"It was one of the most beautiful experiences": How Loreen made two-time Eurovision history with two healers

Loreen largely attributes her second, history-making Eurovision win in Liverpool earlier this year to something rather intangible: energy. “It sounds weird to say, but the actual competition – I blocked it out. It wasn’t interesting,” she says. “For me, it was about creating a certain energy, sending it out, seeing what comes back.” She brought two healers along to sit in the audience to “enhance” the positive vibes and cleanse the auditorium of anything negative. Before each performance, Loreen and her healers would meditate simultaneously, in separate rooms. “It was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life because of the collective connection,” she says. Watching that final performance of ‘Tattoo’ – a powerful earworm of a song – you could really feel it, even through the television screen.

A few months after claiming the trophy, Loreen has an unexpected perspective on the experience. “When people say, ‘Can you believe that you won?’ Honestly, it’s not that exciting,” she says. “But if they say, ‘Can you believe that you touched people?’ Then I feel that in my body.”

We’re sitting on a couch in a pistachio and pink dining room at Villa Alma, a charming boutique hotel in Visby on Gotland. The 39-year-old artist has lived on the island, about an hour’s drive from here, for a decade. It’s high tourist season and the streets outside are flooded with Stockholmers looking for a good time, but where Loreen keeps a house with her longterm partner, it’s quiet and, like the rest of the island, outrageously beautiful. In the mornings, she swims naked in the Baltic Sea. What drew her to Gotland? The energy, of course.

Even if the competition wasn’t the point, Loreen still won Eurovision and, no matter which way you slice it, it’s a big deal. Having triumphed in 2012 with the certified banger ‘Euphoria’, she now exists in a two-person club of two-time winners (the other artist in that club is Irishman Johnny Logan). She’s the first woman to win twice. The first bisexual (she came out in 2017). Not to mention that she was representing Sweden, a country with an unabashed Eurovision obsession; this year 82.3 per cent of all Swedish television viewers tuned in to cheer on their champion. What’s more, Loreen’s victory brings Sweden’s total wins to seven, tying us with Ireland for most wins ever.

All of which is to say that Loreen’s win was not only historic, it also meant a lot of things to a lot of people. When I point this out, she smiles. “Well... that’s beautiful,” she says. “If I can inspire with that, then it feels wonderful, honestly.” While Loreen’s final Eurovision performance was seen by a global audience of 162 million people, her very first performance was seen by no one. A music teacher at her Stockholm high school – an American woman named Deborah – had heard Loreen singing in the halls after hours and begged her to join the choir to no avail. “I’m like, ‘It’s not gonna happen’, I was so shy,” Loreen says. “But she was very persistent.”

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Eventually Loreen conceded to one performance under one condition: that she sing in total dark ness. Oh, and one more thing: it couldn’t be when her classmates were already seated, it had to be as they were entering the auditorium. “I was literally standing on the stage, in the dark,” she says, laughing. “I remember these kids coming in and being like, ‘Is somebody singing?’” As she says this she looks around the room, her waist-length black mane of hair whipping this way and that. The song? ‘Miss You Most (At Christmas Time)’ by Mariah Carey. Loreen sings the titular line and the hair on my arms stands up.

So how exactly did the teen who could only perform in the dark wind up conquering one of the world’s biggest stages not once but twice? Born Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui, Loreen grew up the eldest of six children raised by a single mother who had emigrated to Sweden from Morocco. Located in the Stockholm suburbs, Loreen’s home was predictably chaotic and, being the eldest, she took on a lot of responsibility from a young age. Given that her mum had her at 16, eventually they felt more like peers than mother and daughter. “I bypassed a lot of years as a child, not being able to be a child,” Loreen says. “I preferred my own company very much, so I had my own sanctuary, which was singing. Just being alone and singing for hours.” She would grab her mother’s vinyls off the shelves – Celine Dion, Whitney Houston – and try to copy what she heard. In the dark, of course.

Loreen’s sister, Markiz Tainton, had a front row seat to these private concerts: the two shared a room growing up. “She would be like, ‘Hey, be quiet, I’m going to sing this song’,” recalls Markiz, who is two years Loreen’s junior. “I just got used to it – that is Loreen for me. Even when we hang out now as grown-ups, she can just disappear into her own world and her own spirit.” No stranger to the spotlight herself – Markiz placed third on Swedish Master Chef and has since become a celebrity chef, publishing cookbooks and frequently appearing on TV and radio – she knew her sister had a noteworthy talent as soon as she heard her hit the same high notes as Celine Dion.

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According to Markiz, the whole family adjusted to Loreen’s pastime quite naturally. When Loreen would occupy the upstairs bathroom, singing for hours (“She liked the acoustics”) Markiz and her siblings would use the downstairs bathroom instead. “It became a part of our everyday,” she says. “If we were on spring break, we’d know we were going to have breakfast and then we’d go to shower and then the live music would start at around 11.” When Loreen was feeling emboldened, she would perform downstairs, accompanying herself on the piano.

It was their mother, a woman Loreen describes as “ver y spiritual”, and grandmother that began to coax Loreen out of the shadows. “There are certain people who come into your life and plant that seed,” Loreen says. “They were like, ‘Sometimes you have a gift, and it’s not only for you.’” She was resistant at first. It wasn’t until she was 18 that she started considering music as something she might like to pursue. A couple years after that, she dove straight into the deep end.

