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" In September 1981, Stevie Nicks appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. She&amp;#039;d just released her legendary first solo album, Bella Donna, and was busy working on Fleetwood Mac&amp;#039;s Mirage on the outskirts of Paris in a decaying 30-room ch\u00E2teau that David Bowie, who&amp;#039;d also recorded there, believed to be haunted. In the interview, Nicks talked about her affection for the Hindu goddess Devi, her desire to build her own pyramid, and her certainty that she&amp;#039;d been a monk in a past life. The story reads like a portal into a lost world, one in which decadence and eccentricity were prerequisites to rock stardom. On the cover, shot by Annie Leibovitz, Nicks&amp;#039; delicate finger serves as a perch for a giant white bird (in homage to the Bella Donna album art). It&amp;#039;s a paean to the kind of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll woman you just don&amp;#039;t see anymore\u2014the enchantress, the mystic, the gothic siren. Blame it on the fact that today&amp;#039;s twentysomethings were raised in the heyday of irony. Blame it on the collapse of a music industry no longer able to rent French estates in the name of sonic soul-searching. Blame it on a modern definition of New Age as meditation and green juice rather than s\u00E9ances and cocaine. Today&amp;#039;s rock stars, so crushingly aware of the bottom line, are more managed, less debauched, and generally saner than they&amp;#039;ve ever been. Where are the Grace Slicks, the Kate Bushes, the Tori Amoses; who among today&amp;#039;s stars has Nicks&amp;#039; &amp;quot;timeless face of a rock and roll woman/ while her heart breaks&amp;quot;? Related: Lykke Li Releases &amp;quot;No Rest for the Wicked&amp;quot; In 2008, an answer emerged in the form of a beguiling Swede named Lykke Li (pronounced &amp;quot;Licky Lee&amp;quot;). The cover of her debut, the Little Bit EP\u2014with the singer gazing into the distance, wearing a headdress of white orchids\u2014conjured a sense of intimate mystery that the music only amplified. Li sang in a girl&amp;#039;s voice about having a woman&amp;#039;s broken heart. The detached youthfulness of her tone against her warm electro-soul sound, plus the abject loneliness in her lyrics, made for an irresistible modern take on girl-group melancholy. Critics embraced her as a founder of a new &amp;quot;indie soul&amp;quot; movement\u2014one that has since become a defining subgenre of the day, from the orchestral nihilism of Lana Del Rey to the dazed funkiness of Solange Knowles. With her long, dirty-blond layers, crisp tailored slacks, and enveloping coats\u2014always in black, always with kohl-rimmed eyes\u2014Li may not have been a direct Nicks descendant, but she certainly embodied Scandinavian alterna-cool. Related: Hear &amp;amp;amp; Now: Women in Music 2014 In late January, some five years after her emergence, Li opens the door to her airy, sparsely decorated Hollywood Hills rental looking like an art-school girl on laundry day, in silky black track pants and a beige wool sweater, with coconut oil still in her hair from yesterday (the hot water is out). It&amp;#039;s Grammys weekend, and Li is feeling &amp;quot;a little weathered.&amp;quot; She was out late last night at Mark Ronson&amp;#039;s party and is due at a dinner for Paul McCartney in a few hours. &amp;quot;He doesn&amp;#039;t even know me. I&amp;#039;m just somehow invited,&amp;quot; she says. Putting on the kettle for tea, Li describes the Jungian &amp;quot;dreamwork&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;s been doing. &amp;quot;Sometimes I can be a total good girl,&amp;quot; she muses, pulling up a patio chair and lighting a cigarette. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll order all these books on macrobiotics and stay home cooking massive stews and watching French films and meditating. Then I&amp;#039;ll be out every night, drink a lot of mescal or smoke weed or drink a lot of red wine.&amp;quot; She exhales a delicate stream of smoke. &amp;quot;You can do both, you know?&amp;quot; As Li&amp;#039;s career has progressed\u2014her second album, 2011&amp;#039;s fierce Wounded Rhymes, landed on best-of lists everywhere from Pitchfork to The New York Times\u2014so has a larger-than-life reputation as a chameleonic muse, a messenger from a bygone era. It&amp;#039;s something lots of people seem to want a piece of. Rappers Drake and Tyler the Creator, TV on the Radio singer Dave Sitek, and Beck have all remixed her songs; Kanye and David Lynch have collaborated with her. Hypercool Swedish label Acne hired her to model; H&amp;amp;amp;M tapped her to design a line for its upscale offshoot, &amp;amp;amp; Other Stories. (The result is &amp;quot;my nomad collection&amp;quot;: everything the chic rock girl needs on the road\u2014&amp;quot;one pair of heels, one loafer, one slipper, one cigarette pant, one cashmere sweater, one leather jacket, one shirt&amp;quot;\u2014all in black and all boiled down to &amp;quot;fit in this one massive leather tote.