Album bio: Siv Jakobsen - Gardening

The first seeds of what would become Gardening arrived in Siv Jakobsen’s mind unexpectedly – unwelcomely, even. Returning to a city she once called home, her mind and body were overcome by memories – both physical and emotional – that pulled her back into a time she had thought was long buried. As she walked through her old haunts, memories of a “destructive and difficult relationship” rose up from her past like a monstrous weed. Its roots had not been exterminated and it suddenly poked through the cracks of her consciousness, five years after the fact.

“It was almost as if I had been in a time machine and suddenly I felt like I was in the past. I felt confused about what time it was, what year it was, and who I was,” she recalls. “It was a confusing couple of days where I was met with my body’s reaction to being back there. I felt so overwhelmed and quite frightened, like I had vertigo or something.

“So I decided, ‘OK, I need to figure this out’. It made me realise that I had to dive a little bit deeper and try to understand it. And that prompted me to start writing about it.”

She headed back to Oslo as the pandemic took hold, lockdown allowing her even more time and space to unpack and untangle her knotted thoughts. In the verdant Norwegian capital she was able to take walks in the forest just five minutes from her home, tend to her patio garden and occasionally see friends. All the while, her mind continued to process the spectre that had reared its head, words coming out onto the page, revealing a cutting new depth to her candid writing style.

“I think it’s a difficult record to swallow,” she says. “And it’s one that I wrote just for myself. It’s completely unfiltered.”

By early 2021, she was ready to record. With lockdown measures still in place, she was forced to record in her native home for the first time ever, which turned out to be a blessing. She approached local songwriters and producers Simen Mitlid, with whom she’d shared bills before, and his creative partner Hans Olav Settem, as their album Birds; or, Stories from Charlie B’s Travels From Grønland to the Sun, and Back Again had become a 2020 favourite and she heard in it a sound world sympathetic to her own desires for her next album.

“I got in touch to see if they wanted to try and do some writing together, and I think we all realised it was a very good match,” Jakobsen recalls. “Then it just morphed into recording without me noticing. What started as recording one song became two and then it was 10. It was a really soft process.”

This softness was key to handling the delicacy of the subject matter and bringing it out into the light. “It really allowed me to grow more and more comfortable with the idea of the songs being not just for me,” Jakobsen says.

Rather than cram the recording into a couple of weeks or a month as she had done in the past, Jakobsen and her collaborators worked for more than six months between February and August, convening when they could – with some sessions called off due to the inevitable contact with Covid. But this all helped to ensure the record felt more natural, honest and open. “I think the amount of time that I had in between each session was really helpful. I think it enabled a different result,” Jakobsen says.

Remaining in Oslo also meant that she could invite more friends into the recording process to add strings, double bass and even some traditional Norwegian hardanger fiddle. Jakobsen also went beyond borders to contact Brighton-based musicians Emma Gatrill (This Is The Kit, Nick Cave, Lucy Rose) and Marcus Hamblett (Laura Marling, James Holden, The Staves) to remotely add horns and more. 

“We just kind of gave them free rein to do what they wanted,” she says of these extra players. “I always pick people that I think are really incredible at their instrument and I feel it would be strange if I were to then micromanage them too much, because that defeats the purpose of bringing them in. I think what happens when I let go a bit is more interesting.”

The resulting Gardening is at once Jakobsen’s most emotionally intimate and her most musically expansive record. The title comes from one of the album’s flagship moments, the “crazy jungly sounding” track “Gardening” – but is a thematic link throughout the album. “This record is me doing an intense amount of emotional gardening,” she says. “I was just raking through my mind and pulling stuff out, and then it grew back again, so I pulled it out again.”

Early highlight “Romain’s Place” sets the scene for the start of this process. Jakobsen puts us into the place where she first felt the past encroaching, staring out the window of her friend’s house at the place she once called home, envisioning her ex standing there on the sidewalk; “I swear that you look just the same / You haven’t aged at all.” Unrepressed memories of anger and being screamed at float up, unbidden but undeniable; “How am I back here again, afraid again,” she sings, speaking of a place that is both literal and mental. 

