Agnes Obel has discovered a different way of seeing

The world has a funny way of rearranging us in those moments, and all that we relied upon before for context and guardrails is left to feel inadequate and pale. For Danish artist, producer, and composer Agnes Obel, it was the discovery six summers back, amid a global crisis, that her body was building another one inside it, quite by surprise.

Pregnancy brought with it a profound rewiring, with immediate effect she says. Having had to shut down her Myopia tour and return home to Berlin, Obel had done what she’d always done before when coming off the road: start another album. Intrigued by tech and how it has remade the world in its image, externalising our nervous systems and inverting our ideas of human nature itself, she’d begun to research songs relating in some way to the machine age. But that all went out the window when the two blue lines appeared, confirming a positive pregnancy test, and Obel’s mind swerved off track and down a whole new rabbit hole.

“It was, in very real time, a brain-altering experience,” she tells me over video call from London, ahead of her Somerset House show earlier this summer. “I suddenly had this very weird feeling that everything had a consciousness, I’d do things like go out for a walk and find myself looking at the grass thinking ‘Holy shit, it’s alive,’ and all these other things I’d never really thought about before. I knew I couldn’t continue with the work I had been making, so I started something else.”

Enter The Meaning of Flowers, Obel’s first new music in six years, announced today alongside the shape-shifting lead track “Laymelli”, a song that’s more inner- than otherworldly, inspired by the life cycles of insects and Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s works on metamorphosis, an early, working title for the song.

“I was interested in how I could take the feeling of the energy that runs through everything and turn it into sound,” she says, marvelling at the immensely complex but completely universal ideas flooding into her newfound creative direction. “It was a mystery to me, but also the only thing I could do.” 

Motherhood may be the governing intuition of The Meaning of Flowers, but the album reaches far beyond the cradle and the bewildering miracle of life, going back thousands of years to draw inspiration from the world’s first named author Enheduanna, what we carry through our bloodlines, and the soil itself as a venue for all of existence, via Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality and how the endless capacity for new beginnings might just save our skins. 

And, crucially, Obel’s songs of interconnection don’t rely on reducing the universe to something benevolent. The Meaning of Flowers is ultimately much stranger than that: more primal, playful, and, in some ways, more personal than she’s dared to be before, all thanks to her daughter who, in her own words, “changed me and raised me and taught me so much.”

Any album that comes with a suggested reading list is like catnip to me, so let’s start there shall we? What was the journey you went on as the books you were reading began to shape your creative decisions? 

Well, I was trying to find literature and poetry that could somehow tell me something about what I was experiencing personally when I came across this guy Emanuele Coccia, and his book Metamorphoses (2020). Reading it, I felt like, okay, this is a take on philosophy and existence that I can relate to in this new state that I’d found myself in.

His ideas were so fascinating, like how we are all breathing in each other’s DNA and how birth and time and death are not as clear boundaries as we think. As humans, we’re all blending with each other all the time. And even when we’re dead, we’re actually still alive, just in another form, and I find that so fascinating. It got me interested in things that were very old, and that’s how I ended up reading a lot about the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, who lived nearly 5000 years ago and is supposedly the world’s first writer that we know by name. Reading a new translation of her poems, I thought it was so beautiful that, when we have all these different religious texts [passed down through predominantly male traditions] throughout history, the oldest known author is a woman.

The poems are really hymns to different Sumerian deities, and especially to Inanna, the goddess of birth, war, and sex, and the writing is so strong and pure and simple. She writes about how Inanna was this all-powerful being, whose footsteps would shake the earth and make everything crumble around her, and that somehow really resonated with me. She had this tremendous life force, and I think that’s still around, in all of us. We’re all born into this same universal force but we understand so little about it.

Going through the experience of being pregnant, I was so overwhelmed with how powerful it felt, and how mysterious it was on a deeper level. This is how we all come into this world, and then we just take it for granted. We are these wondrous, unique beings, but we are also a lot of others who came before us. It's a hard thing for the mind to hold, but it's so beautiful and it makes time feel flat or different in some way. I think that was the main thing for me: the interconnectedness, yes, but also the idea that time was maybe not as linear as I’d thought. Enheduanna’s hymns made that clear to me somehow.

Then I read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which I think I came across kind of accidentally, and was really interested in what she had to say about the creative potential we all have within us. She was very critical of this fixation on death we have in philosophy. I think she was a student of Hegel, who was really into focusing on death, and she was like, “But we are also all born, and we carry the potential of beginning again within us by the fact that we've been born.” 

I am not a philosophy expert, and it’s quite complicated, but she had this view of the potential of birth as a political idea, sort of an antidote to totalitarianism and fascism. And that made sense to me, because it sort of redirects our attention to the physical reality of being alive and the miracle that we are even here in the first place, whereas totalitarianism is more about death and removing anything in opposition to power. The way she framed birth as a potential for a better world, I just thought it was so beautiful and it somehow made sense in my mind with the words of Emanuele Coccia and Enheduanna. Maybe it was just that I saw a very strong universalism in it all, but I was suddenly like, “Oh, it all mtoakes sense.”

