When Laleh was little, her parents told her about the escape like a fairy tale. The mother, father and little child darted and played across the borders, from Iran to Minsk and later all the way to Gothenburg.
- My book is also told a bit like a fairy tale, says Laleh, brushing gravel from his trouser leg.
We walk in muddy shoes between plantations and cornfields. The first part of the interview is done on a small farm in YtterjÀrna south of Stockholm. Inside the greenhouses tomatoes are being picked, in the trees outside the plums are getting overripe.
- I've never been a bookworm, never really liked biographies, and never written anything like this before. But it was as playful and intuitive as when writing songs.
No, "I saw how we were stars" is not a traditional autobiography. Laleh jumps in time, associates wildly. Suddenly she is standing on top of a mountain talking to a wolf.
- But the real story is my thoughts. I think many people can recognize themselves in them. I hope so anyway. That what I wrote is deep but universal.
We stop at a potato country. The soil is dark and moist.
On Laleh's last tour, the line was "I put a potato in the ground, ten came!" a standing feature. She shouted and the audience responded. That is why we are standing here now. She has not been able to let go of the idea of ââpotatoes. The memory of the ones she grew as a child, in ice cream boxes in her father's apartment, still comes to mind.
- My father photographed a lot in the countryside of Iran, because he wanted to perpetuate and preserve a way of life where you grow your own potatoes and watch them grow, she says.
- The fact that I wrote the book is partly about me wanting to retell what he told me, and perhaps because I want to do exactly as he did: preserve something.
Throughout almost all of Laleh's life, her father's photographs have been tucked away in an old Konsumkasse, together with other documents from the family's life in Iran, Belarus and Sweden. In the first chapter, she pulls out that box. She doesn't really know why, and she hesitates before opening it. Once that is done, the content can act as a common thread through the chapters.
Why do you hesitate at first?
- Because I wonder if it's worth it. To tell what my father believed in, what my mother believed in. Will anyone listen?
Yet you have now written a whole book, about both their lives and your own. Why?
- I still don't know and I'm torn. The first chapters are about just that: to share or not. I have always kept my life separate from my public life. It was nice to follow every thought fully, not censor me. But it also makes me ache. Should we withdraw everything? Stop the book presses? Laleh says, laughing.
A few days after the interview, on September 18, it is too late. "I saw how we were stars" is available in the bookstore. The story is out.
When she first broke through as an artist, as a 23-year-old in the mid-'00s, Laleh became known for being quite reclusive. Fluffy. In interviews, she did not respond as young female artists used to; sometimes she didn't answer at all. The debut album contained songs in several different genres, in Swedish, English and Persian. She was told that she was unclear, but also that she had integrity.
So it was really there all along. Even as a child, she stubbornly refused to meet the expectations that society brought. She wasn't going to study, she was going to be an artist. But she wasn't going to write love songs like everyone else did. And she wasn't just going to be an artist, she was going to produce her albums herself. When the record company finally agreed, she spent several years sleeping and eating cheap pastries in a studio in a Stockholm suburb. It was small, but it was hers. When she broke through and SVT wanted her to perform the hit "Live tomorrow" at the P3 Guldgala, she went up and sang something completely different.
She smiles when she thinks back to that time.
- I perceived myself as very nice and polite, but I have been told afterwards that some people thought I was annoying and cocky. Maybe they still do. My way of working is and was a bit provocative. You have to work with hit makers, get into a system, but I knew I wouldn't enjoy it.
Where did it come from, that you wanted to go your own way all the time?
- It's something I try to figure out in the book. I think it has to do with the fact that my parents always placed such a high value on me. They thought what I said and thought was valuable. It was so strange, but I acted like I was the smartest and richest person in the world, even though I was a little kid with no power or money.
From her mother, the mathematician, she also acquired strategic thinking.
- From her I learned to see the patterns of power - and how short-term some in our industry could think. It wasn't uncommon to hear artists complain about their early years, that they felt forced to make music that didn't feel right to them. I didn't want to feel that way.
Laleh often returns to the gratitude she feels for her parents and what they taught her. Today both are dead. Her father died in an accident in 1994, her mother from cancer barely 20 years later.
- Some of my friends are like this: "Do you have to give them all the credit? Can't you have some yourself?" But I always land on how important they were. They were two very unique individuals. I was extremely lucky. I wish the public conversation could be more like the conversations we had at home. Respectfully, without slandering, even if you think differently.
The parents met at the university in Iran, where the mother was a student and the father a professor of literature. The age difference was great, and they were also different as people. While the father wanted to learn from history, the mother's eyes were fixed on the future. Laleh believes that she is actually more like her mother, and that this is why it took time for her to start rooting in Konsumkassen.
- But I learned a lot when I wrote. Like the value in holding on to things. We must preserve, for the sake of the future. How did we farm the land in the past? Can we learn from it to avoid becoming minions of a big AI robot? Then it's dad who speaks through me, she says and laughs again.
