Digital exclusive: Tove Lo's Tender Heart

Growing up in the posh suburbs of Stockholm, Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson, better known by her stage name, Tove Lo, would keep an eye on the skies. “I remember as a kid if it was raining, I would run outside. I lived close to the water so I would run down to the water and stand and sing in the rain like Ariel in The Little Mermaid,” she says, going on to trill the aria from the Disney classic. “That was one of my favourites. I remember those moments. I think I always had that feeling: I want to see the world. I don't want to do the same thing every day. I didn't want a normal life.” Mission accomplished. Lo and I are talking over Zoom as she prepares to depart on her European tour supporting her newest album, the soul-baring and synth-bopping Dirt Femme, which features songs on topics ranging from the Top 40 typical (love, sex, heartbreak) to the highly personal (bulimia, indecision over having children, the fear of losing one’s identity through marriage).

“It's very like writing a journal,” Lo says of her songwriting process. “It's like, ‘What's on my mind? What did I dream about last night? What are my fears? What am I feeling that I need to get off my chest?’ A lot like that. If I go into a session, I need to have a mood and have a feeling or a subject I want to write about.” She tells me that she has to conceive of the melody and the lyrics together in order to connect with both properly: her biggest hits to date – 2014’s 'Habits', 2015’s 'Talking Body', 2016’s 'Cool Girl' – succeed because they aren’t just the mindless bubblegum bangers they could pass for; they have an inner pathos to them that connects with an audience for whom lyrics like 'What if I don't want the things I'm supposed to want? What then? But what if I do in the end?' (from 2022’s 'Suburbia') deeply resonate.

I ask Lo whether it’s weird to walk into a supermarket and hear a passionate ode to her traumatic ex blasting over the speakers in the frozen food aisle. “It’s wild,” she says. “I always forget that everyone's going to hear what I write about and then I'm going to have to talk about it. I still get so shocked when I write this personal song and someone's like, ‘Oh, yes, so you wrote that song about cheating on someone, what was it that actually happened?’ I'm like, How do you know that?!” She laughs. “Then I'm like, ‘Oh, wait, it's my own fault.’”

Dirt Femme, her fifth studio album, represents something of a homecoming. Here she is in her 30s, with a real love of her body, her mind, her spirit, her sexuality (Lo came out in the media as bisexual around 2016), and life with her new husband, music producer Charlie Twaddle. The album’s name evolved alongside her conception of her own power. “It's how I identify, I feel like. At first the working title for the album was just 'Feminine'. I think because I was going through all the emotions of the woman I used to be, or the girl I used to be, the woman I've become, being a queer person in a straight marriage, being married at all, which is something I never thought I would do. All of the, what does it mean, my relationship with my femininity? I feel like that's the essence of the record. I'm accepting all my feminine traits now in a way that I maybe didn't used to, but there's still some roughness to me. Dirt Femme felt right, like the contradiction that I usually love.”

I tell her about this saying some friends of mine use – 'a woman’s ideal of a woman' – to encapsulate what we aspire to now that we are in our 30s. She concurs. “I’ve changed what I thought a strong woman was,” she says. “I think I always thought that a strong woman is more masculine, and had those traits. It's just not true. When I started out I met so many great men on my path too that are still in my life that I trust so much, but it was still I walked into this boys club and it was any meeting, any label, anything, to get respect, you had to be a girl who could hang. You had to show that so they would put you in sessions with these successful but misogynist men. Trying to navigate that world.” She found herself tuning into her masculine traits, and suddenly viewing the feminine ones as weaknesses.

“I think also after MeToo, women started just looking at toxic masculinity in a new way and applauding femininity in all people,” says Lo. “I know there's a lot of change that still needs to happen, but it's at least around me I have felt some of that change. I see it in a lot of my straight guy friends who are really going through it, trying not to be such a typical dude.” She pauses. “I really like seeing that struggle for them.” (Who doesn’t?)

Dirt Femme is also Lo’s first record under her own newly launched label, 'Pretty Swede', a move which meant less of having to explain herself and her inspirations to executives, more of being able to execute on her vision with her husband and creative director, Charlie Twaddle. “I didn't want to just sign to somewhere new, and then have them wanting to change everything that I wanted to make. ‘If you don't understand this, I can't work with you,’ that was my mindset,” she says. She wanted to shoot elaborate videos in different characters for each song, some with direct cinematic references ('True Romance', '2Die4', 'No One Dies for Love'). She was tired of playing one of her more talked-about tracks, “Grapefruit,” which directly addresses the five or so years in her late teens in which she was battling bulimia, to a room full of uncomfortable stares. She didn’t want to have to keep explaining herself to the men in charge forever.

“It’s always a bit awkward when you're in a meeting with new people and you're talking about ‘Grapefruit,’” she says. “We can't play that song and not say anything. I just try to say it in not a super intense way, but it's hard for me, because I'm quite intense and open.” Disordered eating is a notoriously thorny topic: even content that explicitly details the harm and distress involved can have adverse effects on people suffering from it, who tend to comb through popular culture, even stories that are clearly cautionary tales, for methods and inspiration. For those reasons, Lo is careful not to go into too many details about her weight during those years or the self-abuse she endured. The broader pressure she felt, on the other hand — to fit an ideal in which the female body was to be subjugated and beaten into submission (or as close as possible to a size 0) to be considered of cultural value is fair game. For women born in the mid to late '80s, like Lo and me, it’s unavoidable; it was the air we breathed and the water we swam in.

