She Was Mine Before She Was Everybody’s

The first track I memorized was Little Bit. Then I’m Good, I’m Gone. Then Dance, Dance, Dance. By the time I’d worked through all of Youth Novels I had a problem—or, more accurately, a religion. This was before the festival posters and the Pitchfork scores, back when you still had to explain who Lykke Li was at parties and people looked at you the way they look at someone who just said something they didn’t mean to say out loud.

I’m being that guy, I know. But there’s something real underneath it: loving something first carries an intimacy the artist doesn’t know she owes you. While everyone else was getting their asses handled to MGMT’s Electric Feel in Berlin clubs that have since become Airbnbs, I’d already given myself over completely to a Swedish woman who sang about wanting things she couldn’t keep. I understood her exactly. I still do. If she ever finds herself with a free evening and Scarlett Johansson has a prior commitment, I remain available.

Seven years since Youth Novels. Seven years, and it still doesn’t embarrass me. That’s the only test I apply to old favorites—would I admit to this in front of someone whose opinion I actually want? Youth Novels passes every time. It’s the album I’d still put on as a direct, unapologetic argument.

The new track is Never Gonna Love Again, which is either a promise or a threat. The video leans into both—enormous and slow and theatrically committed to its own devastation, which is exactly what Lykke Li does. She has never been casual about heartbreak and she’s not about to start. The feeling that she’s singing specifically at me has not faded in seven years. If anything it’s gotten sharper.