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Apr 01, 2015 Elliphant By Laura Studarus

“My music is not so deep,” Ellinor Olovsdotter, better known as Elliphant, bluntly admits. “When it comes to all kinds of art, I’m a sucker for the simple. Also, I think it’s fun to fuck up the words and be proud about not being so interested in the ideas that we created as humans. It’s actually just an experiment with words and shit anyway…I really think that dancing and moving and being happy, and looking with a smile to the next person in the crowd [is] what humans are supposed to do. That’s so important to me.”

In an A&R age, it’s a surprising statement from a musician, one full of messy, warm humanity. But perfection is far from the Swedish singer and beatmaker’s mind. Seated at a table at an outdoor Texas café, she’s got more immediate concerns: the humidity (her puffy, multi-colored jacked comes off moments into our conversation) and finding a cigarette. (Olovsdotter hopefully eyes passersby as she speaks, smiling when one finally comes to her aid.)

Olovsdotter’s output to date has been one long game of sonic hopscotch, enforcing her self-proclaimed “free-spirit” nature. Initial singles, released in 2012, showcased a singer with a nail-tough voice and rapid-fire flow, her hip-hop, and dancehall flavored tracks prove that melancholy wasn’t the only thing her country’s music scene was capable of exporting. But slowly, that began to change. On her latest 2014 EP, Look Like You Love It, Olovsdotter partnered with producer Skillrex for “Only Getting Younger” proving that she was equally at home in his heavy drops and skittering EDM beats. A meeting with Danish artist MØ produced “One More,” a percussive, low-key pop track that praises “24 hour taco” stands and grabbing a nightcap with your best friend. It’s a sound signature; or rather lack of one, which the genre polymath credits to her mom, a music fan with a record collection that contains everything from Prodigy, to The B-52s, to David Bowie to Bob Dylan.

“But she killed it for me too!” Olovsdotter laughs. “I was never interested in music. I never had any idols. I never had any big interest in music. She took that because she was so interested in music. She killed it for me. She was constantly buying records and we had to stand and wait for her for hours when she was listening through all these records. When we came up from the subway the record store was just there. We always tried to go, and mom was like ‘wait girls, just going to go in there for a moment to see.’ So she definitely filled up my batteries but she took away the excitement. But I’m getting there now. It’s really fun with music.”

Olovsdotter tackles life as one big passion project, a fact that encroaching popularity is unlikely to change. Her conceptual charity Save the Grey focuses on grey mammals—whales, sharks, elephants, and wolves—because one of her goals is to “actively work everyday with nature and animals.” The forthcoming Elliphant album features a different producer on almost every track, because, as she explains, “I could say yes to anybody who wanted to work with my project.”

“I have a very free mind,” Olovsdotter admits. “I’m not so interested in names and numbers. I’m very free in that sense. I’m spelling everything wrong, and I don’t really care what people think. That’s my superpower. That’s the only real thing I have. I don’t have an amazing voice. I don’t have the craziest, coolest clothes. But I have that freedom. I want to represent that. I don’t want to be provocative and annoying. I just want to be a good example for being free, and show people that.”

(www.facebook.com/elliphantmusic)