SONG INFO

Performed by Björk, Tagaq, Mike Patton with The Icelandic Choir
Beats: Rahzel
Bass line: Björk
Programming: Valgeir Sigurdsson, Mark Bell, Björk
Gong: Peter Van Hooke

"When I made this track, it was the first time I left my little baby girl. I had gone to La Gomera, which is a small island part of the Canary Islands - one of the islands no tourists go to - and I'd found on the web this English guy who had a studio there, and I think I was the first client or something. So I turned up there with an engineer and my little girl, and then we planned it that -- she was like 14 months old -- and they were gonna leave four days before me, so I could for the first time jump off a cliff -- obviously not literally. Like when you're writing a song and you get possessed and you can't sleep for 40 hours 'til it's ready, and you don't have to worry about putting her to sleep and just be totally self-indulgent. So this song, for me, is really about the sensuality of just jumping in that pool again, of just you and the music, nobody else, and walking on the cliffs in La Gomera and just indulging in it, and then you can go in and you're singing and singing and singing and be obsessed with music." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk

"I wrote the words probably in 1999, back when I was working in Denmark, and wrote the melody much later, and it wasn't until a lot later that I matched the two together. But I felt that I was gonna do a vocal album, and it was exciting because of how few toys you have. Then again, with the few toys you have, you have to try to do as many different things as possible -- maybe one song with a choir and a beatboxer and a throatsinger and a heavy metal guy, and the next song with just you and a throatsinger, and in the next song you're doing lots of backing vocals. Just to try to get all the colours. So I always knew that one song had to be just one voice, and that's it -- with the uncomfotableness of that too. Almost like when you are at a party and somebody stands up to do a speech and everybody is like "oh my god". You just say your bit, and then you sit down. So it has that feeling. At least I tried to do it." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk, Mike Patton, Gregory Purnhagen with The Icelandic Choir
Beats: Rahzel
Programming: Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson, Miss Specta, Björk

"The vocals on this track actually aren't that manipulated, but they're edited alot. A lot of chopping. The sounds that probably sound most synthetic are actually Rahzel just doing those crazy noises - you don't believe it until you see him. But we did a lot of editing, we would get the noises and then place them in this track. I felt that with Rahzel, you need to do both the extremes. There's one song - 'Who Is It' - with him doing a live take through the whole song, nothing's edited or added on top, it's just one take. The other extreme is in this song, where you take Rahzel and edit him all the way and make some sort of collage that only could've been made with him, no-one else. The choir was fun too. There are sections in this song that obviously have reverb, but we didn't take it any further than that. There are some bass-sounds that are so heavy - that is actually Mike Patton. He is incredible, he has these effect boxes that usually guitars have on the floor and you step on them. He did the bass sort of heavy metal / death metal, then he put Octaver on it to make it an octave lower. So there's a bit of that too. I've been joking with my mates that I really wanted to do a headbang choir song. So I started this song doing the choir arrangements, and then I had to find the beat to match it. It was fun. It sorta made me think of 'Bohemian Rhapsody too', there's a bit of respect to Freddie. So people should be headbanging, then my dream would be fulfilled." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk with The Icelandic Choir
Written by Jakobína Sigurdardottir
Composed by Jórunn Viðar

The original version of this song can be found on the Smekkleysa release by Jórunn Viðar - Únglíngurinn I Skóginum.

"It probably means "Calm of being awake".. it's hard to explain. But it's basically a lullaby, and it's the one song on the album that is not by me, it's by an Icelandic composer who is like 80 years old now. There's a funny story for that song, because I wanted that song first to be on Vespertine, and there was this music box company that was making 12" copper plates where they drill holes into the plates that is the song, and it takes forever to do them. I got them first to do 'Pagan Poetry', then 'Aurora' and then 'Frosti'. Then I sent 'Vökuró' for them to do, because the cycle of this disk takes one minute - and 'Vökuró' has four verses which each take one minute, so it was perfect, and each verse goes slower and slower which makes sense, because most songs start slow and then go fast, but since this is a lullaby it starts fast and goes slower. But it takes them so long to drill the holes in the copper plates that I still haven't got it - so it missed Vespertine.

