![]() ![]() She’s had a busy 2021, releasing the follow-up to Trauma plus a collaboration with her boyfriend Christian Ekvall and – as producer and co-writer – a long-awaited third album from Swedish-Lebanese artist Nicole Sabouné. Wilson and I met three times while writing this feature, twice over Zoom and once in person in Stockholm. ![]() There’s this pressure, as a woman, that you have to always show how strong you are and sort of brush off the past like it’s something that can ever be fully dealt with. “I’ve realised that being a person who sits on sofas in TV studios talking about traumatic events like being raped is, uh, not the most healthy thing one can do. Speaking over Zoom from her apartment in Stockholm, she wraps her cardigan around her and leans forward into the camera. Lately, Wilson has been wondering the same thing. At sixteen she made a promise to herself to never keep anything secret, especially if she ever had children of her own, and my goodness has she stuck to it. In previous interviews, she has described growing up feeling surrounded and smothered by unspoken hurt. Losing her mother at such a young age profoundly shaped Wilson’s character, not least because her absence plunged the household into silence. Here was the exhilarating sound of an artist pushing an idea as far as it could go. Written in Swedish and recorded with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with famed conductor/composer Hans Ek, Trauma threw all conventions out the window. This led to a theatrical performance, Who’s Afraid Of Jenny Wilson?, billed as a universal story about women and abuse and who owns public space, which in turn led to a second album centered on Wilson’s horrific ordeal. Released in 2018 just as the #MeToo movement began to really blow up in Sweden, Wilson found herself on the edge of a cultural firestorm. Wilson took her unbearable pain and spliced it with huge dance hooks to make an eye-wateringly frank yet irresistibly earwormy document of the assault, its aftermath, and how women are so often failed by the society around them. This, too, became a record.īut not just any record Exorcism was unlike any album ever made. Then, one night in 2016, all of that was snatched away when she was raped by a man she had met on the dancefloor. She continued to work and tour and found some joy and solace in the bars and clubs of Stockholm. Her long-term relationship broke down and suddenly she was alone again, soon turning forty and with two young sons. There would be time to rest later, she thought, except there wasn’t really. Happily, again, the tumour went into remission, and Wilson, relieved, threw herself into touring internationally behind the album, which had won three Grammis at home. ![]() This time she was not so sure she would survive. Before the album was finished, however, the cancer made an unwelcome return. Propelled by anger and frustration at the world and the sudden fallibility of her own body, Wilson headed into battle. Demand The Impossible! was an album inspired by uprisings: psychological, political, physical. And she was right the cancer responded to chemotherapy, and Wilson started to make a record about it. Having lost her own mother to breast cancer when she was just 14 years old, Wilson knew it could be serious but was convinced she would not die. In 2011, Wilson was preparing for the release of her third album, Blazing!, when she discovered a lump on one of her breasts. When life just can’t stop handing out lemons, you have to learn to juggle. Faced with one dire setback after another, Wilson’s instinct as an artist has been to barrel determinedly onwards, and to channel each crisis into her work. ![]()
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