Iggy Pop and Anna von Hausswolff, photographed by Fredrik Bengtsson.
Flowing hair aside, Iggy Pop and Anna von Hausswolff share another thing in common: an obvious appreciation for each other’s music. After hearing her 2018 album Dead Magic, the rock and roll icon named von Hausswolff “one of his favorites.” Now, after tapping Mr. Pop for a duet on her latest album, Iconoclasts, the Swedish singer-songwriter and pipe organist is returning the compliment. On “The Whole Woman,” the two alternate between seemingly conflicting sounds, with von Hausswolff bringing an airiness to Pop’s deep Midwestern vibrato. In the end, they find harmony in difference. “I felt when I wrote it, it was more of a song between two lovers,” von Hausswolff told her collaborator when they met up last week. “It’s still a love song, but it’s not necessarily between anyone.” Ahead of the track’s release, the two got together to talk about a range of topics, from iconoclasm and insecurity to making art in troubled times. As Pop said: “There’s a lot of Xanax going around.”
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ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF: Is this you, James?
IGGY POP: Yeah, that’s me.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Or should I call you Iggy?
POP: You can call me James if you want to.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yay.
POP: Tell me, did you eat anything today?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I had to. If I don’t eat, my brain doesn’t function.
POP: Oh my.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I’m very on the clock.
POP: Oh, that’s great. I asked you because I lived in New York when Interview magazine started. I’m aware of who reads it and a lot of people who read it know a lot about lifestyle. But they don’t know shit from Shinola when it comes to music. So I didn’t want to start with a technical question. I’m an old git now so when I go to the doctor, he always asks me what I had for breakfast.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: What do you have for breakfast?
POP: I eat a lot after a show, and I had a show last night. So I had bacon, eggs, yogurt, cheese, bread, orange juice, cappuccino.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: What does your doctor say about bacon?
POP: He’s a Canadian doctor. He’s sensible. He says the Europeans eat better than we do. But it’s ridiculous to crusade against any particular food group—or any sort of group, basically.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yeah.
POP: So I eat bacon when I’m very tired, and I’m tired.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: When I was on tour with The Swans … do you know Michael Gira?
POP: I sure as hell do know Michael Gira, from a very long time ago. He had what he thought was a rehearsal room about one block from my apartment in New York and it was a dungeon, basically. Or a place you would go to torture somebody and murder them. No windows, no light, no air. But that’s very Swans. He’s a top-notch musician.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Maybe he changed his routine, but we were on tour for six weeks. Now, I don’t drink at all. And at that point, I never drank when I was on tour. And he didn’t drink at that time so we were the ones who would go to the tour bus early after the shows, and he would always have a whole chicken to eat for himself.
POP: Oh, that’s beautiful. I’m curious about Iconoclasts, the name of the record you made. How did you come up with that name?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: One of the first songs that I wrote for the album is “The Iconoclast,” and that song became the starting point. The album is about questioning something and breaking out from something. It could be an illusion, a system, a relationship. I wanted the title to just represent the questioning and the breaking out of worship, worship of a lifestyle, worship of thought, and finding something new.
POP: There must be something in the stars right now because that’s happening up and down levels of society. The boundaries and nationalities right now are often very silly.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think worship can be such a beautiful thing. It can give you so much hope and inspiration. Worship of love, worship of certain people. But when it comes to people in general, you have to be very careful because it could so easily lean over to something extreme, something that is not grounded in who your true self is. We have such a tendency to become obsessed with things or obsessed with people.
POP: It’s becoming evident, probably through social media, that there are certain people who seem to be doing so well. Meaning, if you count up the numbers or look at the size of the yacht or how many jets or how much they can influence a government. And then there are people who just aren’t getting anywhere and they feel that way. I am an old git who loves very, very much the mid-60s to 1970s, which was titled loosely to the free jazz movement. And the first cut on the record, “Struggle With the Beast,” reminds me of the period where John Coltrane would take a Broadway show tune like “My Favorite Things,” and elevate it with very beautiful music. I’d never heard you work with saxophones or anything like that. How was that recorded? Who are the saxophonists?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: For the whole album, and that track in particular, I collaborated with the saxophonist called Otis Sandsjö.
