Kristín Anna on Motherhood, the Dessner Brothers, and the Friendly Push That Spawned I Must Be the Devil

If you’ve never spoken to an Icelandic person before, I’ve noticed a unique artistry to their take on the English language. With bird-like trills of a soft-spoken register, each word is weighed and thoughtfully considered at a pace that mimics the glaciers so prevalent to their homeland. It requires patience of the listener (especially if she’s an American) but pays out handsomely, with a bounty of genuine thoughts, evocative words, and interesting ideas.

This is essentially how my conversation with Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir went. After over an hour together, I’d maybe asked four actual questions, letting her take her time to tell the stories she felt best conveyed the most honest answer to the question. With a tantrum-filled two-year-old baby at home, the extra space to gather frazzled thoughts was even more important. The pay off led to Anna opening up with unflinching honesty about her constant struggles with guilt, feeling disengaged and unhelpful to an unjust world, and an abortion she had in 2005.

For those unaware, Valtýsdóttir, who now records under the name Kristín Anna, has significant roots within the Icelandic music scene. 20 years ago, she and her twin sister Gýða Valtýsdóttir, who’s also a well-known musician, joined the band múm. Her affecting, childlike soprano vocals added depth and emotion to the experimental folktronica the band was creating.

Since leaving múm in 2006, Valtýsdóttir took to making increasingly experimental and left-field music under the name Kria Brekkan. Collaborations with her husband at the time Dave Portner, also known as Avey Tare, led to the polarizing 2008 record Pullhair Rubeye as well as contributions to Animal Collective’s Feels.

Her latest album, 2019’s I Must Be the Devil, is a gorgeous meditation of orchestral folk, led by twinkling piano and Valtýsdóttir’s hauntingly elvish voice. After 14 years of toying around with song ideas, Valtýsdóttir was finally pushed to make the record by a team of friends within the music and visual arts scene that knew she had something beautiful inside that she needed to birth. They were right, on multiple accounts.

Below, read KEXP’s interview with Kristín Anna in which she discusses the process of finally making I Must Be the Devil, how Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National helped expand her own relationship with her twin sister, and her excitement over performing for KEXP's Reykjavik Calling this Sat, November 21st.

You've had such a long and fruitful music career going back 20 years to when you started with múm and have collaborated with so many different, amazing artists. What keeps you creatively energized and motivated?

Well, I think I am just kind of usually just in some kind of a process of being human, and I use creativity to, I guess, have me to just be. And I guess I don't necessarily see creativity or expression or something necessarily resulting in a product. I am extremely private in many ways and a lot of stuff I do, I do it just for the doing of it, you know, and I guess a lot of the music, especially like the piano music that I released recently, was done and created or composed from that space. And so it is a personal dialogue.

But I do love just being in the game of creating something, like with people or stuff, but in my solo mode, you know, I'm a single mom of a two-year-old, I just get very occupied with sort of intangible existence and processing of emotions and going through the day and just doing creative...Yeah, that's how I approach us going through our life. Most of the stuff I make doesn't result in a thing that I share with the world.

So is it kind of a constant, daily thing to be creating for you?

A lot of it is that it's totally...you don't see it. And maybe many people wouldn't call it being creative or creating but I think a lot of what I have created and shared with the world is usually due to the influence of other people that either have brought me to it or I was in a collective just doing my thing, and they put it out there. Or with my piano music, my friends just kind of insisted on me going into the studio and having me work on this and record this and release it. And in my solo mode without these friends or collaborators, I'm just kind of not like very engaged outward into the world in a sense.

Maybe it's like you said, though, "You've had such a career." I'm like, "Oh, thank you for reminding me of that." Because being a mom is a pretty...I mean, to me, it's a super creative process. You're putting your whole emotional intelligence, then physical being into this, it's just all the same to me.

