2009, Defend Music Inc.
Sometimes creativity can only properly thrive in exile, at a necessary distance from the familiar. So it has proved for Tina Dico, a 30 year old singer songwriter who left the safe and sociable world of her native Denmark seven years ago, and upped sticks for a city where she knew nobody and nobody knew her: London.
Based in a flat in London’s Ladbroke Grove neighborhood, Dico has lived alone. She has walked a lot and in the process written a pile of songs that have filled her previous four remarkable albums – the latest being a trilogy of EPs, ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ - and re-defined contemporary urban folk. Somewhere along the way Dico became one of the voices of Zero 7 (on the singles “Home” and “The Space Between”).
But it’s the anonymity of her life in London that fuels her creativity. “London is my desert island and being a stranger amongst strangers is what inspires me to write music – at least at the moment. It’s like a private observation post: everything potentially complicated is stripped away when I’m here. I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can be picky about which words and stories I let into my days. In Denmark it’s very different as everybody knows who I am and things get complicated very quickly. I become far too self-aware.'
Tina Dico was born in Arhus, Denmark’s second largest city, the daughter of parents who listened to 60s folk icons in her carpenter dad’s hi-fi basement heaven. Here she heard Dylan, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, with some occasional Irish input thrown in for good measure. “There was something magical about the grown ups’ music,” Dico recalls. “Their songs and stories felt like they meant so much more to them than what me and my friends were listening to -- like Wham and Duran Duran.” At the age of about 10, everything changed with the arrival of Tracy Chapman. “She brought the singer/songwriter genre into the 80s and that was a defining moment for me! She turned me on to the guitar and made me want to write my own songs.”
Dico spent her teenage years writing songs in secrecy, only ever playing them to the 4-track tape recorder her Dad had bought her for her fourteenth birthday. At the age of 20 she mustered the courage to put together a band and over the course of three years she won several talent shows, piqued (and ultimately rejected) the interest from various Danish major labels, started her own record label and released her debut in 2001 (‘Fuel’) before moving to London and signing a publishing deal with Kojam.
“In London, I started writing with all the big pop writers but it so wasn’t me. It almost hurt. My second album was a rebellion against this ‘pop machine’ and this was the album that got lots of critical acclaim in Denmark. Dico won ‘Best Composer’ at a Critics’ award show and ‘Best Songwriter’ at the Danish equivalent to The Grammys.
Dico’s third and fourth albums from 2005 and 2007 (respectively) have both gone on to sell double platinum in Denmark and Tina has for quite some time been the biggest female artist of her generation in her native land.
“Fame doesn’t sit very naturally with me. I was a girl from nowhere who didn’t know anybody who was an artist and suddenly, everybody thought they knew everything about me.”
So for almost 7 years now she’s stayed in London, where, barring longish absences for the touring she loves so much she has remained, more or less, incognito ever since.
The independence and integrity, which blaze from her songs, are fundamental to her life. Dico owns all of her recordings, via her Finest Gramophone company, and if she wants to put out a couple of albums in the same year - as she has in 2008, first with the critically lauded ‘Count To Ten’ (“there are countless reasons to appreciate this Danish-born, British-based singer-songwriter” – People Magazine) and now with ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ – then that’s her prerogative.
“On ‘Count To Ten’ I went for a richer sound with full band and big arrangements but I had a drawer full of folkier songs that leant themselves to a much more raw and naked sound. Songs that I loved and couldn’t bear to see gather dust in the drawer. I wanted to do a trilogy because I needed to break out of certain patterns and frames that I’d written myself into over the past couple of albums. And the thought of creating three separate and shorter journeys that would interact with each other captured me.”
It is indeed the scouring directness of her observations on the accidents of life and love that makes the fifth Tina Dico album such a compelling listen.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to ‘arrive’ somewhere and ‘lock into’ my life. This new album is me coming to terms with the fact that life is one long messy string of beginnings, detours and open endings and that I’m never going to ‘arrive’ anywhere.”
“It’s also me growing up and realizing that it’s not all about being free and doing what you want,” she says contradicting earlier comments with a knowing grin.
“In many ways ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ feels like the beginning of a new chapter in my life and I’m excited to see where the detours will take me from here…”
The challenge now for her is to live up to present expectations, which are, like her music, a tad more ambitious than those of many of her contemporaries. In September, she won the Crown Prince’s Cultural Award, Denmark’s most prestigious arts prize. Her work with Amnesty International continues, as does an intense touring schedule, which will keep her on the road for the rest of 2008. This is where the restless exile that is Tina Dico finds her greatest release. “I don’t find it easy to just be. I ask way too many questions. Performing is my cleansing ritual.” Hers and anybody and everybody lucky enough who get to hear her, actually.