POP: That’s a good player, really.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: He is brilliant. And like almost everyone I work with, he’s someone that I know from my past, from school or my childhood. Before I made this album, I wrote music for a theater play in Stockholm called The Lower Depths, a play by Maxim Gorky. It was the first time I arranged for Woodwind.
POP: You can read music?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Very badly, but I know the basics, and I think it’s very convenient to work in Logic. Logic has so many tools where you can work intuitively with a MIDI synth and you can play directly. And then you can add layers and it will convert it into notes.
POP: What is Logic, Anna? Is that a program or something?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Oh, Iggy, my god. It’s time for you to open up your computer, download Logic, and start working with your string arrangements.
POP: Yeah, right. [Laughs]
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Actually, before I worked in Ableton. But then my friend who has worked a lot in Logic said, “Well, if you do want to try and arrange bigger compositions for orchestra or any other types of instruments, I highly recommend you to download Logic and then I can help you.” Joel Fabiansson is his name and he helped me out. He’s also the guitarist in my band.
POP: Yeah.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: All of a sudden, I could work intuitively with practically any instrument that I want to and then Logic would be smart enough to limit the range of certain instruments and transform it into notes. So any musician could basically read whatever I’ve written. I could play more simple things, but then I could also work with more advanced patterns and move quite freely and not be restricted. So I started writing woodwinds and then I asked Otis if he wanted to be the one and only woodwind player for that play and for the recordings of The Lower Depths. He said yes and I sent him all of my music. And what he did with my notes and the demos that I sent him, it was mind-blowing. He put life into everything and he changed melody. He would take my melody, but then he would add these small details that would just elevate it. He elevated basically everything that I’ve sent to him.
POP: Ah!
VON HAUSSWOLFF: There was one track for that play that we loved, which he recorded. He sent it to me and I was like, “What is this? I didn’t write this.” And he said, “No, I just made it. I thought it was fun.” It was excellent. It’s the main theme of Struggle with the Beast.
POP: It’s a killer. There are several times, I think, on Facing Atlas—and then on the one we did, “The Whole Woman,” but also on “Young Aging Women”—where suddenly there are melodies that are very close to certain kinds of pop ballads, trying to lift the chorus and everything. You can write that stuff. Hats off.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think I wanted, with this album, to stay a little bit true to who I was at the beginning of my musical career and what sort of music I was interested in, aside from all of the rock and experimental music. When I started playing music, it started with me and my sister and our friend. We were singing together. It was a lot of R&B, a lot of soul, a lot of pop. And we were also dancing hip-hop. So, I wanted to bring in more movement, and I wanted to have these very clear, simple pop lines that would just stem directly from the heart somehow. I would not give it too much thought or intellectualize it too much.
POP: For a listener, it’s pretty rare to hear those sorts of things without being accompanied by some horrible productions beating you over the head. On “The Whole Woman,” my favorite lines are when you say, “I’m not afraid to go down to the harbor” and “See you again to tell you the whole truth.” Do you go down to the harbor?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yeah, I do a lot. Whenever I need to air out some emotions, the harbor is my place. The ocean is my go-to spot when I need to calm myself or when I need to get out of my own head. I think the harbor is also, for this song, a place to say farewell at the same time, to clean yourself from your past.
POP: There’s an interesting thing. I’m an American, and the way you sing the phrase and the pronunciation is more correct than anyone would normally sing it. You say, “Go down to the harbor” a little bit like an Android. I really like it. I thought, “Holy shit! What has she done?” But then I thought, “Let’s go for it.” I’ve never done anything quite like that.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yeah. I love it so much. Our voices are so different. You’re very deep and the sound is so close and you really get into the head. And I’m out there, lots of reverb. I’m floating around. I felt when I wrote it that it was more of a song between two lovers.
POP: It’s a love song, yep.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: It is still a love song, but it’s not necessarily between anyone. It doesn’t necessarily have to be between two lovers. It could also be between a child and parents, or two friends, or someone being scared to come out from their shell.
POP: What about “Aging Young Women”? That’s a heated theme and you have Ethel Cain, who’s dynamite. What’s going on there?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Most women, I’d say, when they close in on 40 and if they still don’t have kids, life starts to feel like a fear of missing out. I don’t have kids and I’m very confused about that. And I’m still not sure if that’s my way, having kids or not. But I’m at the end of that cycle soon and it’s been an internal struggle to deal with that. What is it that I truly want? I know what my family wants from me. But what do I want?