&amp;quot;) And, though she can&amp;#039;t say much about it, this past fall Li was on set in Texas with the legendarily reticent filmmaker Terrence Malick, shooting a project reportedly involving Austin&amp;#039;s music scene with Ryan Gosling and Natalie Portman. (&amp;quot;I was like &amp;#039;Terry, should I be getting acting classes?&amp;#039; He was like, &amp;#039;No, please! You just be free and be yourself\u2014be like the wind, follow your intuition.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot;) To Li, it&amp;#039;s all part of the creative tapestry she&amp;#039;s weaving centered on one theme: figuring out &amp;quot;how to be a woman.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s the focus of the 28-year-old&amp;#039;s third record, I Never Learn, out this month, which she thinks of as the final installment of a trilogy charting her trajectory from ingenue to adult. This yearning to grow up is interesting, considering that most people forced to function as adults in childhood, as Li was, are keen to move in the opposite direction. She was born on a farm south of Stockholm to an artist mother and a musician father who played in the moderately successful Swedish prog-rock band Dag Vag. Li&amp;#039;s mother didn&amp;#039;t think she could have children, but after visiting a Tibetan medicine woman in the early &amp;#039;80s, she got pregnant with the singer&amp;#039;s older sister, who is now a stylist in New York. In the spring of 1986, soon after Li was born, the Chernobyl disaster struck Ukraine, sending a cloud of radiation west over Sweden. Li&amp;#039;s mother &amp;quot;started freaking out,&amp;quot; the singer recalls. &amp;quot;So when I was nine months old, me and my mom and my grandma\u2014they bought an around-the-world ticket to find where we should live.&amp;quot; Li remembers her first trip to California, taking the bus around Venice and eating at a soup kitchen not because they were homeless but because &amp;quot;it was like, great, free food.&amp;quot; The family spent time on a commune in New Zealand before deciding, now with Li&amp;#039;s younger brother in tow, to build a house on a hill in a remote part of Portugal. &amp;quot;It didn&amp;#039;t have electricity, no hot water\u2014we were in the middle of nowhere.&amp;quot; Eventually, they returned to Sweden. &amp;quot;My brother lived in the closet, and my dad slept in the kitchen sometimes,&amp;quot; Li says of their apartment near Stockholm. &amp;quot;I had a very free childhood, a bit too free.&amp;quot; So, as a teen, &amp;quot;I wanted control, structure, and I wanted fucking out of there,&amp;quot; Li says. &amp;quot;I also wanted to become a great artist.&amp;quot; She studied first ballet, then modern dance, which provided the discipline and surrogate family she longed for, but the art form felt too limited. At 15, she quit dance and wound up at a high school for wayward misfits, &amp;quot;where everyone [was] gangster.&amp;quot; Finding a way out of there forced her to get serious. She enrolled in music classes run by the state for low-income kids and joined a gospel choir (which explains why she&amp;#039;s the rare Scandinavian able to channel the elemental warmth of soul music). Working in a nursing home and as a &amp;quot;rose girl,&amp;quot; selling flowers in the street, Li saved for her ticket to America. She arrived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at 19 and promptly fell in love with &amp;quot;completely the wrong person.&amp;quot; Thus began Li&amp;#039;s songwriting career, each record inspired by the dissolution of a relationship. Of her parents, she says, &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re so nonmaterialistic, they honestly don&amp;#039;t care about [comfort]. All they want to do is make a living and travel. They&amp;#039;ve lived their dream life, but it&amp;#039;s not mine.&amp;quot; Li is still clearly pulled by opposing forces\u2014the craving for stability versus the instinct to search and wander. She never knows which side will win out. A few years ago, she went to Mexico alone, &amp;quot;but I ended up meeting a lot of people. It&amp;#039;s such a clash\u2014you&amp;#039;ll be at the pyramids, and then you&amp;#039;ll be in Mexico City at a crazy rave party.&amp;quot; She went back regularly while writing the new record, combating bouts of creative uncertainty with trips to explore the Oaxacan jungle, go dancing, and, in true retro-rock-star fashion, take peyote in the desert. Li&amp;#039;s evolving view of maturation is less about tidying up &amp;quot;the chaos in [my] head and soul&amp;quot; and more about accepting imperfection and instability as constants in life and art. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m ready for something different in my life than to be completely self-absorbed,&amp;quot; she says, chuckling. &amp;quot;Then maybe something new can happen to me.&amp;quot; This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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