So then we did this song for this album, and I called the composer and go "I just recorded this song, is it OK with you that I put it on my album?" and she goes "Yeah it's OK. You're obviously very influenced by your daughter." ...I go "...Yeah?". "Well she's got blue eyes, doesn't she?" and I couldn't really work out what that had to do with anything. Then we said goodbye, and then later I worked out that the song was actually sung to a little girl that has blue eyes. Four years ago when I wanted to do that song, and was having the battle with the musicbox-makers, there was no way I could have known that in four years time I would have a little girl with blue eyes. It's a little bit of a sentimental story." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed and programmed by Björk

"It means "All the brightness". Because a lot of this album is a touch to when I was 18, on that farm, writing my first all-vocal songs - this is a step to how I would do those songs. At that point I was so shy, I wouldnt even sing in a language, I sortof had my own gibberish language. So a lot of foreigners probably think it's Icelandic, but it's not true, it's gibberish. It says "all the brightness" and me trying to break through a wall for the light to shne in - that sortof deep poetic stuff, hehe." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk and Tagaq
Beats: Rahzel
Bass synth: Björk
Programming: Valgeir Sigurdsson, Mark Bell, Björk, Matmos

"This is a song I wrote at the end on Vespertine, but I didn't put it there because I felt it was from a different family - Vespertine was introvert and shy and not very phycisal a record, and this was a very physical song that I wrote when I was feeling quite strong again. The words are kinda self-explanatory. This is the one song that Matmos helped me with - they did fruit-machine-noises that are in the choruses. Like when you put a coin in slotmachine and get three strawberries. So they made those noises with synthesizers that I later imitated with my voice. So I would like to thank Matmos very much for that input, thank you very much. That was the first song where Rahzel sang, and he did the beat in that song in one take. We just all fell on the floor, we couldn't believe it. There's no overdubs, no treatment - this is it. I felt quite proud -- if you're gonna have a human beatboxer, at least get the real thing. " (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk and Robert Wyatt
Programming: Valgeir Sigurdsson

"He lives in Louth, and he has equiptment in his bedroom where he records himself and his albums. We brought a G4 and Pro Tools and recorded it in like one afternoon. He's such an extraordinary singer. Before he left, he insisted to give us a scale of his voice, where he sings all the tones - and he has the most amazing range, like 5 or 6 octaves. What's really interesting about his range is that each octave is of a totally different character. We actually ended up using that later for 'Oceania', we used what he calls the "Wyattron". Maybe this isn't a secret, but when I was pregnant and breastfeeding - what is great is that your nature tells all your cells to go on vacation now that the baby is the most important thing. It's a very humbling and gorgeous thing and a very healthy experience. But slowly after 6 months or so, the baby wouldn't mind being without you for an hour a day, a couple of month later two hours, and meet other kids and have relationships with other people than you. And mothers kinda have a hard time to let go too. It's an interesting stretch. And with my "submarine behaviour" ...the part of me that writes songs had gone dormant, and this song says it's time to wake it up and say "hello! wake up" - it's been hibernating, so it's a little bit of an alarm call." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk with The Icelandic Choir
Programming: Olivier Alary

"Olivier Alary (Ensemble) had sent me a CD with a few sketches, and said "if you ever feel like using those, please do." A year later, I wrote this melody and was singing it in a cabin by a lake here in Iceland in january 2004. That was like the first little trips away from my little girl - I would go three hours a day to this cabin by the lake and do whatever I could and then drive back to town. I would sing several versions of this melody, and then I would say "wait a minute, this is this thing that Olivier gave me a year ago" so then I sang it to that and it fitted perfect together, it was really incredible! Then when I came back from the tour and discovered that the whole album was gonna be a vocal album, I thought "wait a minute, what about this song here, I really like this song and it should be on the album". So I started doing choir arrangements for it. I did a really complicated choir arrangement, for like a sixteen piece choir, and recorded it three times doing totally different things, and it was like 50 tracks of voices, but it just wasn't right, so I kept editing it on and spent like days and weeks editing it, and it never was right. Then I emailed Olivier and said "Listen, I've tried everything with this track, but I can't just be dogmatic about this album. At the end of the day, the best music's gotta win. So I think I'm just gonna stick to your old version, because I think that's still the best one." And then he just said "Guess what! I made it out of your own voice!" So he actually took a voice of mine, saying "I'm not sure what to do with it" from Hidden Place and did a song out of that! And then he sent it it to me, and didn't tell me, just in case I didn't .. you know, whatever... it was just a secret!" (Mixing It, 20aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk with the London Choir
Beats: Shlomo
Piano: Nico Muhly
Vocal samples: Robert Wyatt
Programmed by: Björk, Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson

This song was premiered at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

"Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'We Are the World' type song. Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, 'Maybe there's another angle to this.' When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing." Björk decided to call on Sjón Sigurdsson, Icelandic poet and previous lyrics-collaborator. Needing something epic, Sjón took a course in Greek mythology, and then wrote these lyrics for 'Oceania', a kind of aquatic sojourn and the last song recorded for Medúlla. "The Olympic version will be a little different. But it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn't see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjón came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land. He has The Sea saying, 'Your sweat is salty / And I am why / Your sweat is salty / And I am why.'" (Björk 13 Aug 2004)

