media essay 5-6 pages due 12 hours

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WORDS nick levine

Tove Lo makes pop music that’s cool, catchy and kind of risqué. “I eat my dinner in the bath tub / Then I go to sex clubs,” she sang on her 2014 breakthrough hit Habits (Stay High). Then she celebrated the freedom of being in an open relationship on this summer’s comeback single Cool Girl, which featured the knowing line, “We don’t put a label on it.” And now, in her usual no-messing-about style, she’s named her new album Lady Wood.

“Well, Lady Wood is an expression that means the female hard-on,” she tells us in a very matter-of-fact way when we ask why. “And that feels right because this album is really all about chasing rushes – whether that’s a sexual rush, the rush you get from drugs, or from falling in love, or whatever. And also, when a woman is strong or brave

or has a lot of opinions, people will often say she ‘has balls’, but I never really liked that [expression]. So maybe Lady Wood can be a new way of saying ‘a chick who has balls’.”

Tove, who grew up in a smart part of Stockholm and wrote her rst song at the age of 10, is de nitely a woman who has Lady Wood. On stage, she’s frank and funny, often telling the crowd about whatever rushes she may have been chasing lately. O stage, she moonlights as an in-demand songwriter who’s co-written hits for Ellie Goulding (Love Me Like You Do), Girls Aloud (Something New) and The Saturdays (What Are You Waiting For?).

“Performing is de nitely a rush for me,” she says today, “but so is getting in the recording studio and making a really great song.”

She experienced another rush when she guested on Years & Years’ spring single Desire, though she says she was “gutted” not to have time to appear in the video – a super-sexy and celebratory a air which frontman Olly Alexander described as an exploration of “poly-multi-hetero-homo-sappho-inter- gender-queer-desire”. Tove bonded with the Years & Years boys when she met them in Stockholm, and says the collaboration came about “completely organically”. When Olly o ered her the chance to re-write the parts of the song she’d be singing, Tove said no. “I couldn’t, because the song was perfect already. I just love Olly and everything he stands for.”

By the bi ALONGSIDE CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS AND SHURA, POP’S SEXUALITY-FLUID REVOLUTION IS BEING SPEARHEADED BY TOVE LO – THE FIERCE, FRESH AND FRANK SWEDISH SINGER-SONGWRITER WHO’S COLLABORATED WITH BOTH NICK JONAS AND YEARS & YEARS IN 2016. AS SHE PREPARES TO DROP HER SUPERB SECOND ALBUM LADY WOOD, WE CHAT TO THIS EXCITING RISING STAR ABOUT BEING BI, SUBVERTING POP CULTURE’S “BOY MEETS GIRL” TROPE, AND WHY SHE’LL ALWAYS BE IN OLLY ALEXANDER’S CORNER…

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She was equally impressed when she rst saw the video. “It’s just completely beautiful, isn’t it? I know Olly wrote, like, a letter explaining to people what the video was about but I don’t see how anyone could nd it shocking. Like, how could you nd Desire shocking when there are all these lms where just people go around shooting people? For me, love, sex and people connecting is the most natural thing in the world.”

Tove has her own moment of something close to “poly-multi-hetero-homo-sappho- inter-gender-queer-desire” on a standout track from Lady Wood. “Boy meets boy, meets girl, meets girl / This is the best place in the world,” she sings on the slinky electro-pop gem In uence. Is this lyric is a deliberate nod to sexual equality? “Oh, it was de nitely deliberate! It was my way of changing up the classic old ‘boy meets girl’ story, like playing with it... What’s the word?”

Subverting? “Yes, subverting! I’d been reading about this

church in Sweden where they were refusing to accept gay people and it put the idea [of celebrating equality] in my head. I should say it was just this one random church – Sweden

is a very liberal and accepting country generally, and I don’t want to get in trouble for saying it’s not! But this song is about being in a club and drinking and dancing and chasing a rush – and it’s de nitely a club where every type of person is welcome. So yeah, that line is de nitely supposed to have subtle message of sexual equality.”

On the one hand, it could look as though collaborating with Years & Years on Desire helped Tove to embrace the queerness in her own music. But on the other, she’s always been open about identifying as bisexual, and she’d probably have written this lyric anyway. A few days before we speak to Tove, the O ce for National Statistics releases data that suggests more people in the K than ever before are de ning themselves as bi.

Does she feel there’s a greater understanding now? In the past, even some members of the LGBT+ community have been a bit dismissive, ignorantly suggesting being bi is simply a “gateway drug” to becoming a full-blown homo.

“Why is it something that people need to understand?” Tove replies, as matter-of-fact as ever. “Some people just like guys, some people just like girls, some people like guys and girls.

What’s so di cult about that? I think that once we label who we are, we limit our options – people will say, ‘If you’re that, why are you doing this then?’ I just think, why can’t we all just be attracted to whoever we’re attracted to?” Yet Tove also appreciates that labels can be empowering to the people who embrace them, and helpful to their friends, families and work colleagues. “Sometimes people need to put a label on you so they know how to behave and feel comfortable around you. I get that.”

But whenever Tove is questioned about her sexuality, she deals with it in a way that feels very Lady Wood. “I get shit from some of my friends who say, ‘How can you call yourself bisexual when you’ve never been in a relationship with a woman?’ But I’m attracted to women and I’ve had sex with women and the fact I’ve never been in a relationship with a woman isn’t something I think about.

“Who knows what the future holds for me? I just am – and I’m attracted to who I’m attracted to. And that’s the way I’m always going to live my life.”

Lady Wood is available from 28 October, tove-lo.com, @tovelo

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