The Portrait of an Artist as a Regenerative Farmer: Amanda Bergman “never intended to become a musician”
Somewhere on a round hump of land, scattered with poppies like pimples on a belly, one of today’s finest songwriters stands ankle-deep in cowpat. The notion of a modern professional artist being someone who lives and breathes their craft – never getting their hands dirty with anything else – promoting it, touring it, creating it, in a perpetual cycle pitted with the odd hiatus is actually a very recent construct. Alas, Amanda Bergman is most certainly not a modern professional artist. In fact, she describes herself as a “part-time regenerative farmer and part-time musician”.
She subscribes, as she always has done, to the rather more rudimentary view of living your life and hoping you can channel a semblance of its sentiments into your art, as opposed to living your art and hoping to funnel life into it. She always has lived like this. As a child, she was obsessed with the local horses. So, she’d dash out in her spare moments, cycle towards her favourite spots, then cycle home to plod out tunes about them on her family’s dogeared piano. Thus, Geoff the Gotland pony was as much a part of her artistic education as anyone or anything else.
This need for inspiration to lead her muse, which she then chases after rather than her muse being guided forth by an ulterior motive, is the secret to the breezy sincerity in her songwriting. It is also the reason for her wildly wavering career path. In 2016, Docks launched her as a solo artist of note. Released under the moniker Idiot Wind before that, she had done much the same, as had her work as part of the band Amason. But each successful outing was followed by an odd, stuttering withdrawal.
Success is usually so hard to find in music that when it comes your way, most people greedily grasp it and pursue the potential to cultivate more. That’s the model for most people in any walk of life, in fact. Bergman is the opposite. She has seemingly always been happy to relinquish it in favour of another daunting blank slate. “I’ve been wondering why many times myself,” she tells me. “You could see the negative side,” she continues, as I’m sure many record executives have. “But when looking back, I can’t really see any way it would be otherwise.”
With a giggle of modesty, we arrive at the crux of the matter. “In a way, I think maybe I have too much integrity for my own best interest. I’ve never been good at pretending or lying or being dishonest. It’s completely out of my skill box. So I think that’s why, many times, if it doesn’t feel right, I can’t see the meaning in it.” While prolificacy might have been the victim of this artistic outlook, we get to see the benefit of the quest for meaning in all things with Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever, her latest solo album, eight years in the making.
Allowing time and integrity to guide the art makes it feel more like life rather than a forced creation. In the eight years between solo records, she tells me that she has juggled the loss of her father, the tiring trials and tribulations of pairing motherhood, farming, and creative pursuits, a lifelong bout of imposter syndrome, and the struggles of trying not to tread farm dirt onto a fresh rug. The result is true to her integrity and her search for meaning.
She avoids the pernicious lie of most art that we feel and think about one thing at a time during significant junctures worthy of prompting pop songs when it’s actually far more true that grief and joy can coexist alongside the simple thought of what to have for dinner. We are never so fully in a moment that we lose sight of the next or the last. Bergman has inadvertently allowed herself the chance to realise that in her music, shunning the typical pop methodology of thinking, ‘This is a happy love song in the key of E, and this next one is a sorrowful song about loss with just piano and horns’. As such, Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever is a beautiful, catchy encapsulation of life.
Perhaps she arrived at this because of her unique disposition. “I never, ever intended to become a musician,” she explains. She was all set to be an environmentalist before her songs started to take off accidentally on MySpace. “When things were potentially taking off, I think I got really scared. Whenever people bring you contracts, and you’re supposed to be responsible for other people’s income and well-being, it’s like, ‘No, I can’t even control myself’. How can I even be part of that.”
“The music industry is also such a harsh place too,” she continues. “It’s not fair. So, since music has not ever been life and death for me, I just suppose I’ve always felt that, in some cases, it has just been more logical for me to do something else. There’s many musicians out there. The world doesn’t need more songs. I think I’ve thought that very many times. Then I just do something else, but I always somehow spin back.” Perhaps the reason she spins back is two-fold: firstly, she is a natural musician. Secondly, that is evidenced by the fact she’s been streamed well over 50 million times without even the slightest promotion on her part.
