple playground chant full of quirky, high-pitched voices – “Maybe I should kinda tell you all the things I feel/ ‘Cos maybe there’s a tiny chance you feel the same as me.”
The title track provides the best example of such gaiety, though, by combining Lily Allen’s occasional sweet naivety with the fleet-footed soul Amy Winehouse sometimes offered, all the time flitting guilelessly between flattering infatuation and stalker obsession. My Love, too, is a delicious slice of delicate disco which, though it’s slower and gentler, still recalls Diana Ross’ disco peak with its “Round and round/ Upside down” chorus. What We Do, meanwhile, recalls Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You, and she plays subdued on the regretful Time To Get Over It and the luscious Reasons, which features fellow Norwegian Andreas Høvset (aka Charlie Skien). Her debt to the 80s remains substantial, of course – Lonely Life even reclaims the urbane jazz-funk of acts like Curiosity Killed The Cat – but no one’s calling the debt in, even if they called her out last time”.
If you are unfamiliar with Anna and the North and Dream Girl, then spend some time today to give it a play - as it is an album that you will love. I hope that she has a busy summer with festivals and live appearances. With three incredible albums under the belt, here is an artist who I hope will be making music…
FOR a long time to come.