It’s interesting on the song “Blood So Red” where you ask Inanna to “lay all to waste.” We always associate that phrase with destruction, but we rarely think about what comes after the destruction, which is the creation of something new. I’m not a philosophy expert either, but maybe there’s a truth in the idea that creation always requires some kind of destruction, and, maybe, in a way, motherhood is the same thing: you have to destroy an idea of your older self to make way for the new self, the parent. Do you think motherhood, for you, felt closer to a new identity or just letting go of parts of the old one that didn't serve you anymore?

I feel like I'm the same, but it's like my brain expanded or broke open. Stuff that used to really bother me before doesn't bother me so much anymore. Of course I’m still the same person, full of mistakes and so on, but it's like I got a sense of something very big, something miraculous, and thinking about that allows me to, for brief moments anyway, forget about my ego and all my ideas about how things should be. 

It's not like I'm very good at that sort of meta thinking, but it helps me to sometimes try and do that a bit more, to see the ridiculousness of my own little world in my head. I mean, what is identity? It's very much a story you tell yourself and I think it’s healthy to be able to step back and sort of detach yourself from that, to detach yourself from all the strings that hold you down because you’re trying to fit this story in your head.

I think my daughter does this with me every day. It's so funny when people say they are raising a child. I really feel like she's raising me, in a sort of existential way.

I love the last line in the song, “tangerine cloud settling down”, which arrives so peacefully after all the intensity that comes before it in the song. What drew you to that image? I presume that it’s related in some way to the later instrumental, “Tangerine”.

I would say that “Blood So Red” is more about birth for me than about Inanna. I mean, it’s such a crazy thing. It’s like a war of biology, and the closest thing I’ve had to a near-death experience, and afterwards they hand you the baby and then it’s bye-bye, and good luck.

I gave birth in a hospital in Berlin and the whole time I could hear all these women screaming, and there was a young doctor running around looking like he was terrified. It felt like something very primal happening. The whole thing felt so insane, so dramatic. I imagined it like a war or a huge storm where the sky is filled with orange clouds that slowly, when the fight is over, settle down and clear away, and that’s sort of how it felt for me.

In the very first days with our daughter I remember looking out of the window and seeing small flowers coming up out of the snow – we’d had a lot of snow that winter – and it felt this sense of peace had returned. The idea of Inanna laying everything to waste, in all her power and her terror, was, I think, the perfect image of the whole experience of giving birth. And it made me think how maybe we haven’t really come that far in the past 4000 or so years since Enheduanna’s hymns were written, you know? In terms of understanding what is such a universal, human thing.

On the subject of identity, one of the things I love about the new single “Laymelli” is how the production doesn’t really settle on one identity, with its very purposeful use of pitch shifting being another form of transformation. In your notes you talk about wanting to convey “the animated energy flowing through us all,” but could you maybe expand on how you actually did that?

Yeah, I was playing around a lot with different synths while writing The Meaning of Flowers. Most of the songs began not on the piano as they usually would, but with me experimenting with bass synths. I guess my ear needed more of a pulsating feeling, like a heartbeat. Especially while I was pregnant, I really felt that this was the sound I needed to work with, because it was sort of compressed in a different way, sonically. But “Laymelli” was one that I wrote a little bit later, after my daughter was born. 

I wanted to write music about this life current that runs through everything. It’s timeless. It’s just there. I feel like insects are such a good image for this, with all the different life stages they go through where they become something new but are also the same individual. There’s something so bizarre about it, and to capture that I felt like I needed something that sounded very old and also somehow funny. 

I was experimenting with a lot of different ideas, but I knew that I didn’t want to sing the whole song with my normal voice. I needed something that was a little bit detached from my actual person. At one point I was thinking that maybe I should imagine myself as an insect, or some kind of consciousness, and that’s sort of what I ended up with.

One of my favourite lines from that song is "I'm sure there's more in the mud,” which again comes back to, I think, the idea that evolution isn't done and dusted. It's still going on. What drew you to that image? It's a rich one.

Yeah, I was also thinking about how the mud is so fertile, and how there’s so much in the ground that’s both old and new. I thought it was such a wonderful image for new things coming and old things leaving, and sort of the basic processes of that.

Coming back to Hannah Arendt, you’ve said that the original title of the song “The Meaning of Flowers” was “The Miracle That Saves the World,” which is a phrase from her 1958 book The Human Condition. What made “The Meaning of Flowers” feel like the right title, when the song itself doesn't mention flowers?