I actually did want to talk about those insistent friends because it is interesting, the story behind your last album, I Must Be the Devil. Apparently, you started writing it 14 years earlier and it kind of took your friends, like you said, to kind of push you to get the album finally made, which I think is really incredible and clearly speaks to how loved you are in your community. Can you tell me a little bit about those relationships and the process of making that album?

Yeah. So my friends Ragnar Kjartansson and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir. They are both visual artists. And, I had moved away from Iceland when I was 20 and had been in múm and I lived in New York and I just kind of came back to Iceland a decade ago and me and Ragnar Kjartansson started working together. He had me perform in a piece of his called 'The Visitors.' Are you familiar with his stuff?

Sort of, yeah, he does a lot of multi-disciplinary work. 

Yeah, he's mostly a visual artist and our collaboration involved a lot of his performance and video installations, but also we have made music and performed music together.

But we became friends and I just kind of at the time thought I wasn't going to make any more music, that I just wanted to create something that would leave absolutely nothing behind. And I wanted only to perform and I wanted to use as little cachet as possible. So I was really just interested in showing up in a place and doing something. And then it would be gone and it was sort of ecologically and spirit, everything would sort of work out this way, like I wouldn't use stuff and I wouldn't leave anything behind. And we had this thing called Actor's Theater, where we did this kind of state art service in the basement of the National Theater, and he was involved with many other artists from various sort of creative forms of creation.

But having done a bunch of this stuff and being really good friends, this kind of family, I guess they just thought it was a sin or something that I hadn't recorded any of my piano songs, and they kind of created like a label around that they did this game where they dressed up fancy and drove me to a restaurant to tell me to make a record.

Like kind of an intervention?

Yeah, it was sort of like that and then Kjartan Sveinsson, who is a former member of Sigur Rós and he was also a good friend and also a frequent collaborator of Ragnar's, stepped in and said he would want to do this with me. And yeah but all of us were really intimate in creating the pieces of Ragnar, because Ragnar brings a lot of people together. When he makes his pieces, they're usually really big in the making and then really just about the energy and the good vibration of the people, and then it's kind of documented and that turns out to be the piece.

And around the same time as they wanted me to record this piano song, he called me and my twin sister and the brothers of the National, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, to meet for a week and write music together for a musical that we sort of performed as a set of twins. And I think I could see how easy it was for me when I had the whole thing...Just you know, if you just put me in a place, you can just say, "Go!" And how complicated everything seemed for me in my own way of relating to the world. So I think he just wanted to tell me to just play the music and he would take care of the rest, just like he does in his pieces.

Did that feel like kind of a relief for you? To be like, "I don't have to worry about every single aspect of this. I can just get in there and do it."

Yeah because I had really given...I mean, originally the songs were not written like, "Oh, I'm making a record." They were more written as a way of surviving my emotions or just to understand myself or something. And then Eyvind Kang, a really amazing musician from the West Coast of the USA, he lives in Seattle, I think. He was playing on Animal Collective's Feels and I play piano on that album, and that's where he met me in the studio and I was listening to my piano playing on the recordings and then he asked me a few months later, he was curating The Stone, which is a small place in New York run by John Zorn and sort of a tiny little place with a grand piano, and he asked me if I would do a solo show and I had never done that before.

That was 2006 and I had not really written this to begin with as a way like,"Oh this is going to be shared with the world." But I did it and I just continued writing them and playing them on occasions, when I was asked to. And at some point, I did think, like, "Oh, I should record this." But at some other point I had just totally given up on that I would ever do it. I couldn't wrap my head around it and this music that, to me, was never the same, like this song, how they were expressed and stuff. So, then I just moved on.

But in the recording process, I started... Kjartan would be so patient. He'd be like, "Okay, do you have any more songs?" And I actually revisited a lot of songs that I had kind of forgotten. I wasn't playing them anymore more and they would maybe just be gone if we hadn't given it all this time. And some of them, I realized, were very dear to me and kind of timeless to me, too, and many of them ended up on the album because I think there are nine songs on I Must Be the Devil. But we finished the masters and it's not even half of that, that's on the album.

