Say Lou Lou Are ‘Dreaming’ On The Dance Floor


With their history of pop perfection, Sweden has long been a country that’s provided the world with memorable music. Say Lou Lou, made up of 23 year old twin sisters Miranda and Elektra Kilbey-Jansson, is their latest exciting export.

A little bit disco, Say Lou Lou’s upcoming album, Lucid Dreaming, is set to get people moving when it’s released on April 6th.

I caught up with both Miranda and Elektra to find out more about the album, their lucid dreams, and some of their favorite twin moments.

Adam Bernard: Sweden is, historically, one of the best places in the world for pop music. What does being part of that lineage mean to you?

Miranda: I think it’s, more than anything, Swedes are very hard working, and very ambitious, and I think we have very high standards as far as music. More than anything I think Swedes are proud, and it’s always fun to come to America, or the UK, and people go, “Oh, the Swedish pop sensation.” It’s obviously positive.

Adam Bernard: Your scene has been huge going all the way back to the 70s, but even in just the last five to ten years a litany of artists have crossed over from Sweden to America. Do you see yourself as next in line after the recent successes of acts like Swedish House Mafia, Tove Lo, and Avicii?

Elektra: We hope so, if it happens in an organic way that’s right for our band, and it’s our songs that are in the right places at the right time.

Adam Bernard: What was the first moment that made you say, “We’re making it?”

Miranda: We’re quite realistic.

Elektra: Not realistic, we’re quite self-critical, so we’re never like, “Oh my God, we’ve made it.” Sometimes we pinch ourselves and go, “Oh my God, this is actually my job, I get to do this for a living. I get to meet people, stand on stage, I get to sing, I get to create music.” I think sometimes when you’re in the studio, and you’re having a really good time with really interesting and inspiring people, you go, “Oh my God, this is actually my job,” rather than (it being) a certain moment.

Adam Bernard: Do you remember the first time you thought, “Oh my God, this is my job now?”

Miranda: I think when we stood on stage for the first time we were like, “Oh my God, this is my future. I’m gonna be standing on stage every night for the coming years.” That was probably a few months after Say Lou Lou (first) happened. We played our first gig in August of 2012, and we were like, “Oh my God, it’s actually our job now.”

Adam Bernard: Your new album, Lucid Dreaming, is due out in America on April 6th. What was going on in your lives that inspired the content of the album?

Elektra: As most artists that write their own music, it’s biographical in a sense. It’s like looking back on all the love, relationships, and situations, and adolescence, and kind of summarizing it in songs.

It’s a mix between both of us, I guess, both of our experiences, and on some of the songs we’ve kind of imagined things that haven’t really happened that we kind of wish happened, and we place ourselves back into decades that we didn’t live in, but we kind of wish we lived in, (like) on some of the disco tracks, to kind of vibe.

Miranda: More than anything, I think the record is dealing with our adolescence, and being young adults, and then coming out the other side and being a bit wiser. We’ll probably laugh at ourselves in ten years thinking that we were wise at 23, but I feel slightly a bit wiser than a few years ago.

Adam Bernard: I feel like every five to ten years I realize I didn’t know anything five to ten years earlier.

Both: I know!

Elektra: I even go from month to month, like, “What the fuck was I thinking?”

Miranda: It’s almost like you want to go back and pat yourself on the shoulder and go, “You have no idea what’s happening, you have no clue, so just chill out and don’t worry.”

Adam Bernard: Lucid Dreaming is an awesome title for an album. What are some of the most lucid dreams you’ve had, and have any of them scared you?

Miranda: God yes. I mean our whole childhood we were ridden with nightmares that were very very very very vivid and real. When we woke up we could see the shapes, and people, from the nightmares, and they were so strangely abstract.

The funny thing is Elektra and I had the same dream, the exact same dream, our whole childhood, but we never told each other, we just told our mom. Then when we were a bit older our mom was like, “You know that you had the same dream your whole childhood?”

Adam Bernard: What was this dream?

Elektra: It’s so abstract, but it’s basically about scary shapes, and powers, and it’s dark, and murky. It’s like, forces.

