When Agnes Obel discovered she was pregnant during Germany’s Covid lockdown, she sat at her piano and poured her feelings into music.
“Immediately I could feel my mind being different,” she says about the months leading to the birth of her daughter, Lana, who’s now almost five. “The album I was working on, it was focused on technology. It just seemed ridiculous and irrelevant.”
Obel’s experience of pregnancy during the pandemic was both uplifting and eerie, qualities she infuses into her beautifully uncanny new LP, The Meaning of Flowers.
“I could feel I was changing, and I actually felt it was something I had to almost document with music,” says Obel, who grew up in Denmark and now lives in Berlin with her husband, the German artist and animator Alex Brüel Flagstad. “I just immediately started working in my studio, and it became The Meaning of Flowers.”
Pregnancy can be a dramatic experience in the best of circumstances – and a pandemic was not the best of circumstances. In Germany they have a term for infants born during lockdown, according to the singer: corona babies.
“That was weird,” Obel says, although she adds that, as someone who does her best work in the womb-like solitude of her home studio, on the outskirts of Berlin, being on her own was not a challenge. “The actual isolation thing was not very difficult for me, to be honest. I’ve trained for that my whole life.”
There were obvious changes to her body, but she was just as struck by how pregnancy rewired her grey matter. “I could feel my brain changing,” she says.
[ Agnes Obel: Architect of eerie, otherworldy musicOpens in new window ]
Looking into it, she came upon a theory that pregnancy reorients the neural networks. But reading about it merely confirmed something she could already feel happening inside her head.
“It is a stage where the brain becomes as plastic as in teenage times. There are theories that you can learn stuff very easily again. I was trying to improve my guitar playing.
“The main thing was I felt consciousness was different. I feel like the brain is this thing that is filtering consciousness. And when you feel this filter is changing … I find that super interesting, and I wanted to document it from the inside.”
The songwriter emerged blinking in the daylight with an album that unfolds like a body-horror film in reverse, where her remoulded physical form is ushering her towards a joyful new stage in life.
As befits the subject matter, the tone is both disorienting and comforting: on the title track a bleeping rhythm mimics the fragile flutter of an infant’s heartbeat. On the single Laymelli, Obel’s voice is filtered through a pitch effect, so that it morphs and warps, mimicking the evolving nature of life in the natural world.
The instinct to chronicle what’s happening beneath the surface is nothing new for Obel. A desire to push aside the veil and behold things as they really are has long been the defining quality of this ethereal songwriter’s work, which her label, Deutsche Grammophon, has likened to the “beautifully unsettling” dark fairy tales of Angela Carter.
Agnes Obel. Photograph: Alex Brüel Flagstad
That unique perspective makes her a perfect artist to capture in musical form the experience of pregnancy during the screaming silence of lockdown. All those visits to empty hospitals, the Covid protocols. And then, when the baby arrived, the challenge of being a new family unit in complete isolation.
But if an aura of the fantastical has hung around her evocative chamber pop since Philharmonics, her debut, from 2010, the music also ripples and twitches with darkness.
That was particularly true of Citizen of Glass, from 2016, which she wrote after the death of her father. He died while she was on tour, having lived for years with depression and experiencing abiding regret about giving up his early career as a jazz musician to support his family.
[ Agnes Obel: ‘My songwriting really started when Pro Tools arrived’Opens in new window ]
Obel has also experienced depression, which she describes as “my family curse for many generations”. “This is just something that’s part of me,” she says. “That’s always going to be there.”
She says this in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if recalling yesterday’s weather. “In my experience, and knowing also from my dad, the worst you can do is just put your – in Danish you would say ‘your head in a hole’ – and pretend it’s not there. It’s more like you have to get to know this thing in you. It’s part of you. And then finding ways to face it and work around it.”
Did she worry about postpartum depression, which is estimated to affect 10- 15 per cent of mothers? “Actually not, because I was so elated with the whole pregnancy,” she says. “I was reading these stories, and I understand these are very strong things that can happen, but I did not have that fear.”
Obel had plenty of other fears, she adds. “I watched a Louis Theroux documentary about kids with autism,” she says, referring to Louis Theroux: Extreme Love – Autism, from 2012. “So I was maybe worried a little bit about that. I feel like my depressive side had been expressed at its strongest in my 20s. It picks its head up, but it’s actually been better since I had my daughter.”
One thing that helps, she says, is to be in constant motion – touring, writing songs or simply getting out into the world.
“I’m such a heady, spacey person. I have a body, and actually just moving my body, and being in nature, and also having connection with people, that sort of genuine connection is better than antidepressants, for me. And it’s something I’ve learned through many years. And also just facing it head on instead of trying to be in denial about it.”
As a working parent, she wants her daughter to be part of her life, but she has found the music industry isn’t always accepting of mothers who want to bring their children on the road. She says she’s considering starting a support group in Berlin for parents in the music industry.
“For parents who are touring – it shouldn’t just be mums, but anybody who has this responsibility – it’s super complicated to make it work,” Obel says.
“The thing that I’m surprised at is how few are bringing their kids on tour. I remember I was touring with my daughter in 2022, when she was one. There were venues in continental Europe where they wouldn’t allow us in with the kids because of insurance and stuff like that. And then I realised they’d never had a child in the venue before.”
Obel is the sort of cult artist whose music deserves the listener’s undivided attention. As with her previous records, The Meaning of Flowers is an album you have to sit with: it is cool and mysterious, a puzzle to be unlocked, a poem to be absorbed, and the very opposite of playlist fodder. “Record-label people tell me I have very good [streaming] numbers, but I don’t know where to compare it to,” she says.
At home, away from the tour bus, she prefers to listen to vinyl; she says it has been a pleasure to introduce the medium to her daughter, who listens to old crackling recordings of audiobooks. She has in a sense come full circle, having started with a “ridiculous and irrelevant” project about technology and ending up with a new record that argues for the meditative pleasures of analogue music. In a world menaced by artificial intelligence, she hopes her new album can function as an antidote, as a light in the gloom.
“There’s something very strange when you think about how perfect this vinyl thing is. There’s something about when you put a vinyl on – it’s totally magic. I have a lot of hope for this medium. The dopamine in the brain, it’s much better with the vinyl and the sound waves. Now, with all this AI, people would naturally gravitate towards this more acoustic experience, and stuff that’s imperfect. I’m feeling quite hopeful.”
The Meaning of Flowers, by Agnes Obel, is released by Deutsche Grammophon