Did it feel kind of cathartic to get these songs that have been sitting inside of you out finally?

No, not in a way like...I have made albums that I just go kind of into the world of the album, this album we made, Summer Make Good, with múm. My last album with the band. I just remember being totally wrapped up in the imaginary world of the album and the creative process of making it and knowing exactly what it should be called. And this was a much more detached and...oh, not detached, but what can I say? Um...we just set out to record, not having any idea, just as a way to document the songs.

So, it was few days here and then two or three months later, a few days here of recording and it was sort of with a bunch of gaps in between and also because it wasn't music that had just been broiling inside me, it was so much more like when you are digging up old things and you have to be very careful in going really slow, you know. And a big part of it was rehearsing. I hadn't been playing live music, I hadn't been touring. It was almost like revisiting being a musician for me, in a way.

How long had it been since you had toured?

I always played occasionally here and there, but I didn't tour for some years, I guess. I went on a tour this February, just playing my music, and it was super fun. I've done weird little things, a few shows in a row, but not...

A full-blown, take over the world kind of tour.

No, I've just kind of been in Iceland and doing various projects and not been fully engaged in being a musician, so to go actually into a studio and record the songs was like, "Oh yes, I remember actually I love being a musician!" And so it was like, "Yeah, I just wrote this song" and then I had to remember how it went and then I had to practice because it's all just a live recording and some of them were really long.

And I guess there's also a lot of guilt involved and a lot of sort of painful emotions of having already let myself down or let my creation down or let some young part of me down by not, you know, standing with her or something. But then my friends are super compassionate and funny people and yeah, I had been doing a lot of running away from things, and this was a lot of facing things, so a catharsis and it took me two years to record the album.

Yeah, that's got to be tough to finally face the demons that you've been kind of just ignoring for a while.

Yes, but it wasn't like a full involvement for a time. In the middle of this, we did that piece with the Dessner brothers and when I'm put in that kind of situation, I'm really fast. They play something, we find lyrics, I write the melody, everything happens very fast. And then we have to be on stage. I kind of really love the liberty of this being put into a situation and put on stage and the whole process of fixating the songs onto our recordings just didn't feel that natural to me. Because it's this solidification of something that, to me, feels best just moving and then invisible. [laughs] If that makes sense as well. I actually love acting or performing and stuff. Like I love playing live music, and I have no interest in seeing or hearing it afterward. [laughs]

So when you're talking about this on-stage performance, we're talking about this like these like sort of, I've heard them described as "fake musicals" that you did with Ragnar?

It's not fake musicals. I mean, basically, it was like a visual art piece that was the opening piece for the first Eaux Claires music festival that Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner put up in Wisconsin. And so Ragnar loves a lot of these kind of pieces, but this was all based on songs that we wrote, so it was a musical. But the whole idea, one of these songs, actually, Ragnar made a video piece out of two years later, last Spring in 2019, opened up at the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

Yes, I read about that. Yeah, it was you and Gyða and Aaron and Bryce.

The two of them, yeah. So that was just one song of mine from the musical set as a video installation. But, yeah, I guess you could call it a musical.

So, did they come first and the album after?

We did this collaboration in the gaps between me recording I Must Be the Devil because, usually, creation happened so fast. So we just wrote nine songs in a week and then we met and then we performed and that's like a whole show. But the process of me making this album is just like everything was slow and everything was...

Intentional? You wanted to do it right.

Yeah, I wanted to do it well. And I understand a lot of guilt as an issue. I mean, I think that's sort of when Kjartan asked what was the name of the album? I said, this is the name of the album and then I just laughed about it and then it just stuck. But it was a joke. But and then I realized that it had so much...it applied to so many things that I feel like personal towards the world to watch my behavior, towards these people who are like...and I just kind of allowed myself to, in my attempt to not have to engage with the world, I just kind of allowed myself to be a little bit like a nomad or rascal or something akin to living in this cabin by the sea, but almost in the city.

