Marcel Winatschek

What the River Carries

Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers has a quality I find in almost no other song from that period—it feels like standing very still while everything moves around you. The production is nearly skeletal: a drum pattern that sounds like footsteps on stone, her voice sitting high and exposed above it. No safety net. The Dave Sitek remix that was floating around as a free download pushed it even further toward the hypnotic—slower, denser, more inevitable. You follow the river because there’s nothing else to do. It goes where it goes.