We have left the potato country and gone over to YtterjÀrna cultural center, with its soft, round shapes and large, bright halls. Laleh orders tea, I take a coffee with milk from one of the nearby farms.
Laleh and her family â partner Gustaf Thörn, also a music producer, and their daughter â spend a lot of time here. They actually live closer to town, but would like to move out to JĂ€rna. There is something about being close to nature. Being able to grow your own potatoes.
Just a couple of years ago, their lives looked very different. Then they lived in Los Angeles, dabbled in the American music industry. In Sweden, the career flourished and Laleh wanted to give the USA a chance. It worked: soon she was producing music for artists such as Demi Lovato, Tori Kelly and Ellie Goulding. She had once again decided to break new ground, and did so.
- I got such an incredible desire for revenge when I got there and was treated as just a singer. I just: Move!
When the magazine Vi published an interview with her about her career in the USA, it was titled "A poet among wolves". Laleh thought a lot about that headline. Because surely she also had a wolf in her? "I would handle the pressure. Be strong. Not just a poet," she writes in the book. But it was difficult. The female music producers were few, the competition fierce, some men buff.
- In retrospect, it can feel like I was part of a cult, an ĂŒber-pop world with its own household gods. It was a relief to move away from there and get some distance. I had a goal and I achieved it, but when you prove something, how long do you have to keep proving it?
Sometimes she ponders how much of her life has been driven by revenge rather than mere lust. Has she lived her life in reaction instead of just living? This is also something she tries to figure out in the book. And maybe revenge isn't always a bad motivator. Like that time when her bestie informed her that she wasn't even mentioned in SVT's documentary about Swedish music in the 00s. Or when a friend in LA bluntly stated: "People like you don't become legends."
It stirred something in her. A fear of being forgotten.
- Because surely I existed in the 00s? I remember that. How it exploded.
But the fear was not paralyzing. On the contrary. She picked up the phone, called her Swedish tour manager and booked Ullevi. Three years later, on her 40th birthday in the summer of 2022, she performed a sold-out concert in her hometown's giant arena. She was not forgotten.
- A friend joked with me before I dared to book Ullevi, he was like: "You shouldn't play at Ullevi, you should run barefoot in a forest and play with a guitar." But why shouldn't I be able to play at Ullevi?
Are you driven by not really being able to be placed? Stuck in a compartment?
- No, it has never been my driving force, not even at the beginning of my career. But when everyone talked about how important it was to have a "clear image", I understood what they meant, but it felt difficult to choose. You want to be a whole person, not a role, says Laleh and thinks.
- I think I'm very clear! That's what's nice about the book, that I might now be clearer, even to myself. So not my image, but the real thing. I don't like superficial relationships, most relationships in my life have been very long. I want one like that with my audience too. It's okay that it took some time. It's okay that people have called me fuzzy, because I've always thought "you'll figure it out later".
At the same time, there are parts of life that she still wants to keep pretty much to herself. In "I saw how we were stars" she tells, for the first time, that she has a daughter, but she does not want to go into any details.
- I still wanted to write about my experience of becoming a mother, now that it has landed and many years have passed, because it was important in relation to my own parents.
The chapters on parenthood also show that she did not always take her parents at their word.
- The thing about marriage and children was not a priority according to mother. It was a different time, a different feminism, where the most important thing was that we should be free and avoid making the mistakes of our parents. In the book, I try to understand how it affected my song lyrics and life choices.
At the bottom of the Konsumkassen is what was most difficult to write about: the police report on the father's death, on a late summer day by a lake in Floda. Laleh was standing on the beach when the father went out on the water after hearing about a woman who might be in distress. He didn't come back.
- I kept putting off reading that report, says Laleh.
- We'll read it later, I kept saying. No, tomorrow. But now that I've read everything, I feel relieved. And I chose to include the incident because it raised an important question in me: Is man worth loving? Dad liked it. Mom could be more doubtful.
What do you think?
- I can also have doubts. It can be nice not to have to love the person. To be lulled into indifference. But my songs and this book probably indicate that I love, after all.
Today, Laleh's song "Goliat", about the children who will take over the world and make the earth whole, is a staple at Swedish school graduations. "Some die young" became an anthem for those who mourned the victims on UtÞya, "Bara fÄ va mig selv" an anthem for freedom. The songs are often about human value, probably, she thinks, because she became convinced of her own so early on.
By writing "I saw how we were stars", she rediscovered the music of her childhood, the songs and Cornelis songs that her mother played in the apartment in Hammarkullen. That's what she wants to explore now. That, and something she hasn't explored before: love songs.
- I have not allowed myself to make love songs before. I thought it was spoiled. The world is coming to an end, so I can't go on brooding over my own little feelings. But now I think that they can actually be important and play a role for the future. On the last tour we improvised "The Potato Song", on the next one maybe me and the audience can make a love song together.