Now, with a little more ordinary life, I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, that was really weird." Like I had six roosters and a rabbit and those were my friends and then I would just bike downtown and be intimate with somebody and then just kind of be in my own world a little bit and drive weird old cars and have some kind of another thing applied to me. And yet just kind of being free like this, but then watching the world and following and seeing what's happening and then there were all the refugees coming in and I realized how powerless I've made myself. I didn't even have a smartphone or talk with anybody that's not social. I'm just influencing whoever I run into or engaging and I just made myself in this way that I'm free from responsibility by having like... it's kind of...power, that is more just like I can talk to chickens or I can, you know, make this broken-down car drive with my magic powers or something.

So you're telling yourself that you're free, but you're really more maybe disengaged?

No, I am very deeply engaged. But it's just a private affair. Yeah, and there is a song that's not on the album, but I played it for the session that was recorded, and I wrote that after I named the album. I wrote that, and that's also called "I Must Be a Devil" and it kind of talks more about this engagement. And I guess it was a very sensual way of living, you know, like jumping in the ocean and talking to your animals and just being I mean, it's I guess it's just maybe it's just old fashioned or something.

I mean, it's pretty much what I imagine an Icelandic lifestyle being like, you know, the little elf in the woods, you know, just living a life of freedom and magic.

Yeah it's pretty free, you are pretty free here. You are free here because you feel safe in many ways. When I was like 20 and I realized, like, oh, people are taking interviews that would be written up and people were interested in what we are doing and stuff, I really felt like, "Oh my God... I can't just say something. I must change or help the world or the people in the world," or something. And I really had the world on my shoulders and I feel like I almost would probably have related more to our time, where like, there's a whole bunch of kids just like, "Hey, you know, this is fucked up." The fact that kids today are just like on strike or something is just like, "Oh, wow, I would have totally felt at home at this time." Like if more people would have been devastated at the time or something, but there was a lot of, like...and perhaps people were, I don't know.

So you didn't think there was a lot of engagement as far as politics and doing right for the world within your community?

No, it was pretty avant-garde. I feel like playing music and traveling and playing music, we were bonding and meeting all the people who had similar values. But they weren't mainstream, you know, and just thinking about the origin of the stuff that we buy and stuff wasn't like in-your-face or mainstream thinking at the time. And kids my age were usually not thinking much about it. But I also feel like through my 20s, for example, a lot of musicians I've gotten to know, feel like making music is good, then you're like on the good side because being creative is good. But I was always thinking so much more, you know. Like, what about the stuff that we use to create and I guess it's a Capricornian trait or something like it's hard to be young and not feel responsible for everything. [laughs]

Yep, I know a lot of Capricorns and they're all super responsible and the best in that they want the most out of the world, I think.

Yeah, but I feel like being young, it was a little hard in this way. And maybe it's just my whole sense of being just not ever really feeling super at home in this sort of more material world or something? Everybody had, all of a sudden, you know, iPods came in and stuff and everybody went out and bought one and I was like, "We can't just all buy all of this!" And so a part of withdrawing from this is some way of not making the compromise that you would need in order to participate. At some point, it was like my whole heart and my like how I made music and everything just kind of just shattered to pieces. And I wanted to make weirder and weirder forms of creations on my own, in my solo creative activity. I was working in a cinema and as a model for drawing classes for a living and teaching some of those kids piano and stuff. And I somehow just don't think much about how I make a living out of...like the creative process is so much more like investigation or spiritual to me.

