Small Wonder

We met up with musician Little Jinder the day after her Swedish Grammis win for best new pop, to talk about awards, performing and her favourite part of the music process.

Like most pop stars, Little Jinder is small and beautiful in real life. Sitting in a make-up chair, she is blonde as anything, with a doll-like face, and wearing an Anne-Sofie Back dress that I love. Her demeanour is rather calm for someone who won the best new pop award at the Swedish Grammis the night before. She tells me that, on the way to our shoot, an old couple yelled across the street, “CONGRATS ON YOUR GRAMMY, LITTLE JINDER!” She was mortified, but waved at them anyway.

Josefine Jinder grew up in Stockholm and experimented with sound and music from an early age. Her mother, Åsa Jinder, is an alum of the industry, being Sweden’s youngest national folk musician of all time and now an esteemed player in the history of Swedish music. There’s no doubt that the younger Jinder was exposed to sounds and the process of music at a very early age. She casually says, “I have a lot of music in my family.”

Jinder first got interested in electronica when she was in the seventh grade and started hanging out at different record shops, discovering the likes of Aphex Twin and other contemporaries signed to the British independent record label Warp. She downloaded a music programme and started learning about synthesisers and the technical bits behind everything; the plan was to become a sound engineer.

 

 

At 18 she travelled to Liverpool in the UK to study Sound Technology at the Paul McCartney-founded Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. As pretentious as it may sound, she says, “I was 18, so I was more into drinking and smoking weed and having a boyfriend. It was just a really fun year.” Still, it gave her the opportunity to work with music and meet other musicians. When she started producing, she had to get into songwriting to make actual songs for her to produce, and then it just stuck.

Though her Grammis award was in the “new” category, she doesn’t consider herself an emerging artist. She had her first big breakthrough in 2009 with the song Youth Blood, a breathy, synthy club hit that pushed her name and sound to the front of the music-industry lines. By the end of 2013 she was writing and performing music in her native tongue and, since then, has been a bilingual electro-pop star. “I’ve been working for a very long time,” she says, thoughtfully. “I released my first EP when I was 20. I’m 27 now. I’d been working for a while before it turned out this way, so I feel like I deserve this, but at the same time I’m really grateful.”

Her music is known for being bold and her onstage persona the same but with more eyeliner. When I ask her what the difference is between her private life and stage life, she tells me, “I’m emotional as a person and in my music, but in my private life I’m probably more extreme than I’m allowed to be on stage. In music I’m more controlled – I sometimes feel like it’s the only forum where I actually have control in my life. In my private life things are messier. I’m a more polished version when I’m performing.” She laughs.

 

 

 

Performing is an experience that Jinder has been very vocal about. She once told a Swedish magazine about the most horrifying performance she ever faced: her boyfriend dumped her, the sound didn’t work and her stylist didn’t show up, so she had to wear her pyjamas onstage. When I ask her about that, she laughs and says, “Yeah, and I got my period while onstage, too!” To contrast this I ask her about her best performance. “They are all so different. Some are so good in different ways. It’s hard to pick one that is the ultimate performance. I just did something for the Carlsberg Green Door Project and the sound was terrible. I couldn’t hear anything, but the audience was amazing – 2,000-3,000 people singing along to every word, and I was so relaxed and had such a good time on stage. Then I have gigs where everything sounds good – sound is perfect, mission accomplished – but the vibe is not there. Sometimes it’s just your mood that controls everything.”

Her favourite part of the music process is actually making music, being in the studio and producing: “My favourite thing is just to lay in bed with my headphones on and produce.” So, is being on stage more a necessary evil? She thinks about this. “Sometimes I don’t feel anything at all,” she says. “And then I feel really weird about not feeling anything. Or I get really nervous and feel like I have to cancel the show. Like, ‘This is so fucked up, I can’t handle this. I don’t want to do this’, and my band is telling me to calm down and drink water and I’ll be fine. Once I’m on, all the nerves disappear, and then after the show, I’m thinking, ‘That was so awesome!’”

Credits:

Words by Koko Ntuen.

Photography by Nina Andersson.

Styling by Fiffi Jenkins

Hair and Make-Up: Louise Linder at Mikas

Fashion credits:

All: Marc By Marc Jacobs.

Special thanks to: Warner Music