“I don’t know how it is for the younger generation, but for our generation it feels like it was just like the worst possible,” Lo says. “I saw someone post on TikTok some clips from Top Model and I was like, 'Oh my God'. I remember catching snippets of that growing up and it was like, how are you going to be able to have any normal relationship to your body when they're just calling these super skinny girls fat pigs? I rewatched Bridget Jones too, not too long ago and at the time it was all, ‘Oh my God, she's looking ugly on screen. She's looking fat, not flattering.’ When you look at her now she's just a normal, small woman.” Fat jokes, especially at the expense of women, were rampant across pop culture, as were visibly emaciated women celebrated as the pinnacle of beauty; it was hard not to take that messaging to heart.

It took a doctor telling Lo that bulimia was destroying her vocal cords to snap her out of it. “It was like, what the fuck am I doing? The one thing that makes me happy is singing. Why am I ruining that? That was my wake-up call and my road back to recovery.” It took years of therapy and body positivity training. “I did it all. I think it took me probably four or five years before I was fully fine.” Her star was rising at the same time, and fashion became a real part of her life, initially to her dismay. “I hated everything, hair and makeup and styling. I was stressed out about being watched in that way. People looking at me, everyone's dissecting your face and body, like, ‘You know that your left eye is way lower than your right eye?’ ‘You could really straighten your lower teeth.’ I'm like, Thank you for the advice I didn't ask for! All that stuff.”

Still, she has demanded since the beginning of her career that publications not retouch her images. “Even though I was so uncomfortable, I was like, ‘I don't want people to fuck with my features. Just leave me alone.’” She credits body-positivity training with putting her in a place from which she is able to deal with the strain of life in the spotlight. “I am very happy that I was healthy by the time I became a public person, because I could not have handled it, in no way. It’s so cool now: I had this realisation the other day, thinking about having put out 'Grapefruit', it was the night before the shoot [for Vogue Scandinavia] and it was like, we're just eating Thai food and drinking wine. I wasn't even having a second thought about I have a shoot tomorrow. I need to not eat for four days, or being nervous or feeling uncomfortable for when you get there and half the stuff won't fit you. It's fine. I felt: Oh, yes, I really am good. I love my body in a very real way." That means whether she’s baring her breasts in a heated performance on stage, gyrating in a video, or sitting on my Zoom screen, she radiates the utter freedom of self-compassion.

Beyond the personal work Lo has done, she credits being Swedish with instilling certain basic values. “Growing up in Sweden was a great experience,” she says. “I loved it. Compared to a lot of places, it is a socialist country at heart. The values in Sweden in general are really solid.” Some recent Europe-wide political swings toward nationalist and fascist groups have her nettled, though. “We're going down a little bit of a dark path now with so many people voting for the Swedish Democrats, which is like a racist party, which is really sad to me. It seems to be this shift across Europe that is really dark,” says Lo. Still, she credits Sweden’s healthcare and education systems with giving her the support to pursue a career when her parents told her she’d have to do it on her own. “When I was a freelance session singing and cover singer and backup singer, which I did for years after high school when I was trying to hustle and get my music career started, I didn't have to worry about what if I get injured, what if I get sick? That's taken care of, so you can live on very minimum money, because that is not a worry. Do you know what I mean?” In theory, yes; in America, no. “Those things I think really make it possible for you to chase your dreams no matter what your background is.”

These days she’s happily chasing her dreams with Twaddle, whom she married in a low-key Las Vegas ceremony in 2020. They first met at a Coachella after party through mutual friends, but he was seeing someone else and she wasn’t interested in pursuing someone who wasn’t available. A few years later, at the release party for her 2016 album Lady Wood, he hopped over on crutches, post-surgery, and re-introduced himself. “I was like, ‘Oh, hi. Oh, hi. It's you.’ Then from there, it was just full-on just like, ‘Oh, I'm in love already.’ It was very cute.” She had never been into the whole marriage, 2.5 kids, white picket fence ideal, and yet: “I went from ‘I’m never getting married’ to ‘I do.’” (See 'Suburbia', from Dirt Femme: 'I don't want suburbia / I don't need routines and lies / I hope you know that I know you are the love of my life / But I can't be no Stepford wife'). The honeymoon feeling continues, even as their partnership has developed into a strong professional alliance, and her career has stretched to include acting roles (like 2020’s The Emigrants), and the stress of starting a new label. “It's honestly been so amazing. I feel like a lot of people are like, ‘You should never work with people that you date or that are too close to you," but I highly disagree,” Lo says. “I wanted to have a family vibe.”

Working with her husband allows Lo to be vulnerable, to be fun and rough and sexy and just the right amount of weird. It’s the kind of comfort and support she never imagined back when she wrote about picking up daddies at the playground ('Habits', 2014). Or maybe it was exactly what she was talking about the whole time: we just didn’t get it. “He just loves me for who I am and respects everything how I do it,” she says. “I feel very lucky that we just click this way. What I care about the most is my music. It's on my mind all the time. To share that a little bit, I think that also helps, but also to be involved in it together and both care about it so much is really special. It just works. For me, it's ideal, to be honest.” And really, why should she have it any other way?