This wrestling match with the past continues into the following songs, where she is sometimes falling victim to resurfacing wounds and at other times able to pack the skeleton forcibly back in its closet. “Most Of The Time” has her admitting “I wanna know what it feels like to be alone without you in my mind”, while “Birthday” finds her sneering defiantly at her ex for ruining the atmosphere at her party, wondering why she wasted so much time on them. In the latter she comes to an acceptance that she might never be rid of them, singing “Take a swim in the marrow of my bones”, but equally they’ll never be rid of her: “And I’ll grow old in your brainwaves”. 

Gardening also takes some detours away from the directly personal. The sharp yet surreal “Tangerine” is told from the perspective of someone who feels helpless, disposable and worthless. “I imagine this person trapped in a house, needing help and not being able to ask, then locking eyes with a neighbour and silently asking for help they’ll never get,” Jakobsen says. If it sounds like a Murakami short story, that might be because Jakobsen read an “extreme amount” of the Japanese author’s work in the last few years. 

Following track “Blue” is another narrative-driven song about an abusive relationship, Jakobsen observing the woman as she lies awake at night and wondering when the light in her eyes died. “This song just kind of happened,” Jakobsen says. “I wrote it and then I was like ‘Okay, I wrote a very dark story about someone who’s experiencing domestic abuse’. I felt like it fit in with the rest of the record, even though it’s not about me.”

“Sun, Moon, Stars” offers the biggest moment of reprieve from the album’s thematic weight. Gloriously arranged with silvery strings and elegiac horns that subtly build alongside the song’s swelling current, it finds Jakobsen singing through a storm and coming out the other side thanks to someone who has become a bedrock of her life, singing “You are the reason I am alive”. It is also graced by harmonies from her fellow Norwegian, the legendary Ane Brun. “A big part of why I wanted her to sing on this song in particular is because a lot of the influence I have from Ane is in it,” Jakobsen says. “The style of the guitar, the strings, it just felt like it was a nice nod to how she’s inspired me, so to have her sing on it felt like a full circle moment.” 

Gardening is bookended by its two most vulnerable songs, “Small” and “The Bay”, which were the last that Jakobsen and her collaborators recorded. The opening track sets the theme and tone for the record immediately: “Pulled along by an invisible string / Tied around my throat and gnawing at my skin / Now I can’t even sing anymore / I’ve closed the door, you win.”

It’s a stomach-turning introduction that needs no shortage of bravery to put on paper and sing - let alone release into the world for thousands to hear. It turns out that recording these songs at the end of the process was fateful and helped bring them out of Jakobsen.  

For these tracks, Jakobsen, Mitlid and Settem retreated to a wooden cabin on the outskirts of Oslo that felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. “It’s at the top of a hill, there’s a dense forest right behind it and even with all the windows closed you could hear all the birds,” Jakobsen describes. “It was a very beautiful room and we made our studio there for a couple of days in the summer.” Listen closely and you can hear the wooden creaks and chirping birds in the background of those songs – but what you’ll mostly hear is an artist laying bare her most guarded thoughts with astounding, measured and painstaking clarity. 

“Something about the way that room felt and sounded allowed us to record the two most vulnerable songs on the record,” Jakobsen muses. “I think I maybe hadn’t been ready to do them until then, anyway.” 

Gardening is an album that is inextricably linked to Jakobsen’s own experiences and hard-learned lessons, as is evident in every word and the way she delivers them. However, she has always been an artist who wishes to welcome as many people into her musical world as possible, and that remains true here. 

“My hope is that these songs can be helpful for anyone who has experienced a difficult and/or destructive relationship, whether romantic or not,” she says. “I hope these songs are universal in some way - no matter the nature of the listeners past experiences.”