oh! FURIE by Alicia Edelweiss
interview with Alicia Edelweiss - new album 'FURIE' is out now :)
Alicia Edelweiss is a fascinating artist I encountered this month. Her sophomore album “FURIE” has been released on the 9th and it’s been a soundtrack of my everyday life. There’s something so creative and freeing in her songs about self-expression and ‘furie’ (eng: fury).
Enjoy reading about her creative process behind this album, how this album challenged her to think about how it’s always better to be honest and take up space and more.
Bonnie Orbison: Introduce yourself! Maybe there’s an interesting story behind your artist name, or a fun fact about how you got to music - feel free to mention previously released works.
Alicia Edelweiss: Hi! My name is Alicia Edelweiss. I'm a musician, performer and visual artist and right now I am living in Vienna. Edelweiss was actually my first name when I was born and I changed it to Alicia when I was five, 'cos Austrian people didn't find it as cool as my parents did. Not many people know this, but the Edelweiss flower actually originated in Central Asia, including the Himalayas, not in the alps.
I realised I wanted to be a professional musician when I was hitch-hiking through Europe and busking all over the place. I've been releasing music for a while now, it began very DIY with my EP "I should have been overproduced" and my album "Mother, how could you". And then 2019 I released my first studio album "When I'm enlightened, everything will be better." on which I also started working with strings for the first time, 'cos I realised it really amplifies the expression of my music.
Who is your legend?
Laurie Anderson
What is the name of your upcoming/just released album/EP? And how does it reflect where you are at in your (artistic) journey at the moment?
FURIE is the name of my new album. The word reflects my intention of giving less of a shit about people not liking me for who I am and it's about no longer putting up with bad behaviour. It's about unchaining myself again, being child-like and rewilding myself also artistically. And it expresses my goal to no longer let people shame me for my anger.
But FURIE to me is also anger at the world, anger at the patriarchy, anger at all the injustices happening every single second, all the sexual abuse that's happening as we speak, above-all to women and children, and all the pain that's being caused to the animal world. Trillions of animals are killed every year by humans, billions of those end up in the bin.
Anger and Fury are powerful emotions, especially for women, as we've been taught to suppress it all of our lives, so we would put up with abuse, exploitation, partners that steal all of our energy so that they can flourish and so on. And yes, I do think that the environmental degradation and exploitation of the animal world is connected to the oppression of women.
Walk us through the process behind FURIE! Writing, recording, inspiration, themes, realisations, etc.
Creating this album was a really long journey. I wrote many of the songs quite a while ago. The "newest" one is "Feminist Girlfriend".
I always write the structure, the melody and the lyrics on my own, and then me and my band work on the string arrangements. This time I worked with a string quartet for the those. In the summer of 2023 we recorded 6 of the songs live (main instrument, voice + strings) in Vienna. And having those basic recordings, we continued adding overdubs in the studio.
Every song is a little world of its own for me. I draw inspiration from nature at times, from friendship, from all kinds of relationships, intense emotions, moments of sadness or grief, my spirituality, my dreams.
I got a lot better at producing during the album and realised that in some cases it's necessary for me to record the main vocals and backing vocals completely on my own, because they are something so personal and it can take time to get it just right. I also realised that it's difficult for me to record main vocals in a tiny soundproof box, I need big rooms and high ceilings to be able to sing with emotion and feel vastness. So there was a lot of trial and error going on, but I was able to test all my ideas and visions and really took the time to experiment.
Anyone you wanna shout-out or credit? Anyone helped you on this album or was simply by your side during this time?
My manager Bettina was there for me, and Wolfgang Lehmann whom I produced it with was a big part of making the album. It was actually quite tough for me this whole process, it felt like I had to bear the artistic responsibility of the album on my own most of the time, which wasn't easy for me, but perhaps necessary for the outcome.
What’s your favorite lyric line(s) off one of the album tracks?
Perhaps "In my dreams I've found an attractive dude, he never smells bad, 'cos he always smells goooood." from my song "Feminist Girlfriend"
Only if you want, can you annotate it for us? Where did it come from? Do you remember the moment you wrote it?
I thought about my dream partner and thought, yeah I do want to be together with someone I find attractive, but then I thought - but wait a sec, what does attractive actually mean to me? I can find someone pretty and handsome but have zero desire to kiss them, or when you kiss them you realise, ah, this doesn't feel right. And that it's actually the smell of someone that can sometimes predict if a kiss is gonna be satisfying or not. I think there's tons of studies on that. But also, I really find the smell of alcohol or cigarettes incredible off-putting, I think that's the main reason I wrote that line. 'Cos when me and my ex broke up, I suddenly had a very long list of things I wouldn't put up with anymore, amongst others: smells that sicken me.
Anyway, I wrote this song when I was high on a fever and had some major revelations about that relationship and also about relationships I'd seen my friends be in over the years. I thought it's a really funny song, but I've heard from many people that it's actually quite heart-breaking. Also, I like having "dude" and "good" rhyme.
If you’d give the listeners an opening album to listen to before diving into your one, which one would it be?
Sinéad O'Connor's "The Lion and the Cobra"
Any concerts you have upcoming? Any merch or physical copies listeners can get their hands on? Anything exciting happening soon you wanna share?
I'm going on tour in UK next week (End of May)! I'm playing some shows with my friend Kate Young in Paisley, Aldershot, Shoreham and London. And I'm also playing at Fire in the Mountain Festival and at Windmill Brixton in London with The Rebel and Lola. Then there's a couple of festivals coming up in summer in Germany and Austria and last week we got a festival confirmed in South Africa for September, which I can't announce yet though. In the next months I'm also going to be composing music for a musical theatre piece of Hamlet, that's gonna premiere in August in Villach in Austria. Apart from that I'm actually really excited about working on my next album already.
There's LPs and CDs of the new album and I also made some pretty cool posters. I haven't gotten around to make T-Shirts yet, but it's my plan to have some printed this year.
Alicia Edelweiss’ LP FURIE is now out via Glitterhouse Records.