In what can only be described as her own version of immersion therapy, at 20 years old, Loreen auditioned for Swedish Idol. “I knew it was going to be painful,” she says. “When I was alone, that was my space. I was totally in sync with what I was doing. It took many years for me to get over that – to be in public and perform.” It was Markiz, after seeing the advertisement for auditions on television, who gently convinced her sister to try out. “The thing with my sister is she has to make that decision on her own,” says Markiz. “You have to push her, but make her comfortable in that decision.” Eventually Loreen agreed to take the short drive to Stockholm to audition,
though Markiz recalls being “so nervous” that her sister would change her mind up until the very last moment.

Not only did she go through with it, the judges loved her. After the first rounds of a cappella auditions (she sang ‘If I Ain't Got You’ by Alicia Keys) Loreen stepped onto the main stage not even knowing how a microphone worked. It was years before she could watch the footage of herself back on YouTube. “Instantly when I saw it, I could see the fear,” she says. “I was just smiling and making it seem like I wasn’t nervous. I was a sensitive kid. Now I can look back and be like, ‘Oh, you tried’.” She ultimately placed fourth in the competition.

Even when Loreen first won Eurovision, she hadn’t entirely shaken off those adolescent nerves. “I wasn’t completely ready with ‘Euphoria’,” she says. “I was maybe 40 per cent.” I tell her she’s being too modest and she reluctantly ups it to 50 per cent. Still, she describes the experience, first at the Swedish competition Melodifestivalen and ultimately on the main Eurovision stage, as the first time she was “starting to calm down”. She had given Eurovision a go the year before with the song ‘My Heart is Refusing Me’, but it wasn’t meant to be; as with Idol, she placed four that Melodifestivalen and never made it to the main competition. “If you look at that performance, I was hiding. The fringe was here,” she says, drawing a line beneath her eyes. “You couldn’t see my eyes. The clothes are so big, you could hardly see me.” She returned triumphant the following year, in a light-as-air billowing embroidered kimono, the hair blowing off her face.

With ‘Tattoo’, Loreen isn’t hiding anymore. Wearing second-skin leather and mesh, the camera often closed in on her face as she belted out the lyrics from deep within – this was an artist operating at 100 per cent. It’s an aesthetic mirrored in our Vogue Scandinavia cover story, in which the landscape of Gotland’s rauks and sea are mirrored in the ethereal, figure-exposing looks. As with her Eurovision performance, which drew inspiration from sand and wind, here she becomes one with nature – aesthetics and energy brilliantly mirrored.

It was a long road to get here, one that started with Idol and concluded with a seven-month sprint to the Eurovision finish. “I was sitting at the record label and I told my team, ‘If I say yes to this, I’ll have no life’,” she says. “What do you mean?” They asked her. After all, the song was written and everyone knew it was a hit. She’d been performing for over a decade. Plus, she’d done it before. Her response? “You’ll see.”

With the fastidiousness of a method actor, Loreen “changed her life completely” for the seven months leading up to the competition, adhering to an outrageously strict workout and diet. “There were symbols in everything I was doing in terms of my body,” she says. “It wasn’t only that I needed to be fit to sing it right, there were symbols of feminine and masculine energy that I wanted to inhabit.” She demonstrates the soft, fluid movements countered by a sharp pose. This discipline carried over into the competition itself; when other delegations were “eating dinners and having a nice time” she’d be down at the hotel gym. “I was such a boring person,” she says. At the end of the day, she tells me, she’s a servant to her audience, tasked with giving them the greatest performance possible. This meant the utmost consideration down to the tiniest detail.

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Take, for instance, the smoke. “I told the guy who was handling the smoke, ‘You need to be precise’,” says Loreen. Too much smoke, you won’t see her, too little smoke the light “won’t reflect well”. She told the wind guy the same thing. Both men assured her that they had it covered. Then, at Melodifestivalen, her worst fears were realised. As she was lying on her LED stage, waiting for the song to start, she could hear the smoke machine going for a couple seconds too long. Even before the fog rolled towards her, she knew it was too much. “I was thinking, ‘What the f***’,” she recalls. She made it work, of course, finding the gaps in the mist. Afterwards she gathered her team and stressed the importance of everyone’s role. By the time they took the show to Eurovision, the smoke was perfected. I ask her why she didn’t just automate the smoke and the wind. “It has to be organic,” she says.

Moments before the Eurovision winner was announced, Loreen texted Markiz, who was sitting in the audience. The text said: “What does your gut feeling tell you?”. “I was so nervous,” says Markiz. “But my first feeling was, and I wrote her, ‘Listen, today is going to be the day where you write history again’.”

These days Loreen is applying her signature fastidiousness to recording new music and preparing an upcoming tour. “There are definitely a lot of specifics,” she says. She hasn’t started working on the staging yet – right now she and her team are focused on developing the best sound set up possible to create a “three dimensional surround sound” for her audience. “Some people are just rock and roll, straight up,” she says. “I’m more cinematic.”

With this final statement, Loreen brushes her hair off her shoulder, revealing some text on her black T-shirt. We’ve been sitting here chatting for nearly two hours and this is the first I’d noticed it. I ask her what it says. “I don’t even know,” she replies, glancing down. I read it aloud: “Pure mind and full heart”. Loreen beams and exclaims, “See what I mean?! The universe is talking to me all the time.”