Agnes Obel

One of music’s inherent conflicts is that of control. A musician will throw their emotions and creativity into a piece of work, fine-tuning it over the process of several months or even years. And yet the moment the work is placed in the public domain, that control is irreversibly and eternally gone. It takes on its own life if its creator is lucky. If not, it disappears into the ether.

Fortunately for the Danish-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Agnes Obel, her debut album ‘Philharmonics’ has very much found its own flight. It's sparse, disarmingly beautiful songs have connected past the barriers of culture and language to become a pan-European hit, most notably in Obel’s former homeland where it spent seven consecutive weeks at #1 as it shot to Platinum status. Slowly, it has unveiled its charms across the continent too: it’s been certified Gold in France, hit the Top 10 in both France and the Netherlands and has made major inroads in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. Appropriately, audiences are discovering the album’s beauty for themselves, its message conveyed via word-of-mouth and its contemporary online equivalent.

As a child, Obel was subconsciously guided into music by the influence of her mother and father, who would play and listen to a blend of the classical greats, folk music like Jan Johansson and the timeless sounds of Roy Orbison. “A lot of this music I grew up with, but there were also times when I didn’t care for it at all,” she confesses. As she grew up and discovered her own identity as a music fan, other artists came to the fore with Elliot Smith and Portishead’s ‘Dummy’ album proving to be particularly influential. “It was so different and intense and strong,” she flows enthusiastically. “And everybody liked it across genres – hip-hop, electronic and rock – which is really important when you’re a teenager.”

Obel had always been writing songs on the piano, but it was her move to Berlin in 2006 that prompted her take her music to the next level. “I knew at some moment that I had to fix them in time and put them on an album. It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time,” she explains. Few of her new friends in the city were musical, so the emphasis on working alone was an organic process. Her work on the album – entirely self-played and produced – became more serious through 2008 and into 2009. The recording studio she worked in, located on the outskirts of the city, was “perfect as I could sit and work without distraction.”

‘Philharmonics’ opens with the instrumental piano piece ‘Falling, Catching’ which echoes her initial confusion over whether her music was classical or something less readily definable. The next song, ‘Riverside’, flows with a depth of emotion embedded with further character by Obel’s love of combining her sweet melodies with carefully considered lyrics that evoke the song’s innate sound. ‘Just So’ works a similar trick, its blend of melancholy and optimism perfectly encapsulated into the opening line ‘Black turns beat me bright.’ Elsewhere, with ‘On Powdered Ground’, ‘Brother Sparrow’ or her interpretation of John Cale’s ‘Close Watch’, she melds different moods and atmospheres, all indelibly linked by the brittle majesty of her music.

The album’s songs have also subconsciously found an audience through their use in film and television. ‘Just So’ soundtracked a Deutsch Telekom advert, which gave Obel the unusual combination of having a song that everyone knew while having almost no profile as an artist herself. But soon opportunities presented themselves and continue to do so. Her music reached a bigger North American and international audience when ‘Riverside’ was used in Grey’s Anatomy, while iTunes extended that profile further by requesting an exclusive release of ‘Philharmonics’ and highlighting Obel on the home page of their North American website. The attention of the press has been consistently positive with Vogue and culture magazine Telerama producing in depth features in France, while Obel will also feature in both the North American and European issues of TIME.

Film too is an important angle of Obel’s work. One of her earliest breaks came when three of her demos featured in cult director Thomas Vinterberg’s film Submarino – ‘Riverside’ earned her a Robert Award (Denmark’s equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Song of the Year. Music and film, she says, is intertwined. “It’s really interesting when music is used not just to colour scenes, but when it becomes part of the story too.”

New scenes are added to Obel’s narrative on a near weekly basis. She’s just finished a week of sold-out concert hall shows in Copenhagen, an event which she describes modestly (and near silently, perhaps lost in the wonder of the moment), as “very overwhelming and a little bit unbelievable.” Obel’s standing in the live arena has exploded exponentially; each time she’s returned to play in cities in Denmark, France, Holland and Norway she’s graduated to play bigger and consistently rammed venues, while her set at Eurosonic was the hottest ticket at the entire event as demand swamped the venue’s capacity.

Next, though, she’s set to return to the UK for her first headline shows as part of a global tour that also included further European dates and her debut North American concerts, with more world-wide dates to follow. Whether Agnes Obel can control the destiny of ‘Philharmonics’ is in doubt, but her journey so far suggests that she’ll be just fine.