Oh Land Returns to Earth to Find the Sounds She's Been Searching for All Along

Photo by Justin Tyler Close, courtesy of Oh Land

Oh Land needed the ominous, shuttering sound of a rattlesnake for a song she was working on – or at least that’s what she thought. So, with the determination of Steve Irwin, she headed into the Mojave Desert to hunt them down.

Turns out, the Danish singer, born Nanna Oland Fabricius, is a master rattlesnake hunter. But when it came to putting the sound on her new album, Earth Sick, she just couldn’t do it.

“In theory, it was the best sound ever because it’s basically a shaker, but there’s just something deep in your instincts that, when you hear that sound, it makes you want to run,” Nanna said, admitting she was too scared to put it in the track it was intended for, "Machine." Fabricius was FaceTiming me from her Brooklyn apartment, where she recorded some of the LP, a completely DIY project released just days earlier on her own Tusk or Tooth label.

Although the reptile didn’t make the cut, there’s plenty more to be heard on Earth Sick—a complicated record that requires a few extra listens to hear everything that's going on. Oh Land’s album requires the voice of Stefon from “SNL.” It’s got everything: strings, an opera singer, dog barks, Velcro rips, shoe stomps, scissor snips, pill bottles… *leans in* birds chirping.

You could call Earth Sick electro-pop; it’s produced, looped and mixed with computers and synthesizers. But so much of it isn’t synthetic. Nanna bares her insecurities in a more upfront, blunt, vulnerable way, instead of playing the part of smooth, mysterious pop star as she did when she first hit the US. For Earth Sick, her fourth album, she trekked back home to Denmark to record and produce it on her own, just as she did with her 2008 debut, Fauna. That album had launched her onto a trajectory that didn't involve as much home recording: In 2011, she landed a big record deal with Sony for her sophomore album, her first to be released in the US. She went indie again for 2013's Wish Bone, which she worked on with Sia and TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, releasing the record through Sitek's Federal Prism label and her own newly minted Tusk or Tooth Records.

But this time, Nanna ditched a formal record label and funded the project through online pledgers, who bought it early in exchange for video updates about her progress. "I recorded an album in my bedroom, eating lots of Cup Noodles and only wearing pajamas. And I kind of want to do that again," she said in her inaugural video on PledgeMusic.

While at home, she found out that the sounds she had been searching for were actually sounds she had known all along.

That opera singer? That’s her mother. Her father composed all the string arrangements, with her cousin and his girlfriend on violin, her uncle on viola, and her aunt on cello. Even her husband, Eske Kath, created the artwork for the CD.

“They’re all musicians, so I was just like, ‘I’ve been playing with them all my life, so why not incorporate them in the making of this album?’” she said. “It’s been so, so fun to do it because it means something to me on another level. They’ve inspired me better than anyone. When I write something, they know where it comes from.”

With a deeper bond than any other backing band, Nanna and her family have an understanding. When she sings a melody, her dad knows exactly what to do with the counter-melody. If he doesn’t quite nail it, it isn’t awkward to tell him how she really wants it. What can be awkward, however, is sharing her lyrics with her parents.

“It’s basically like gathering your family and then saying like, ‘Oh, so, I’m just gonna read out loud from my diary, and you guys just enjoy,’” she said, describing the personal themes on her album that she isn’t so proud of: greed, dissatisfaction and “the feeling of not ever being content with what you have.”

With lyrics like those on the meandering, haunting “Trailblazer” (“In my head I’m losing / For sanity I’m begging”), it’s natural for a parent to ask, “Is everything OK?”

“Mostly they don’t comment,” she said. “Once in a while, [my dad] will be like, ‘So what do you mean, by saying, blah blah blah?’ and I’m like, ‘Ehhhhhhh…’”

For Nanna, 29, it was necessary to go home. Best known for pop hits "Son of a Gun" and "White Nights," Oh Land broke into music nearly six years ago when an injury kept her from a dancing career. Since then, she's been on the road, moving across the Atlantic to Brooklyn in 2010. In the past year, she toured in support of Wish Bone and held a spot on Denmark’s “Voice Junior” coach panel. While all of that was going on, she said she forgot what it was like to be a “normal person.” So when the pixie-haired singer returned to Copenhagen, she wasn’t used to the sound of the simpler things.

“Silence can be quite overwhelming and actually makes a stronger impression than action,” she said. “Suddenly you hear your breath, you hear your heart beating, you hear the refrigerator, you hear the neighbors—so many things when you’re like, used to it being noisy, jet-lagged, concerts and people.”

While other people go to art galleries, the park or the subway for inspiration (Nanna said she writes music on the subway all the time), Earth Sick came about from sitting at home being bored, stewing in her own thoughts. The album's title comes from a disorder astronauts suffer when they return to land, their bodies not used to gravity. After a long time in outer space, their muscles, joints, and even their minds have to adjust to life on Earth. That’s what Nanna says she’s doing: adjusting from her crazy whirlwind life to something more settled. But it’s all for the better.

“I think it’s healthy to be bored, and stay in it for a while. You’ll start really processing all the information that you’ve gathered,” she said.

As she gained more perspective on her life back in New York, she wrote songs like “Favor Friends,” an honest track that calls out a pal who only talked to her when she needed something, like a place to stay or an introduction. “Cut it out, cut it out / Take off your halo / Can we just be favor friends?” she sings, telling me later that she’d rather do a favor for that person without all the faux-politeness. The track itself is multi-faceted: There are tidal waves of strings, glitchy beats, layered foot stomps (you can see them make the “sloppy” beat in a pledge video), a choir, and then—the best part—her mom comes in with an opera melody Nanna wrote just for her. The song, like all the others on the album, is complicated. Nanna calls it her "Bohemian Rhapsody."

“Opera was always something I’ve been ashamed of, because I was like, ‘Here comes my loud mom again,’ “ she said about growing up with her operatic mother. “It was something that I didn’t think was cool. It wasn't like being a rockstar.”

Now that she's grown, she's embracing full-on orchestral music and adding everything else from her life into the mix, even if it sounds a little crazy. She told me that she smashes a plate in "Doubt My Legs" and shakes a bottle of painkillers in "Hot 'N' Bothered," a song about the "wounds we all have and whatever things we have happened in our lives that have scarred us." In the video for the album's first single, "Head Up High," she dons a black helmet and shatters everything in sight with a baseball bat.

Ridding herself of a formal record label has been as freeing as smashing a lamp against a brick wall—you just don't care what other people are going to think about your work because you don't have to. She created Earth Sick for herself and her legion of fans, who call themselves "Narwhals," named after a costume she wore on tour.

"To me, it was already a personal success, because my pledgers liked it," she said with a smile. Although there haven't been any bad reviews of Earth Sick—there haven't been many reviews at all, to be honest—she doesn't even feel pressure to create something well received by the masses. "I couldn't care less about how somebody reviews it or how it does on a chart because these were the people it was intended for."

Regardless of where she goes next to find the perfect sound—whether it be the Mojave Desert for a rattlesnake shake, the Amazon for an exotic frog chirp, or just the sound of her heart beating in her bedroom—she knows she has her family, her friends, and her Narwhals backing her the entire time, and the sound will be perfect before she even records it.

Emilee Lindner could probably catch a snake in the desert. Follow her on Twitter.