So just living in Iceland, it just happens to go like this. So, I found this way of being where I was just kind of having fun, you know. And I had an old car, I had my little animals and I had this, you know, way of living where I didn't have to live off the same budget as people in the city because I didn't really live in the same ecosphere. And I lived a pretty...I really valued sensual activities, like dancing or making out with someone and I was making the album and it was going kind of slow. And then the refugee crisis came and I felt like I had been obsessed with, like taking a part in a bigger...it felt like this was something I'd been obsessed with since I was a kid and that I'd been obsessed with helping out with something and people were going there to help out and there was something in the back of my head saying, "Oh, you can't go because you haven't finished your album." I'm being way too personal here! [laughs]

No, this is great!

But I wasn't always that involved with this album, I was just in the shower and thinking about something gorgeous that just happened last night or something. Yeah, and this title just came to me from many directions, like both how other people saw my spirit as a threat. Or how me just going about my daily life, like having endless showers and engaging in my emotional wobbly bobbly instead of like coming to the rescue or doing something like engaging in the pain of the world and to have eliminated or have raised the frequency or something. Like it was sort of like I guess I just lived a selfish life or something.

So you took that on as, "I must be the devil because I am not doing the most that I could for other people."

Yeah, but was also just like this person was...it was also very personal just because I was a very free spirit. At the time, because of the way I carried myself, I also was like the devil to some people. You know, I could just tell or I was just told by them [laughs]. Like some people didn't want me around them or something like I was a threat to their safety and stuff.

But everything's changed so much, just both the world and my life, and I actually kind of relate to the world in a crisis. In the beginning of this year, people were talking about "back to normal." I was like, "What? You really thought anything was normal?" And I am on the side of people who were just like, "Oh, okay, finally. This had to happen." And they're just like, "Okay, go nature!" And like, "Go higher powers!" Like, "I'm at your service and I'm just doing my thing over here."

And I guess more and more I am sort of freeing myself of the burden of the world by focusing on my own stillness. And I guess once I had landed better there, I had more desire to write more music and be more engaged. But I feel like, for the last couple of years, it's been super private having a baby, changing a whole lot in my life and my interiors.

Yeah, well, absolutely, I mean, motherhood doesn't quite allow for just, you know, spending all day dancing and making out with different people every night, unfortunately. But I feel like motherhood and birth have been touched on in your work long before you had a baby. I'm thinking specifically of the Kría Brekkan Uterus Water EP from 2010. I'm curious whether that experience of pregnancy and birth and motherhood have been kind of like creatively driving experiences for you.

For Uterus Water I was asked to write a song for children to go to sleep to. And I guess I was still working through an abortion I had had. So I kind of wrote it as a way of just like...I guess the Icelandic lullabies that we sing are pretty dark and they're like the mother carrying out the child that she can't have kind of lullabies. So I was a little bit like that and I think I just hadn't worked this out so much because I didn't really talk about it and I was just trying to be so...to make every decision like what I wear and what a buy it, what I eat, very conscious.

I had an abortion and that felt so intense for me that I thought that just the less I would speak about it and the fewer who would know about it, the more it wouldn't have happened or existed or something. And that so that kind of came back at me I think. Everything you do, just our society, everything we do and try to not [think about] and we don't look at ourselves in the eyes about it or we pretend we're not doing like everything we're doing. We're just kind of like scooping it down until it just like explodes.

So, yeah, there was sort of a theme of guilt, another hit of guilt that followed through with me for a while. But yeah, I think motherhood or to... I feel like the weight of the world being guilty or something or traits that are opposite with, when I feel actually good, when I'm making tea for all my band members and being sort of caring or motherly towards the people around me. And I feel like I had always been pretty enthusiastic about being a mother. I would never have thought I wouldn't have a child until I was 36.

[Kristín Anna later expanded on the experience surrounding her abortion, in an email to KEXP]:

And so now that you're finally a mother, have you been really inspired by the experience?

I loved giving birth!

Really?!