"It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and people that aren't beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - trying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to do things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. It wasn't til the last day of mixing that I though - oh! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology! So we called up an English choir, and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit like sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno tango beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it's good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk with The Icelandic Choir
Based on a poem by E.E. Cummings called "It may not always be so"

"Basically, there's 'Sonnets', and they have many unrealities, and this is reality number 11. It's like a chunk of poems, and this is one of them. It's kind of him taking the piss of himself, when you make up things that scare you out of nowhere - you're just paranoid. In this particular case it's about him being madly in love with a girl, things are totally euphoric and couldn't be more perfect, and then his mind starts playing games on him. He starts imagining, what if, in five years time or something, she sould meet someone else, and how he would deal with that. He asks his girlfriend then; in five years time, when she meets and falls in love with someone else, and will smell his hair and kiss him and be naked with him and all these things - could she please tell him gently, and then he would go up to her new lover and wish him good luck with his new girlfriend, take his hand and wish him all the happiness in the world, and then walk away. It's sort of "how hard can you make it on yourself", you know? I just think it was sort of funny, because it happens - the few times in your life when you feel you've got it right, your mind start going off on "what happens if this goes wrong?" and this feeling of carrying a chinese vase across a motorway... "oh it's definitely gonna break, I know it's gonna break", and you make it up in your head when everything is actually OK." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk and Tagaq
Piano and programming: Björk

"'Ancestors' was one of the last titles to come. I kept calling it 'Piano II', 'cause I did some piano experiments and this was one of them, it was a working title. In the end when I was naming the record 'Medúlla' and tried to work out what was missing, maybe it was the pagan element and the element about this record that is going back to the roots - before time, or civilization, or religion, or patriotism. Because most of the time I'm looking forward and I want to enter the unknown and get as techno as possible, but maybe this album was a bit different, because it's about me going back to when I'm 18, before I did all the work i've done - and also me going two thousand years back, in my head, anyway - to some cave where people sit together with long hair, naked, and they sing disco music or something." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk and Tagaq with the The Icelandic Choir
Beats: Rahzel
Bass synth: Mark Bell
Programming: Björk, Valgeir Sigurdsson, Mark Bell

"Obviously the line about Osamas and Bushes was a bad joke. But I guess it's sort of partly true, because it insterests me a lot with western civilization, that someone as passionate as Osama could be such a threat, and it seemed to me at times to be almost passion versus logic. I found it really interesteing that it could be so un-understandable for some people that somebody would do something like that, and how unaware the western civilization were of how annoying they are sometimes -- I'm obviously not justifying what he did. But after that, it just totally took over - it was all about arabs and americans, and if you were pro or against or whatever. It just seems curious to me, where obviously both were right and wrong. It seems like the whole world has been talking about it for the last three years, not only me. All unbelievable people are suddenly interested in politics. And maybe me in the end wanting my music to offer something else, and saying I want to look for a shelter with an altar away from the Osamas and Bushes. And maybe these politicians think that they are 95% of our lives and that we should all just worry about if Bush gets re-elected or not and what's gonna happen to the muslims or whatever. And I think it's about 5% important, and 95% is like... children going to school, the latest breakdancer, people starving and people losing their jobs and people telling awful jokes, and all these other stuff, you know. People in space, and jellyfishes in the ocean having affairs with other jellyfishes. I'm inventing marinal soap operas here, sorry. But there's just a lot of other stuff, and it just got boring after a while. So maybe this record is partly an attept to say "wait a minute, there's other stuff out there you know". That's it." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk
Programming: Björk, Jake Davies

"I just nicknamed it "Miðvikudags", which means wednesday...s, it was basically because I did it on a wednesday -- sometimes you don't know what to call them, you know. This is similar to me with "Öll Birtan" -- that it's like a little interlude and maybe shows where this whole tree came from, that it's from me being 18, or even younger - being ike 10, and having two rubbish tape recorders and recording my voice into one, and then recording on the other one, the tape recorder and me, adding a voice on top, and then back, playing with a teaspoon on an ashtray or something. Kind of just back to that, and there's no words in this one either, it's just gibberish." (Björk, XFM 25aug04)

SONG INFO

Performed by Björk
Human trombone: Gregory Purnhagen
Beats: Rahzel, Dokaka
Programming; Valgeir Sigurdsson, Mark Bell, Björk