POP: Some people can handle that and some people can’t. There’s a lot of Xanax going around.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: But it’s also a song about seeing a world sort of breaking apart in front of you, in front of your eyes. Everyone wants a future for their kids and you are starting to see how things fall apart.
POP: Tell me about it.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: [Laughs] I don’t know. I feel there was such a fantastic climate uprising, an activist uprising and awareness before the pandemic, and Black Lives Matter, too.
POP: I know what you’re talking about. We’re in a very insecure time right now. People are very insecure.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I felt like I could see all of these big communities and forces coming together, raising their voices, being concerned about nature and trying to deal with all of these injustices and the structures that we live with. And then the pandemic happened and it felt like all of that just fell flat back on the ground. Everyone became so isolated and you couldn’t have these big demonstrations anymore. The world got very silent for one or two years.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think lots of people just carry this stress. And they don’t know what that stress is or how they can solve it. And sometimes, it’s just an emotion. I have this stress about lots of things around me. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I expressed that in this song, “Young Aging Women.”
POP: Fair enough. “Rising Legends” is an evocative title. And who are the rising legends?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think you are a rising legend.
POP: I’m still rising? Wow. Thanks, Anna. I have trouble at times seeing a future in which I’m included because you get to a certain point and you say, “Oh, man. I’m good at this. Do I have to do it again? Oh, shit.”
VON HAUSSWOLFF: But I think that you put in all of the work now for future generations. That’s the whole thing about being an artist. Repetition and being persistent.
POP: Right on.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: It’s also physical labor. It’s very easy when you’re in that constant flow of work. For example, you’re on a tour, you’re exhausted, and you’re like, “Oh my god. Why am I doing this? I feel like shit right now.”
POP: I’m becoming aware of it. There’s so many young players, and singers, and composers and people in the arts who are out there starting out and working very, very hard tour schedules, putting out a lot of releases. And initially, there’s either no money in it or little money in it. When I started, it was actually negative money because to keep going, you would sell off the rights to your future. It’s hard, but there are so many people that want to do it. It’s pretty moving, you know?
VON HAUSSWOLFF: When you’re a musician and you don’t earn that much money, you need to be really clear about why you’re doing it. You have to set a goal for yourself and also understand the relationship you have with art. Is it pure? Is it love for the arts, or is it just a love for the attention? I think if it’s for the attention and money, it’s not something that’s going to last. But if it’s about passion and if it’s about true love for art, you will be an artist your whole life. And it will be a constant flow of changes with many beginnings and many ends.
POP: That’s beautifully articulated. I agree with that.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I want to ask you, in terms of what we are talking about, how do you keep your curiosity and imagination alive?
POP: I’m not the brightest person. But I am interested in strange sounds, strange sights, and people and other places. I’ve always been that way. I remember the first night I spent in Europe, it was in Munich, Germany and the doorknobs there have a handle instead of being round. And I wrote a long letter to my parents about how the door handles were in Munich and how the clothes looked engineered and about the funny alpine hats with the little feather. As I started touring Europe, each place I went I would have between 50 and 150 people. But I was excited because I’m playing the capital of fucking Denmark! It would be some dirty little dive full of drug dealers and runaways, but I saw it in a noble light. I lost all that little by little over time, and I struggled to interface with the professional industry and it nearly killed me. What really brought it back in the last years was when Jarvis Cocker wanted to stop doing his BBC radio show.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: Oh, yeah.
POP: And he gave me the nod to replace him. For the first year, like all old gits, I just wanted to play all the old music that I knew. And then I ran out of old music. So that’s how I found Sleaford Mods. That’s how I found out about you. That’s how I found out about Lambrini Girls. Sometimes, you need an occasion to be curious. You need a path.
VON HAUSSWOLFF: I’m so glad you did that program. I feel you have a very similar taste in music to me. So when will the Psychedelic Stooges reunite?
POP: That will never happen. The Psychedelic Stooges have all passed away except for moi. I guess you could say we’ll reunite in psychedelic heaven when I kick the bucket.
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Creative director: Andre Jofre.
Styling: Sofie Krunegård.
Styling Assistant: Ellen Kowka.
Hair and makeup: Daniela Mengarelli.
Hair and makeup assistants: Erika Spetzig.
