Klara Keller: Man måste vara någonstans för att saker ska hända / Klara Keller: Il faut bien être quelquepart pour les choses arrivent

In mid-December we met the Swedish singer Klara Keller at Bouillon Julien, her favorite place in Paris. She was running late in a chic Carrie Bradshaw kind of way - when she arrived at the restaurant we had already opened the affordable/shitty bottle of wine. Klara told me and my photographer that it was her boyfriend at the time who showed her the brasserie. He had said he knew the perfect place to celebrate her birthday - and it turned out he was right. With her music studio just around the corner, she ended up spending many nights under the high glass ceilings at Bouillon Julien. K: I remember the first time I came to this street. I was like “What is this place?! This is so fucking intense. So rough but also so gentrified and artsy. It's like…everything`”

Almost two years have passed since then and a lot has happened. In 2022 she moved back to Sweden for the release and tour of her second album BANG. We now meet up to have dessert and talk about why she once let the stars guide her to Paris.

In Klara Keller's career, there is a before and an after Paris. In Sweden in 2018, she became known as a rising star on the indie scene. Her debut EP was nominated for the Swedish Grammy and the Nordic Music Prize. So when she decided to move to Paris and start the process of making her second album she was expected to step up as the rightful heir of Håkan Hellström.* Or at least to produce the same Swedish pop for which she had made herself a name back home. But instead, she found herself in a context that completely rewrote the rules - far away from her usual audience in some kind of creative frenzy. While her first EP took her three years to make, BANG was made in three months. Even though she produced it completely on her own. She pours herself a glass of wine and says that she had mixed feelings about sharing an EP that ended up being exactly what the title BANG implies.

Something completely different.

K: I wanted the track I could never give it to you first, because it introduces something new. Like “Wtf is going on”.

* Swedish King of Indiepop :)

Klara had planned to stay in Paris for one month but arrived with a huge suitcase. It was as if she unconsciously knew that she was going to stay longer. Behind her in Sweden, she left a stable relationship and everyone she usually worked with.

K: It was such a huge thing to just cut, but it was what I really wanted. My life was so extremely settled. I had lived in Stockholm and just needed to…cut.

After a few weeks, she got herself a boyfriend and ended up moving into his squat in Montmartre. It was an abandoned hotel that they shared with a bunch of other artists and friends. Klara tells me how they used to walk around in nightgowns in the covid-empty, tourist quarters around Sacre Coeur.

K: I felt like “God, this is just what I’ve been looking for!” I got the feeling that there weren’t any rules. I don’t know what it's like generally, but where I lived with my people there were really no weekdays or weekends, no schedule. I thought it was so nice to live like that. I just walked to my studio every day and became so creative. I had made a setup for myself where I wouldn’t do anything else than exactly that.

Klara keeps coming back to how she needed a change. How she had longed for a break-even point that could force her into a new direction.

T: Was that need to break free something new, or just a part of who you are?

K: I’ve always been that way. But I don’t think people have known that side of me, haha.

I ask Klara if she ever hesitated that she made the right choices. After a moment of silence, she says that she did, but at the same time, she always had a strong gut feeling for the direction she needed to go. A gut feeling that seems to consist of a strong faith to follow her own impulses, and a trust in letting the energies around her lead the way.

K: The decision to move to Paris for example. I just wanted to get out and go somewhere. The thing is that I’ve been going to an astrologist for a long while and-

T: Oh! Have you?! Which star sign are you?

K: I’m Cancer. Or Cancer and Aquarius and Sagittarius. So a little bit of everything. Except for earth signs.

T: Hmm alright I usually fuck with earth signs. I’m Pieces so we get along well.

K: Nope no earth in me.

T: Too bad.

K: But anyways, he showed me a map with cities that crossed my sunlines.

T: What does that mean? That the energies are good in those places?

random places, like Saltzburg or Poland. And haha okay I thought why not.

T: Saltzburg makes sense though, like Mozart?

K: Yes haha. But then he also said Paris, so I knew that was an option too. And I thought I could give it a try. To just start somewhere.

Even though BANG introduced a new chapter in Klara’s life, it also meant returning home. So much about BANG and how it was made seems new and bold, but in some sense, it was also the way back to how she’s always done things. Her producing and personal lyrics might be new to her audience but has in fact existed in Klara for a long time. She tells me she’s been writing a diary all of her life and that it’s the very root of her music making. Her creativity still stems from her personal writing, she describes how she sees her life in chapters divided after the music she’s made. The professional and the personal are always intertwined.

K: My choices follow my music. I can close the door to a specific chapter in my life when an album is finished. It goes hand in hand.

Eventually, there came a time when Klara needed to move back home to Stockholm. The door to Paris closed behind her, she was back in her old room at her parents’ house. Out of money and still not knowing when the album was going to be released.

K: It was horrible coming home to Sweden. You get like depressed, sadly. Last spring was a bit of a crisis honestly.

T: Why?

K: Like everything feels boring when you’ve been in this super fun, buzzing city. It's also not fun feeling like things aren’t fun. You don’t want to shut down energies. You want to be connected, for stuff to come your way.

But, as her saying goes, you have to be somewhere for things to happen. In the course of time, they did, also in Sweden. In September 2022 the EP BANG was released, at the time of the interview it had 300k listenings on Spotify. The release was followed by Klara Keller's first ever tour, she sang the songs she had made in her studio next to Bouillon Julien to her Swedish audience. If she once used to long to break free, it was now the merge of her worlds that she was looking for.

K: My time in Paris really taught me how cool it is to share energies. And just jam together. And experience things together. That’s something I’ve really taken with me back to Sweden. In that way I am much more… open now. Intuitive.

T: It sounds fun?

K: Yes! It is -

The waiter interrupts us with our desserts. We don’t mind. A move back to Sweden, a relationship and an EP later Klara is back at Bullion Julien having the same crème brulée. Maybe it’s a sign she’s carrying the freedom she found in Paris within her, not needing to change her ways to feel free. Or maybe some habits die hard.

Text: Tova Olsson

Photography: Julia Eklund