Ten years ago my mind was set on attending Fabrica Design school in Italy. The application papers were sitting on my desk in my apartment when I met the love of my life here in Sweden and the dream of going to design school in Italy was permanently put on the shelf. But somewhere deep inside a longing of seeing something else, being somewhere else and experience something else kept living in me.Over the years I lived it out in small portions through starting my label, releasing a bunch of records and traveling through Asia and the USA many times. Every time I did something like this I felt more alive, and every time I came home to my apartment in Stockholm I felt like I had left a little part of myself behind.
A year ago I started thinking that I could maybe get a job in New York. In my mind it would be a way of supporting myself and at the same time do shows and be closer to my US fans. It was an excuse to go over and pursue my music career, something which I soon discovered was a total paradox. Having a job in New York wouldn’t mean a lot of free time which I could use writing songs and doing shows. If anything it would be the other way around. Taking a job in the US would mean having less time to pursue my music career than I did now. Not to mention my husband was asking the question; and what would he do for a living? So one night when we were talking about this urge I had of leading a more adventurous life, preferably somewhere else than Sweden, I told him “wouldn’t it be great to go over and just tour, to just work with music and nothing else. And he looked at me and said “Why don’t we? That’s what I want too”.
It was like a veil fell from my eyes. Here’s what I had longed for all these years without ever quite realizing what it was. And after that the preparations began. It was all very slow and unorganized from the start. I started looking into ways to do concerts in a different way from the old pub show thing, checking out how it works with house concerts, having ideas of Library concerts and small intimate shows at art galleries. I got in touch with a company who helps artists apply for artist visas and filed an application. It’s now been 9 months and I still have a long way to go and a lot of stuff to work out before I can even say this has begun. Right now I’m not living in the now at all. I’m living in the future where I see myself living in the moment – every moment.
I’m still not quite sure how we will manage financially but I will just have to “make it work” like Tim Gunn would have said. Because what does money matter when you have the chance to be living your dream.