“The Miracle That Saves the World” is, again, the political idea of birth as a potential for creating a better world, whereas “The Meaning of Flowers” is something I got from Emanuele Coccia’s explanations of sex and biology. He was sort of building on the ideas of Darwin about how flowers are part of this intrinsic system and how their beauty isn’t for us, it’s for the bees, and reading his words, I think, flowers just started to make sense to me in a way that they hadn’t before. 

Flowers are these tiny things that exist within an insanely huge and complex planet of mountains and oceans, but they also have their own hyper-complex biology. It’s so interesting to think about how even the smallest unit is linked to everything from the geology of stones to human survival. So, for me, the song had to be something small and beautiful, but enormous at the same time, in the title at least.

If someone had asked you before you became a mother what the meaning of flowers was, do you think you’d have had a different answer?

Yes, definitely. I would have said something more linked to some kind of cultural meaning, or a specific flower representing something. I have a background in cultural studies and I once wrote a paper about a flower that repeatedly appears in Italian poetry and what that represented, but I don’t even remember what the name of the flower is now. What I mean by “the meaning of flowers” in this context goes beyond culture in that sense. It’s more of an existential, biological, philosophical thing, whereas before I would have been much more culturally specific and connected in some way to literature.

All these scientific ideas and mythological poetry are just different ways of approaching the same mysteries of life, I guess. I was wondering, do you think that welcoming mystery of accepting uncertainty has become a bigger part of your creative process than it used to be?

Yeah, definitely. I also think I'm becoming more interested in imperfection and mistakes.

I did use a click track on a lot of the songs for this album, but I’m now at the point where I don’t think I will use that for what I do next. I'm getting further and further away from needing things to be perfect. I want them to be as human and as pure to the original idea as possible. Of course, like anyone else, I want things to sound good and I have all these ideas about that, but sometimes you just have to say “Okay, fuck it. I will leave it like this, there’s a reason why it sounds the way it does, and I just have to trust that.”

So, I guess I would say it’s not about being less perfectionistic necessarily. For me, it’s about understanding that perfection isn’t always perfection, and that what isn’t perfect can still be perfect for me. I think that’s where I’m going.

That’s a perfect segue to talking about the song “Beyond the Sun”, because as you say in your notes, the version on the album is an unfinished one. It’s not ‘perfect’ in that sense. What’s the story there? Did you finish the song and then go back a few steps to choose the demo we hear on the record?

I did actually write another verse and another chorus for it, and I’m planning to record it again on piano later this year. I guess, after writing “Faustian Deal”, which is the last track on the album, I was thinking about what I’m really afraid of when it comes to perfection and the creative process.

With “Beyond the Sun”, I really had to sit there and ask myself, okay, why am I not satisfied with this demo? I recorded it very quickly, pretty much as I was writing the song, and this is how it sounds, take it or leave it. So I decided to take it, because I have so few songs that are as pure at this, where the idea and the recording have come together on the same day. It doesn’t matter that half the song is missing, because the vibe and the original feeling exist in this recording, and it doesn’t make any sense to be afraid of that.

That’s so true. I like that in “Jenn's on the Way” the flower imagery returns, but this time it’s funny: “I banged my head on a flower.” It feels like maybe you have something to say about being surprised by beauty rather than just appreciating it…

That whole song is so fun to me. I have a close friend called Jenn who is famously always late to meet people so often I’m just in a state of waiting for her, but she’s also the person I know who is most in touch with her inner child. She’s the friend who’ll call you when it snows and insist we go out and play in it. She’s just a really wonderful person, and she actually sings a little bit of the choir vocals on this song.

In writing this song, I really wanted to have a song about being in a state of uncertainty and what a gift that can be, and I think that’s also linked to not needing to understand everything, like flowers for example, to be able to appreciate how beautiful and complex they are. There’s something in our biology that understands it, but we don’t understand it ourselves, intellectually. It’s like how we can love something fiercely but not be able to explain why we love it, we just do. I think it’s so funny that we try to fight this not understanding kind of thing, and I think we all do it. I fight it all the time.

I feel like I relate to the way you described your ideal creative state as being stressful but slightly ridiculous as well. That feels very recognisable to me.

Yeah, it's like I get this feeling of a weird sort of urgency and something has to come out. My phone is full of these moments where I’m sort of fumbling around an idea, because if I don’t record it then and there, once it’s gone it’s really gone and I don’t know where it goes. I am not good at remembering these things. I find it quite funny how many times I’ve broken or ruined something in my urgency to record something desperately before it disappears, like spilling coffee into the piano.

I think it’s quite hard to really look at yourself in those moments, but that’s why it’s so fun to do anything wholeheartedly because you can just forget about yourself somehow. In a way, I’m really happy that I don’t know myself when I get in this state, because I see how my partner, who is very creative, can get into these horrible moods while working on something. But then what comes is out is always something super cool and interesting, and I don’t think he understands it himself either.

