Will Elín Hall blow up even more than she has already? Next March, she’ll open for Laufey at Kórinn in Reykjavík’s suburb of Kópavogur. But she’s not sure where this will all go, only that she wants to keep making music and telling stories on screen and on stage. Fame in and of itself is less of a concern.
“I do not aspire to be too famous at all,” Hall says. “I’m famous enough in Iceland, and it’s just, I know the pros and cons of that, so I kind of like being able to go to London and nobody knows who I am. That’s really cool to me.” (On my trip home, I’ll see her bright blue eyes and red hair magnified on a giant Blue Lagoon advertisement at the airport.)
Her pivot to singing in English, most recently on songs like “Wolf Boy” and “Heaven to a Heathen,” isn’t necessarily because she wants more international success. However, she grew tired of having to over-explain the meanings behind her songs to non-Icelandic audiences. Still, both languages come with their freedoms and restrictions.
“It’s very fun to write in Icelandic because there are a lot of things that haven’t been said, and I feel like there aren’t a lot of people writing from the perspective of my generation,” she says. “But English is just different because it’s a way more forgiving language. There are so many wrong ways to say things in Icelandic. You just speak more generally in English, which sometimes can be more fun to write poetry that way, [because] it has more meanings. English can sometimes be a bit more ambiguous, but in Icelandic, for that same sentence, there are five ways to say it, and they all mean different things, and you have to choose.”