I just absolutely love turning into a dark tunnel and the pain and everything, and I love life and death situations. Yeah, I mean, I have been and I really thought, now that I'm not running around, I'm just at home with my baby and I can be very protected but I feel like I'm just kind of flirting with creation, again, like doing a little here of painting a little bit or writing. Just because I had the baby with a young man that I didn't really know so I was kind of alone in it. And so it kind of took up a lot of my time to take care of the baby and myself, and then a year ago I just kind of collapsed a little bit in the back and couldn't...So, yeah, I've really just been engaged with my body and healing my body and sort of really facing dysfunctions, like emotional. And I guess maybe I always did this stuff through music but right now I have just been doing it more in a like less poetic way. I mean, sometimes maybe you could call it poetic, like because it's literalistic, but it's not to be shared with the world, you know.

Just something for yourself to kind of work through...

It's kind of burning things away and having it disappear rather than putting it out and giving it for people. And I've just kind of been so engaged with that and taking care of her and my body that I haven't been producing very much.

But I did go on tour in February and that was super fun and it was for a whole month and I absolutely loved it. And that's awesome. And in the middle of it, we recorded 12 songs or something that we had written, me and Gyða, my twin sister and the Dessner brothers and Ragnar Kjartansson. We recorded in Paris. So a lot of things can happen in one month and I was like, "Whoa, I'm a musician again! I'll go home and my kid is in kindergarten and I'm back into creating." But then Covid came. And I guess it's really different for people who have kids and people who don't have kids. [laughs] And I was like, "Wow, this would have been perfect for being creative at any time to just  set everything down and you just have a creative project." But when you have a kid, you're just really occupied.

I don't know how people in America are doing it, who have a job and a kid and stuff. I am fortunate enough that I can just scoop my work to the side. But, yeah, so I just feel like I'm so out of this, like I'm mature up until part, but also I want to make music of different substance and I'm just allowing myself to be in this process here. It's really every day, it's really not otherworldly. [laughs] I'm kidding! It's all super otherworldly.

Yeah, I can imagine! So, you said that you and Gyða and the Dessner Brothers made music together when you were on tour. Is this going to be an album?

Yeah, in the middle of the tour. So there was a break on the tour and all of us met in Paris for a few days and we recorded the songs from the musical and a few other songs we had written. I mean, the funny thing is that we wrote them all and most of the songs we wrote in a week, and then we tried to find some time to all meet together to record these songs. And it didn't happen until like four years later and five children born between us.

Oh my goodness. But it happened and is coming out? Is there a plan for it?

I don't know. I mean, it's weird music. I don't know what will happen to the music. I usually just forget about it, that it even exists! And I guess probably Aaron and Bryce too, just like they have all these other things going on. This is such a wacky...[laughs]

I love this relationship you have with the Dessner Brothers. Do you feel like a kinship because you're both twins? Is that part of the factor?

When we met, it was very special, and Ragnar is just a genius in putting people in special surroundings. And when we met them, we sat down in the living room in the middle of the day or like at 11:00 in the morning, with a guitar and a bunch of poetry books. And we are just writing songs and just playing guitar and singing, and we're all together writing songs. And I feel like at the time they had just been doing a lot of The National touring and writing music in a band by sending emails and stuff and I'd just been doing my solo wacky stuff, so I think for all of us, this was really special to sit together like this and write music together like this. And me and Gyða usually didn't do this together.

We had so much fun and there was this instant...because we were using so many, like older poetry, we were immediately, also because the theme of the musical is that we are these courtly lovers and walking through a forest and then the poems made the whole story around that. And it was just a very playful friendship where we kind of talked to each other as if we were these people and with all this imagery from these poems. So, yeah, that was fun, but yeah, we can also talk about being twins in a way that maybe many other people cannot relate to. There is a weird, yes...there is a thing about it. We have these similar amount of similarities and having been together in music and stuff.

Yeah, with you and Gyða being twin sisters and making both musicians, do you guys feel like you have some sort of special relationship that you can't quite explain to other people? What's that relationship like?