Based in a flat in London’s Ladbroke Grove neighborhood, Dico has lived alone. She has walked a lot and in the process written a pile of songs that have filled her previous four remarkable albums – the latest being a trilogy of EPs, ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ - and re-defined contemporary urban folk. Somewhere along the way Dico became one of the voices of Zero 7 (on the singles “Home” and “The Space Between”).
But it’s the anonymity of her life in London that fuels her creativity. “London is my desert island and being a stranger amongst strangers is what inspires me to write music – at least at the moment. It’s like a private observation post: everything potentially complicated is stripped away when I’m here. I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can be picky about which words and stories I let into my days. In Denmark it’s very different as everybody knows who I am and things get complicated very quickly. I become far too self-aware.'
Tina Dico was born in Arhus, Denmark’s second largest city, the daughter of parents who listened to 60s folk icons in her carpenter dad’s hi-fi basement heaven. Here she heard Dylan, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, with some occasional Irish input thrown in for good measure. “There was something magical about the grown ups’ music,” Dico recalls. “Their songs and stories felt like they meant so much more to them than what me and my friends were listening to -- like Wham and Duran Duran.” At the age of about 10, everything changed with the arrival of Tracy Chapman. “She brought the singer/songwriter genre into the 80s and that was a defining moment for me! She turned me on to the guitar and made me want to write my own songs.”
Dico spent her teenage years writing songs in secrecy, only ever playing them to the 4-track tape recorder her Dad had bought her for her fourteenth birthday. At the age of 20 she mustered the courage to put together a band and over the course of three years she won several talent shows, piqued (and ultimately rejected) the interest from various Danish major labels, started her own record label and released her debut in 2001 (‘Fuel’) before moving to London and signing a publishing deal with Kojam.
“In London, I started writing with all the big pop writers but it so wasn’t me. It almost hurt. My second album was a rebellion against this ‘pop machine’ and this was the album that got lots of critical acclaim in Denmark. Dico won ‘Best Composer’ at a Critics’ award show and ‘Best Songwriter’ at the Danish equivalent to The Grammys.
Dico’s third and fourth albums from 2005 and 2007 (respectively) have both gone on to sell double platinum in Denmark and Tina has for quite some time been the biggest female artist of her generation in her native land.
“Fame doesn’t sit very naturally with me. I was a girl from nowhere who didn’t know anybody who was an artist and suddenly, everybody thought they knew everything about me.”
So for almost 7 years now she’s stayed in London, where, barring longish absences for the touring she loves so much she has remained, more or less, incognito ever since.
The independence and integrity, which blaze from her songs, are fundamental to her life. Dico owns all of her recordings, via her Finest Gramophone company, and if she wants to put out a couple of albums in the same year - as she has in 2008, first with the critically lauded ‘Count To Ten’ (“there are countless reasons to appreciate this Danish-born, British-based singer-songwriter” – People Magazine) and now with ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ – then that’s her prerogative.
“On ‘Count To Ten’ I went for a richer sound with full band and big arrangements but I had a drawer full of folkier songs that leant themselves to a much more raw and naked sound. Songs that I loved and couldn’t bear to see gather dust in the drawer. I wanted to do a trilogy because I needed to break out of certain patterns and frames that I’d written myself into over the past couple of albums. And the thought of creating three separate and shorter journeys that would interact with each other captured me.”
It is indeed the scouring directness of her observations on the accidents of life and love that makes the fifth Tina Dico album such a compelling listen.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to ‘arrive’ somewhere and ‘lock into’ my life. This new album is me coming to terms with the fact that life is one long messy string of beginnings, detours and open endings and that I’m never going to ‘arrive’ anywhere.”
“It’s also me growing up and realizing that it’s not all about being free and doing what you want,” she says contradicting earlier comments with a knowing grin.
“In many ways ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ feels like the beginning of a new chapter in my life and I’m excited to see where the detours will take me from here…”
The challenge now for her is to live up to present expectations, which are, like her music, a tad more ambitious than those of many of her contemporaries. In September, she won the Crown Prince’s Cultural Award, Denmark’s most prestigious arts prize. Her work with Amnesty International continues, as does an intense touring schedule, which will keep her on the road for the rest of 2008. This is where the restless exile that is Tina Dico finds her greatest release. “I don’t find it easy to just be. I ask way too many questions. Performing is my cleansing ritual.” Hers and anybody and everybody lucky enough who get to hear her, actually.
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