2024-07-21 05:16:18
From a blonde girl in a blue dress who flawlessly imitated Céline Dion in a talent contest, Zara Larsson has grown into a woman who knows what she wants. She composes her own music, directs music videos, fulfills her feminist vision and, unlike Taylor Swift, managed to acquire the rights to her own discography. After the spring concert in Prague, the Swedish pop diva will perform at the Colors of Ostrava festival this week.
Many talent show winners fade into obscurity shortly after taking part in them. This was also feared by Zara Larsson, who won the Swedish version of the Got Talent competition called Talang in 2008 with the song My Heart Will Go On by Céline Dion. But she was only ten years old. “I was afraid that my career was over,” she recalled of her beginnings for the British newspaper Guardian. After the contest, no offers from record companies came.
She admits that she already had big ambitions as a child and was therefore not indifferent to where her career was going. “I knew exactly what I wanted – to be on stage and sing. Talang was the only competition that had no age limit, that’s why I applied there. I wanted to stand in front of the audience and I couldn’t wait,” says Zara Larsson in a telephone interview for Aktuálně.cz
Zara Larsson won a talent contest at the age of ten. But it did not bring her instant fame. | Photo: Reuters
Her parents supported her, even though they are far from the world of big stages and spotlights – her father is a police officer, her mother is a nurse. But it was she who helped the young Zara Larsson out of the deafness that followed the triumph in the competition. They went together to the filming of another talent competition, Idol, and during a commercial break, the mother presented her then fourteen-year-old daughter in front of the judges. “Do you know who he is?” she allegedly asked. And when the judges nodded yes, the mother said they should. “It was embarrassing,” the musician recalls today. But the trick worked and one of the judges introduced the girl to the recording company Ten Music Group.
Mother accompanied Zara Larsson on work matters until she was about 20 years old. Not because she wanted to continue to tread her daughter’s path, but to protect the teenage girl from possible danger from much older men. “I started very young, my mom wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of and that I wouldn’t be dealing with old slimes,” she explains. “I definitely got into uncomfortable situations that would have been very strange if mom wasn’t there,” she adds.
Less charts, more art
Today she is 26 years old and can stand up for herself. This year she released her fourth studio album called Venus after the Roman goddess of love. She believes that it brings her closer to how she sounded at the beginning of her career. Over the course of the last decade, she had several internationally successful hits such as Symphony recorded with the UK’s Clean Bandit. But she felt under pressure to stay on the wave of fame. For fear of proposing anything, she wrote her own texts in a drawer and worked only with what she got from her team.
However, she has overcome these concerns and is now creating her music. “When I was younger, I cared a lot more about the charts, I wanted to be commercially successful. Now I focus more on the artistic process and I care less about the numbers,” she thinks. He also perceives that the creative process itself can influence, unlike the charts. And besides, she enjoys work more with this approach. “But I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter to me at all, I’d be lying. Of course, I’d still like to have a hit that takes the top spots. It’s just that it’s in a better balance now,” she adds.
Zara Larsson creates danceable electro-pop music and does not delve too much into melancholic themes. Music critics agree that the ballad position does not suit her at all, nor does it correspond to her concept of pop. “When I was little, I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend I was on stage. I love how it makes me feel. I have it in me,” she reflects on why she felt that pop would be her genre since childhood.
While writing the last album, she felt that everyone now makes concept records where they reveal their deep wounds. She wondered if she should go down a similar path. But producer Rick Nowels talked her out of it.
“He said, ‘I don’t feel like this is you.’ And so we agreed to cough it up and just make good songs. I’m really happy in life and there’s no drama going on in it that I can draw from,” she explained to the British website iNews. She was inspired by the relationship dramas of friends or the love for her sister, which she sings about in the song On My Love, on which she collaborated with David Guetta.
Zara Larsson’s 2015 song Lush Life has amassed over a billion plays on Spotify. The clip has more than 840 million views on YouTube. | Video: Ten Music Group
Feminist with an opinion
Zara Larsson has taken her music back into her own hands in recent years, literally. After one of today’s biggest pop stars, Taylor Swift, lost the rights to her discography five years ago, Zara Larsson’s team took notice. In June 2022, the musician announced that she was leaving the record label Ten Music Group to start her own label called Sommer House. As a result, she acquired ownership of all her music. Today, she says with a laugh that it’s her retirement fund. A truly emancipatory step, one would like to say.
Zara Larsson (pictured) has acquired the rights to her entire discography – unlike Taylor Swift. | Photo: Reuters
After all, the pop diva has been a feminist since she was a teenager. As a child, she studied at the Swedish Ballet Academy, where she moved mainly in a girl’s group and therefore did not perceive inequality so much. “I loved and still love girls. Then I transferred to another school and suddenly I realized that people treated me so differently than boys,” she recalls. “I was around fifteen, I started releasing music and was under the public scrutiny. It started to dawn on me that the world is not the way I imagined it,” she adds.
She also started writing a feminist blog around this age. Later, she became famous for her sharp tweets, for which even the media sometimes sniffed her. In 2017, for example, she wrote: “I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again. Hating men and feminism are two different things. I support both.” Today, she evaluates it so that she was and is a woman with strong opinions, but expresses herself more cautiously on the networks. “I stopped blogging because I started to feel how mentally draining it was. I heard so many crazy things on the Internet,” she says, adding that she still has strong feminist views but doesn’t share them as loudly as before.
Instead, she tries to make feminism an integral part of her work. Now that she has the ability to decide what her team looks like, she tries to give as many women a chance as she can. She creates most of the songs with a British producer who goes by the pseudonym MNEK, but she always tries to have at least one other woman speak to the process in addition to him. It is likely that this Saturday also at the Colors of Ostrava festival, visitors to Zara Larsson’s concert will see a lot of women on the main stage – a singer, a dancer and a band.
Zara Larsson tries to give women as many opportunities as possible. | Photo: Reuters
“I try to surround myself with women; it’s important not just to talk about equality, but to really walk the path for other women,” she describes her approach, which is the complete opposite of what the so-called queen bee does – a woman who has fought her way to the top of a man’s world, but fundamentally does not help other women to achieve the same.
Paradoxically, however, feminist themes do not find their way into Zara Larsson’s music. “I’ve tried so many times to write a feminist anthem and it’s really hard. Maybe I’ll try to get my opinions into my music more,” says the singer, who is currently working on her fifth album. And how do you assess the position of women in the music industry? “We still have a long way to go. But I’ve been in this environment for ten years and I’ve experienced big changes for the better over the years,” she concludes.
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