In Oh Land’s song ‘White Nights,’ the lyric “There’s no silence/I’ll keep following the sirens” can be taken quite literally. When the singer — who moved to Brooklyn from Copenhagen earlier this year — stopped by Spinner’s headquarters to treat the staff to a private performance, she explained that the New York state of mind has left her in a creative frenzy. “When I moved here in January, I just felt like I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t want to miss a second,” Oh Land, aka Nanna Fabricius, told Spinner. “I stayed up all the time and worked all the time and was always inspired by sirens, the noise of New York. I found my stillness in the storm.” As of late, Oh Land has released an EP and played several shows around the city.
After performing the EP tracks ‘White Lights,’ ‘Sun Of A Gun‘ and ‘Rainbow‘ in Spinner’s office, she revealed that she’s also been mingling with some pretty impressive musical peers: Florence Welch, whom she met at a recent concert, as well as John Legend and Pharrell, both of whom she’s actually written songs with. “They’re not recorded yet, but we’re gonna do it very soon, I hope,” Oh Land said of her collaboration with Legend. “I have very different ways of writing, but normally I write with little electronic sounds, on instruments like I’m playing now. But John Legend is such a brilliant pianist, so we just wrote the whole song around the piano. It’ll be interesting to put that into production.”
“I also recently wrote a song with Pharrell as well, in Miami,” she added. “That song, I just can’t wait to get it finished and get it out there because I think it’s really fun. It’s almost like an anthem.” Though Oh Land was trained as a dancer and raised in a home full of classical music — “I was used to hearing little boys’ choirs or opera,” she said — she’s not afraid to break boundaries as a musician. “When you have been trained for 10 years of your life to live up to one specific ideal that is ballet, it’s very much everyone needs to be the same height, the same shape, do exactly the same 45-degree [movements]. When I started making music, I just wanted to do my completely own thing and wanted to follow my own rules and not be told what to do,” Oh Land told Spinner. Oh Land’s full-length album will be available in 2011. Watch the video from Oh Land’s visit with the Spinner staff to preview the tune ‘Sun Of A Gun‘ and to find out how tuning in to Portishead changed everything for her, and check out some photos from the day after that.
Oh Land – Sun Of A Gun