Anna Ternheim

As backwards as it might sound, for a singer/songwriter to be able to touch people with their music, the actual process of writing is one centered on solitude: You have to be able to spend a lot of time with yourself and inside your own head, confirms Sweden’s Anna Ternheim, noting that that’s where the songs composing Halfway to Fivepoints originated. “Part of me likes being social and spending time with other people, but, with my writing, I’ve always had a big need for solitude. That’s when I get sorted out, put words on thoughts and feelings.” she says.
As some of the more somber relationship songs on Halfway to Fivepoints suggest, the 29-year-old, Stockholm-based Ternheim isn’t always happy about some of the things happening in her life. If the elegant, thoughtful collection maneuvers between folk and pop, conjuring the excitement and vitality of Beth Orton’s early records, there’s a melancholic thread tying the songs together. But it’s a good melancholy, at times shot through with moments of sonic and lyrical uplift.
It’s maybe one of the singer’s favorite tricks; one that’s not lost on her—sad can be beautiful. “I don’t think sad is bad,” she says. “I always look for some sort of darkness in good love songs. If there’s no pain, I have a hard time connecting to it. Even happy songs, good happy songs have some darkness to them and love always has it- to different degrees”
Her first official full-length release in the U.S., Halfway to Fivepoints is something of a journey through Ternheim’s already successful international career. A critical darling in her native country—where her debut album, 2004’s Something Outside, earned her a Swedish Grammy for Best New Artist—Ternheim has included some of her oldest and newest material on this album. The lone cover song on the disc is an exquisitely stripped-down and slowed cover of Fleetwood Mac’s eighties hit “Little Lies.”
Together, this collection features quickly-written love stories, tales of loneliness, messy lives, stalkers and therapeutic kiss-offs to formers lovers. In tracks like “Lover’s Dream,” which she calls a “creepy love song,” she sought to bring the listener into another realm, one akin to the grainy, black-and-white world found in the memorable 1922 film Nosferatu. It’s appropriate, as Ternheim’s voice lends a cinematic quality to the disc, at times conjuring Orton’s contemplative alt-folk and even the timeless wisdom of Joni Mitchell—sometimes within the same song (as on the album-ending title track). Throughout it all, there’s a class to these songs, a beauty to them, and to the transportative quality of Ternheim’s sometimes breathy, sometimes sweet voice.

“In terms of lyrics, I try to stay pretty simple and clear when I write,” she says. “Some feelings are impossible to describe in words, that’s where music enters the equation. I want music and lyrics to feel like one single entity”
Growing up outside of Stockholm, Ternheim wasn’t even ten years old when she started writing songs, having realized that melody was all that was needed for such a task, not instruments. She wrote fairy tales, songs about “everything and nothing, just as I do today.”
Between her tenth and eleventh birthdays, her parents bought her a guitar—even though she wanted a piano, she says with a laugh—and after learning three chords, she began writing on guitar.
But it wasn’t until she spent time abroad, living in Atlanta, Georgia, that she upped her game. It was there where she played with a band for the first time and heard her songs filled out by instrumentation for the first time. With that band, Sova, she gigged “wherever people would have us”— coffee shops, bars, house parties, open-mics.
The same opportunities weren’t as available in Stockholm. Yet, when she came home, she formed a new band there, and hit pretty much “every basement in Stockholm,” and plenty of “small crappy clubs.”
While Halfway to Fivepoints is her first full-length album to be released in the U.S., it is something of hybrid of the Ternheim music available in her native country and across Europe. In 2004, Sweden’s Stockholm Records released her debut, Somebody Outside, featuring then-new songs and songs she wrote as a teen.
Born out of longing—longing to cut an album, to see these songs recorded, and to finally to make music her life—the disc was what she calls her “lovechild”: “They were songs that I wrote when I was living by myself; they were my steady companions. There are ten songs on there that come from ten different times and ten different places but somehow it all sticks together.”
Her second full-length album, Separation Road, followed in 2006, and garnered two Swedish Grammy wins in the best female artist and best lyricist categories. Both albums were released with complete second discs, with acoustic and alternate versions of songs on the first disc. In between, Ternheim has released a string of Swedish and European singles and EPs full of covers and originals. Some of the songs on Halfway to Fivepoints are culled from those releases as well.
While turning her into a rising star within her own country, Ternheim’s releases have also earned her support slots on bills with Okkervil River, Patti Smith and Joseph Arthur throughout Europe.
Now writing music for the production of The Light, which being staged in Gothenberg, Sweden, she says that picking the songs that comprise Halfway to Fivepoints, wasn’t an easy task: “I see it as sort of an introduction. It gives you some kind of picture of what I do.”
“I want people to listen over and over again. What you hear the first time might not be what you hear the tenth time. There are layers to it. And I also hope that it brings you away somewhere and gives you a chance to project your own ideas and dreams onto the songs. I have my own stories, and that’s where I always start, but songs can be bigger than people and even life sometimes, because you can fill them with so much.”