Her band, Amason, is equally successful, yet it took her “more than seven years” to think of herself as “a musician by trade”. Even then, it was only the piling “empiric evidence” of sales records, awards, TV appearances and all the other trappings that made her realise “Oh, yeah, I’m probably a musician now, because this is actually what I do.”
However, it was also during that time that she began to pull away. “By that time, I’d been working too much for too many years, and I was kind of tired,” Bergman explains. “Honestly, I could not really work because I was in really bad shape. I had to do something else for a bit. That’s about the time where I had my first kid, and we also bought the farm, and we dove into that completely for a couple of years.” Nevertheless, she adds that the whole time, she “was constantly thinking about making another album, but I couldn’t really see it happening.”
Much of the impetus arrived with the passing of her loving father. Her life had always intersected with music. As much as she may shy away from the profundity of the overlap, she was now more keenly purveying its cathartic side. So, the long-awaited second solo album “boils down to a big realisation”. Bergman explains, “Some people might get it early in life. I might not have gotten it so early, but the importance of relations” became apparent.
“At some parts in your life, it doesn’t matter so much. But then when you get older, and you realise that you’re deadly,” she continued, meaning to say ‘mortal’. “All sudden, the relations in your life step into a light where you haven’t seen them before. You realise the quality of any relationship, whether it’s to your friends, to your partner, to your kids, to yourself, is pretty much everything that life is about because it’s defining, it’s defining your thoughts, it’s defining the way you see the world and the way you spend your days. So, for me, going through a time in my life where many people around me started to die and disappear in a way they they hadn’t before. At the same time, I was having kids myself, so I think it was just an intense period of just puzzling all of this and embodying it in a way. So the album definitely is a reflection of me realising some major facts.”
The album is, in many ways, Bergman making sense of the world. Which, she admits, is what her art has always secretly done. Being multiple things “is all tactics”. It sheds the load. As she explains, “I think if there’s anything that makes me a good musician, then it’s performance anxiety. That’s the driving force. I’ve had that my whole life. You have to track yourself and make it useful. I’ve always done a lot of things besides music. One thing fuels the other. I never understood the concept of specialisation. We’re obsessed with being specialised in our society, and growing up in the Swedish countryside, all my role models were generalists.”
In fact, she even goes further and claims, “It never made sense for me to dive into something completely because I see that as lunatic. Is there something wrong with people who do that? It probably isn’t, but most people who do that are narcissists or crazy?” Bergman continues, “If you’re idolising people, I always felt you’re probably not seeing the full picture because there’s always sacrifices. In many cases, maybe those sacrifices are their close relations. For me, that’s a major no. I would never, ever allow myself to sacrifice my closest relations for pursuing a dream like making music.” And yet she does make music, and it is of the highest quality and integrity, far from a flippant side-project.
While the specialised purists would argue great songs are few and far between, and you have to be ready and waiting to fish them from the ether, Amanda Bergman would argue that they arrive more willing to the contented artist. There is no point in bemoaning the miraculous melody you hum on the farm, but forget that by lunch, another one will come along just as that one did. “So, I treat music like I would going to a factory,” she adds. “Then I don’t expect any miracles. When I have studio days, I show up and if I trust anything, because I do believe in music, it’s closest thing to religion, I believe if you’re being honest with the situation, that’s when sometimes magical things happen. It’s not because you planned it or worked 30 hours in a row. I don’t think the method or countless hours of labour you put into music necessarily makes the music better.”
That much is evident from her masterful latest offering. A little vignette of life, cooked up wholeheartedly between funerals, dirty nappies, frigid mornings on a rural Swedish farm, concerts in their little red barn, and the unceasing, irrevocable, unfurling of chaotic time. And luckily, she says, “I’m already in the studio. So, the next one shouldn’t take another eight years.”
