Long before Covid-19 changed the world forever, Swedish artist Lykke Li was already holed up in her LA home in a self-enforced isolation. “I was already very much in my own lockdown,” she says pensively. “It was something that I was intuitively feeling I needed.” Li isn’t feeling great when we meet in a café in London: she’s opened-up frequently in the past about how sickly she can get in the day-to-day, but especially so on tour, needing to pace herself to avoid burnout. At the start of 2020, at the end of another long series of tour dates, she says she crashed.
“I’d been on the road for so many years and I have so many health issues,” she explains of “destructive” touring cycles. “I found [touring] very difficult and I still don’t know how to balance that with art,” she admits. “Just travelling itself is [hard], I’m very introverted and sensitive and I always get sick. It’s just not very helpful for the body in general: I struggle with it a lot.”