I guess I want to speak more about the brothers. To come together and see how well they work together and how the power of them being good brothers, like being tight and working together, you could see the power of them doing this together and Ragnar was always having me and Gyða do something together in his pieces. But usually we just kind of had spent a lot of time since she left múm in 2002 in different continents, so it was so inspirational, both they are super inspirational musicians and human beings like they are just so focused and warm and compassionate and funny guys and then how they interacted and how they worked together.

And I think it was a big inspiration for me and Gyða to actually have a closer relationship. And since then, after that project, we really went into being closer together. Now she's my best friend, but we had kind of, you know, separated a lot before that. And not really drawing so much of the power of having somebody, you know, just kind of trying to run away from it because people think you look alike. Just embracing the power of it and our closeness.

Yeah, it makes sense that you would kind of want to run away from it a little bit because you're like, "I've been latched to this person since we were born, you know." It's understandable that at a certain point you took your different paths and independent lives.

Yes, of course, yes.

So I'd love to talk about Reykjavik Calling and what people can expect from your virtual set.

Oh, boy, okay here is what to expect. [laughs] So I hadn't really played live music since my tour in February, but I was feeling very perky or something when doing this and all of a sudden I had a little budget and I was playing and I just kind of hauled these guys in with me to have a little band or something just because I was like, "Yeah, let's play music together!" And yeah, so just like coming, showing up, like rolling all the songs with them. I haven't seen or heard the set, but I had a lot of fun playing.

Is it primarily songs from I Must Be the Devil?

No, there's one song from there. And the other, I did record in the same recording session, but they are not on there and also one that's not recorded that I play. It's interesting what stands out to me about showing off the session is...So I did this tour in February and I went on these like big, nice stages in a dress and I played a lot of songs from the album. But I was feeling really like I want to play music with the guys or something and we threw it together and then we filmed it, and then afterward I realized that I just went out the house and didn't really look in the mirror and I didn't put on, like, any makeup, like, no any like daily minimal anything. And I was like, "Wow, that's really weird that I would go to be filmed for a broadcasting thing and not put like a little concealer or mascara on or something."

And I've found it also weird that I found it so weird because, of course, the guys weren't thinking about that. Yeah, so with the whole power of owning and having fun with femininity, I found it weird that I was like, "Was I just being a slacker by not spending at least some time in front of the mirror before this?" Yeah, it was interesting, I just found it so weird, and it's like if I had done that then maybe I would feel more, I would be more like, "Oh, we should've practiced more or something." It was just interesting, feeling like I failed on this topic or something.

Yeah, because men don't generally have to think about that at all.

Yeah. And I just feel like every morning I usually for some reason I'll just, you know, smear something a little bit on my face if I'm going somewhere. But this time I didn't, I was just like, "Okay, let's go!"

I mean, I think that's kind of cool, honestly, that you're just more so focused on like, "I'm so excited to play music, I'm not even thinking about what I look like."

Yeah, it's like focused and excited and then also just like, "Let's go!" It's making decisions at the last minute.

Sometimes those are the best decisions!

Yeah, and so I'm going to watch it, I am gonna check it out when it comes out. Like I say, I just loved being in the moment! I was very happy that I was asked to do this and really honored and yeah it really meant a lot to me to be offered to be a part of something.

I'm super excited about it, too! Yeah, I'm not sure if you're aware, but our motto at KEXP is that where the station where the music matters? So why does music matter to you?

It's uh..Oof! [laughs] Why does it matter to me? It's a part of being a human and helps emotions move. And it helps melt hard emotion or it can give you a perk or power and can generate your spirit to move your body and it can do so many things, it can also just be an abstract thing to realign your mind or change connections in the mind. Or help delivering words and emotions, a way to communicate. It can also, I guess from my experience, sometimes just help you survive your feelings and to understand yourself as a human. And I think in another context that I'm a little bit outside of, it's, I guess, a huge way of people coming together and being physical and vibrations.

Catch Kristín Anna's virtual performance for Reykjavik Calling this Saturday, November 21st starting at 2pm PT/5pm ET