First Aid Kit

First published on 8 Jul 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Hard work and talent will get you started on the path to fame and fortune. The rest, it appears, is up to luck and YouTube. Just ask Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit.  

For Swedish sisters, Klara and Johanna Söderberg, youthful enthusiasm and luck have played their part. A YouTube video of them swaddled in heavy knitted jumpers in a Swedish forest covering Fleet Foxes ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song' was never intended as anything more than idle amusement for the teenagers; however with over one and a half million views and a thumbs up from the original artists it has propelled the girls from a local folk group kicking it around Stockholm, to a band embarking on their first international tour, as Klara explains.

When did you begin playing music together?
We started making songs in 2007. I started listening to Bright Eyes when I was 12 and through that I found a lot of folk music so I started writing some songs. I recorded a demo of a song and Johanna recorded the harmonies on it. We listened to it and thought it sounded so good and so we thought that this was something that we could do together.
Who influences your music?
We listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen, Graham Parsons and Johanna Newsom. We really like the tradition in old country music where they talk about old outlaws and these really horrible stories - we like that especially because there's a lot of songs where the story is very tragic and the song sounds really happy and we really like that contrast.

A lot of your songs are strongly narrative. Where do you get the stories for your songs?
It's a mix of things from our lives and ideas that come to us. Its pretty obvious that a lot of what we write about isn't something that we've experienced ourselves because we are a bit too young to have gone off and been married for a long time. It's a lot of fiction. I think people have this idea that being a songwriter everything you do needs to be autobiographical but I don't really think that's the case. If every songwriter had to write about something that happens in their life we'd have a lot more boring songs about everyday life - or conversely, people would have crazy lives if all those stories were true.

Is it difficult being as young as you are in this industry?
No not really, I think it's a great advantage to have this amount of time to just work it out and see where we're going to go but of course I guess people can look down on us for being young but whatever bad things come from being young are going to pass because we are going to get older. I think mostly it's just positive for us.

I guess a lot of folks probably tend to underestimate young people.
We get that a lot but I think young people are capable of a lot of things. We've had a lot of luck and a lot of will and we've made it happen. You have to have the courage to do it and believe in yourself but that's not always easy when you're young and you're trying to find yourself or whatever.

Was the ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song' cover a conscious attempt to get peoples attention?
No, that was just something we did because we really love Fleet Foxes. We never had any plans that anyone would ever see that video, it was just something that we did for the fun of it. We'd played that song before in our live shows so we thought ‘let's record it for fun'. We didn't have any thought of the band seeing it themselves, which they did, and that was just amazing,

That'd be the luck you were talking about?
Yeah exactly: we just had good timing, which we didn't really plan.

Why do you write your songs in English and not Swedish?
Writing songs just comes naturally in English. It's hard to explain to a native English speaker but for us, that's just the way we write. We write songs it in English but I count in [the band] in Swedish because I like the feeling of keeping that small part, it makes us feel more down to earth and more like we are still in Sweden just rehearsing our songs. Also our drummer is Swedish and we're Swedish so why not count in in Swedish? Most of the music I listen to is in English so when I sing in English it feels natural Also its something about the Swedish language, it feels more naked: singing in Swedish feels a lot more vulnerable.