Thinking about how the album is structured, it feels the first half is more about exploring this mind-expanding feeling of interconnectedness and then the second half turns a bit more inward, talking about identity and the challenges of being an individual in this world. Did you want the album to feel like you were taking people on a journey in that way, or is it just a coincidence? 

It wasn’t deliberate, but that has also been my own journey for these past five or six years of making the record. I feel quite far removed, in a way, from everything that happened around pregnancy and the epiphanies I had about life and time and connectedness with everything. 

Of course, as my daughter got bigger and that out-of-body feeling sort of faded away, I became more my old self again. And with that comes back the same kind of personal problems I had before. Not the same as before, but it is funny how, throughout the pregnancy and first two years of motherhood, I didn’t really think about those things at all. It was a very, very strange experience and I wonder how it was for others, and what the science says about it.

I want to talk about “the age of islands” that you sing about in “No Such Thing as Silence”, which kind of feels like a very apt description of modern life. Do you think that idea was something that was kind of left over from, or grew out of, the album that you were making about technology? 

Yeah, maybe it was, because that song is not so much linked to the whole expansion of the mind feeling of the rest of the album.

I think, as humans, it can be so hard for us to understand each other. We like to think that it’s all about communication, that as long as we are expressing our needs, and so on, we are doing all we can for a certain relationship. But I think there is so much more going on between humans than we can possibly express, and silence is a part of that too.

I love to write songs about things that are unspoken and are beyond language, because I think that those things are such a big part of our lives. With this song, it’s a very personal thing and that’s not something I feel like I have mastered yet. I’m not Leonard Cohen, you know? He was so good at putting images and language to all the strange and powerful dynamics that can happen between human beings. In my own way, this song is me trying to describe the power of silence and the hold it can have over us, and how other people’s loneliness can become ours as well.

My mind went straight to "Famous Blue Raincoat” when you said that, one of my all-time favourite songs.

Oh yeah, it’s one of mine too. Oh my god, that song makes me cry.

I really like the way you write about silence here. It makes it feel like a very physical thing: something you can wear, and something you can cover someone else in.

Yeah, you totally can. It's really such a powerful thing. We know that words can be as painful as being physically hit by somebody – they can have the same effect on the brain – and I think that silence does the same thing too. It’s so strange how much we are affected by each other, even if we never exchange words. 

Would you say this song was a painful one to write?

Yeah, a little bit. I think so. It definitely wasn’t as much fun to write as some of the others, like “Laymelli” and “Jenn’s on the Way”, which I had a lot of fun writing plots for. Those songs were more about abstract ideas but with “No Such Thing as Silence” – which, by the way, is very tricky for a Danish person to say so I’ve been trying to avoid it – it was so much more difficult to write about because it’s personal. That’s always the case for me when something hits close to home, and it's something that's not really resolved.

I’m intrigued as well by the closing track “Faustian Deal”, which you mentioned earlier. This one feels like you’re turning a critical eye on your desire or need for transformation, sort of re-evaluating your relationship with ambition and creative intensity. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

No, no, that’s totally correct. I feel like all my life has just been about focusing on the next project and the project after that, and I’ve never taken the time to stop and celebrate, you know, finishing an album and doing it all by myself. I’ve worked and worked and worked and then just gone straight on tour, then home to start a new album. 

That was how I lived in my twenties and all through my thirties. But since I had my daughter, I’ve been asking myself “What am I actually doing?” because it’s really a very strange thing to try and understand where this kind of ambition comes from. I was also thinking about the driving force behind other people’s ambition. What is it that they want to reach and why? I mean, I don’t have the answer for myself, but I think it is a little bit absurd that we allow it to fill up so much of everything.

Do you feel like you’ve had to confront a lot of conditioning from your early years, in terms of the way you learned to think about success and ambition in one way?

I don’t know. It’s a lot about trying to understand why I ended up working so hard, but I don’t have the answer. I feel like I just had so much to say, but it’s also very weird because I’ve always had a big fear of visibility. And I still have that. I’m trying to get over it still, and the only way to do that is to just do what you’re afraid of. 

It’s kind of ridiculous that I ended up releasing music under my own name. I don’t really love the idea of people knowing who I am, unless they are a friend of mine, so it makes the whole promo thing, and all the stuff musicians have to do to make a living from this, quite complicated. I want to fight it somehow, because the whole motivation behind my musical ambition has nothing to do with visibility. It’s a lot about curiosity, but I know deep down there’s something more than that.

It’s funny, when I was a kid I went to music school and was in the same class as these boys who were the kids of very famous Danish musicians. Very early on they were already talking very seriously about this magical world of successful musicians and mindblowing albums, and I think that must have had a huge influence on me as something to aspire to. But it cannot be the only thing. It’s something that I have to figure out.