Miranda: The only thing that’s actually tangible in the dream is a long white picket fence, being on the wrong side of the picket fence, getting over to the other side, and then finding this weird, dark force, pushing you down.

Elektra: It’s really hard to describe. It sounds really new age-y. It sounds really trippy.

Adam Bernard: It’s a dream. Dreams have to be trippy, or they’re boring.

Elektra: Yeah.

Miranda: People think we’re a bit new age-y, because our family is a bit new age-y. We’re more like astrology...

Elektra: ...and otherworldly explanations, but I guess connecting lucid dreaming to the album is because lucid dreaming, and dreaming, has been a part of our lives, and (it’s) also the sound of our record. We love dreamy, surrounding, productions, and the vocals are layered, and kind of dreamy. They’re both melancholy, and happy, at the same time.

We want to make people feel nostalgia, and at the same time we want them to feel the now, as well.

In a dream you always feel surrounded by all these different forces, and layers, at the same time. I guess that's how we want to connect it. Also, just looking back on our lives so far, which isn’t very far...

Miranda: Our lives so far, at 23.

Elektra: ...looking back at them as dreams, and kind of making them one dream instead of two dreams, and writing about that.

Adam Bernard: “Nothing But A Heartbeat” is the first single off of Lucid Dreaming. Would you say it’s indicative of the tone, and feel, of the rest of the album?

Miranda: In one way it definitely points in that direction, but I think we go in a few different directions. The first part of the record is a bit more disco, and then we go into a more “Nothing But A Heartbeat” type sound, which is, I would say, rhythmic, but yet still quite dreamy, and ethereal, more than groovy.

I think in terms of the euphoric chorus on “Nothing But A Heartbeat,” I think that’s as euphoric, and climax-y as we go. I think that it’s not as pop as we go, but it’s very uplifting, and I think a lot of the other songs are slightly moodier, and maybe more urgent, and perhaps a bit suggestive.

Adam Bernard: Moving from your music to more sisterly things, being that you’re twins, did you ever pull the twin stunt of having one of you take a test for the other while in school?

Miranda: Yeah, we pulled the stunt of swapping classrooms, but actually, it wasn’t as fun as we thought it would be, because after a while everyone was like, “Why did you switch? Switch back.” We were like aww. No one thought it was funny.

Adam Bernard: They could all tell?

Elektra: They could tell after a while. Maybe after 15 to 20 minutes they’d say, “Wait, that’s not Miranda. Elektra why are you in here? Switch back.”

Adam Bernard: That sucks, because if one of you was good at math, and the other was good at history, you could have really cleaned up in terms of grades.

Miranda: Unfortunately, we’re good at the same things, and bad at the same things. There are a few things that I’m better at, but generally speaking I wouldn't bring her to a deserted island. I would probably bring someone who was better at things that I'm not good at, because otherwise we wouldn't get anywhere. We wouldn’t be able to build a raft, or anything.

Adam Bernard: Finally, all siblings fight at some point. Tell me about the most epic fight you two had while growing up. The kind of fight you laugh about now, but was ridiculously huge at the time.

Elektra: We had one famous fight that went down in history as the twin fight...

Miranda: From 2004.

Elektra: ...because our older sister filmed it with our parents’ digital camera, and one of our friends put it up on Facebook a couple years ago, and it went viral with our friends.

It was fake fighting, but with fake fighting, and going too far, all of a sudden we’re fighting like crazy people, and hitting each other.

Miranda: The fake fight escalated into a real fight.

Elektra: It ends up with Miranda running off.

Miranda: I kicked you in the stomach.

Elektra: It’s really funny because we’re like 12, and prepubescent, and (wearing) really ugly early 2000 clothing, and just being really silly, and yelling really silly things to each other, like “You had it comin’, girl!” You can hear our older step-sister laughing, and when Miranda runs off I smash the camera, and I hit her, and then the video ends because I hit the camera. That’s probably the most epic fight.

Miranda: Because it was filmed.

Elektra: We should put it on YouTube, but it could be damaging to our career because we look so silly.


Interview originally ran on Arena.com.

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