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Music

I Only Learn: Lykke Li's Power Ballads Keep Getting More Powerful

She finished strong even as festival organizers allegedly tried to kick her off stage.

All photos by Petya Shalamanova

On stage, Lykke Li is a sorceress of energy and sadness. Her emotive eyes and pouty insouciance wield a considerable power. This is the third time I've seen her live and, with each passing time, her performance becomes more moving.

Most of my notes from the beginning of her set were unenthusiastic. For Li's placement as the second-tier stage headliner just before Eminem’s finale, her crowd was relatively small. Her all-black-clad-band matched the minimalist stage setup, simply adorned with thick black ribbons draping from the top.

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She began with the overly earnest title track from her recent album, I Never Learn. It was a curious choice for the start of a festival performance. In the throes of hundreds of thousands of people, a quiet, vulnerable ballad is difficult to translate. But the audience reacted with kindness. There's that force she wields.

Li is a singer-songwriter first, but she is also more than that. A performer in the truest sense of the word, Li played up the dramatics of her latest record, emphasizing its forefront vocals and the fact that it lacks the quirky elements that defined her define her first two albums.

“Some people say it's a bit of a bummer,” Li said about I Never Learn. “I say it's a broken dream.”

I couldn't tell if she was even "all in" for the performance. But as she transitioned from newer to older material, her calculated emotional build up became clear. She’s the type of artist who’ll reel you in slowly and then knock you out in an instant. The tone turned from despondent to devoted.

Tracks from her second album Wounded Rhymes, like “Jerome" and "I Follow Rivers,” filled out the middle and end of her set. What might sound like personal cries on record instead translate to world-weary battle cries for the audience. On both songs, she taps into the pleasures of melancholy and a hyper-emotive life. Rather than cower from her emotions and angst and yearning, she instead embraces them, and lets her audience know that yes, she feels it, too. I wanted to pretend that I was above it all, but in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, “She just gets me.” I’m sure others felt the same.

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“You gotta do it with me. I'm too shy,” she said, during “Dance, Dance, Dance,” which was clearly not true.. As the song progressed–with its signature horns and drumbeat–she began dancing on stage, shaking her hips and playing the cymbals. It was the perfect transition from the sadness of the beginning into the vivacity of the end. The song was like a complete, finite representation of Lykke Li, the Performer.

Later, with a few minutes left in her set, she cried, “They're trying to fuck me over. They're trying to get me off stage.” Scheduled to perform from 7:30-8:30 PM, organizers were apparently eager to begin moving audiences over to the main stage. Whether or Lykke Li’s claim was true remains to be seen. But her declaration only further excited the audience that actually grew rather than diminished in the tens of minutes before the headliner.

"Scream and I'll sing," she quickly added.

Continuing to speak to the crowd, she gave us a choice between “Never Gonna Love Again” and “Rich Kid Blues.” She settled on the former, playing on the lyrics for a moment to say she’s “never getting off the stage.”

“Is she serious? Are they trying to kick her off?” a young woman I never met said while desperately grabbing my arm.

“Yes? I think so?” I replied confused.

She ran up closer to the stage.

“Were gonna have a power ballad moment,” Li said. “Raise your iPhones and lighters.” I thought she was joking, but everyone ate it up, eagerly. If she was looking for a show of solidarity in the face of the audience’s earlier moods, she clearly found it.

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Britt Julious is now a Lykke Li convert. She's on Twitter - @britticisms.

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