Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers

Wounded Rhymes, January 2011: Björn Yttling, Tarik Saleh’s snow clip

On 21 January 2011, Lykke Li released I Follow Rivers as the second single from Wounded Rhymes, her second studio album. Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John produced it. Lykke Li, Yttling and Rick Nowels wrote it. The original version runs about three minutes and forty-eight seconds. SPIN premiered the track on 10 January. The album followed on LL Recordings / Atlantic in early March 2011, after sessions at Atlantis, Decibel and Högalid in Stockholm.

What you hear first is a slightly off xylophone figure, then a steady drum pattern and Li’s lower, firmer vocal. Keyboards swirl behind a noir guitar line. The lyric follows someone through deep water and dark weather: "Deep sea baby", "Dark doom honey". After the lighter indie-pop of Youth Novels (2008), she wanted a rawer second record. Yttling kept percussion and odd keyboard colours at the front and stacked her voice in places like a small choir.

Tarik Saleh directed the video on Gotland: Li walking a snow-covered landscape alone. The clip matched the colder tone of the album. A few months later, Belgian producer Stephen Fasano, as The Magician, issued a house remix that climbed charts across Europe. Triggerfinger later covered the song live. Those versions travelled far; the chronicle here stays with the 2011 album cut and the sessions that shaped it. Rick Nowels, who had written with Madonna and Stevie Nicks, brought a California songwriting habit into Yttling’s Stockholm rooms without polishing away the odd percussion. Chart numbers for the original single stayed modest next to the remix; in several European territories radio only caught fire once Fasano’s dance edit circulated.