“Love me like I’m not made of stone,” sings Lykke Li on her latest album, I Never Learn. And then she asks the void: “Will you love my scars so I can heal?”

No one answers.

Li Lykke Timotej Svensson Zachrisson described I Never Learn to Rolling Stone as an album filled with “power ballads for the broken”. The observation is correct: The album is a sister to Bonnie Tyler’s second album, Natural Force, draped in black. While Bonnie Tyler concludes on It’s a Heartache that “it ain’t wise to need someone, as much as I depended on you”, Lykke Li affirms that she’s “never gonna love again”. There’s no way out. The scars from an unrequited love won’t go away. But, more than anything, her third album is a lyrical triumph. The words throw darts towards your heart.

“What’s fantastic, when 
it comes to pop songs, is that 
the music can help put you in
 an emotional state, the lyrics go straight in, and it’s not difficult to read, like some poetry can be. That you don’t really need to understand but that, through the music, you can feel, listen and dance,” she says. Her right arm leans against 
a bar in the Grand Hôtel in Stockholm. “The words are the protagonists in my music. Many times, the lyrics have been more important than the melody. Sometimes I’ve found a melody 
I like and been forced to cut a sentence that doesn’t work. It really hurts. It seems not many people listen to the lyrics. But
 I really do. If it’s a fantastic melody with bad lyrics, I don’t like it.”

She mentions Joan Didion, Leonard Cohen and Bodil Malmsten as inspirations. Writers who have one thing in common: starved and minimalist sentences. Lykke Li’s lyrics are just as bony.

“The sentences of Leonard Cohen are like puzzles,” she says. “Every word is unexpected but makes sense. A raincoat, a liver spot and yellow hair can turn into a sad farewell.”

The Swedish background
 of Lykke Li is at the core of the clipped sentences that distinguish her writing. “I let my true love die.” “My heart cracked, really love you bad.” “Don’t you let me go tonight.” “These scars of mine make wounded rhymes tonight.”

“I think many people appreciate that my English poetry is quite banal,” Lykke tells me.
“I have my own way to express myself grammatically. It becomes like my own language. Swedish is pretty wooden. I think I let go of being self-critical when I write
 in English. It’s not so incredibly embarrassing. If you are a native English speaker, you compare yourself with Dylan Thomas. It’s the same thing for me. If I would write in Swedish, I’d never feel intelligent enough.”

I Never Learn was written 
in Los Angeles. During this period Lykke was angst-ridden, tired
 and ill and, following advice from David Lynch, she started a kind
 of meditation called TM [transcendental meditation]. And her vocabulary opened up: “It was insane what a difference [TM] made. It was as if the words suddenly came pouring out. I could write a whole song with words I didn’t even remember I had read. 
It was as if my subconscious opened,” she says. “When you 
are used to creating from pain, darkness and chaos, as I am, 
I think you can become addicted to it. But David taught me that you don’t have to be. When you meditate, it is as if you open the door to your most light inner part. It is as if you find a source that never ends. It’s there, all the time.”

“I think I’ve filled my quota of angst and pain,” she continues. “It’s like a little box, full of darkness. You don’t have to add more chaos 
to it. Instead, you can get it out when you need it. I think that it’s more healthy to keep on excavating that box than to constantly put yourself in chaotic situations.”

If you’d like to read the rest of the interview with Lykke Li, and also about what Jamie xx and Kendrick Lamar say about their lyrics, you can find the full article in the S/S 2015 issue of Bon, available in select newsagents.