She just won Eurovision Song Contest, but says that she hates music. She likes men but could as well fall in love with a women. She hugs you one second and the next lecture you. There is a many ways to start a phone-call when you talk with someone for the first time. Few people master the art to get a stranger in the other end to feel comfortable and relaxing. Loreen is not one of them.

When she yells ”Where are you?” in the phone it’s like being yelled at by a big sister because you got lost at Ikea.
– I…, I start.
– Don’t tell me that we have different address and are stuck in two ends of the town. She moans.
– I can s…, I try and start to walk over to her with one hand up.
– How do you look like?
– White hat, I see y…
– Where? She shouts and spins around.
We are four meters away from each other when she spots me. She smiles widely and winks at me like she’s trying to direct a F14 Tomcat in the opening scene in Top Gun.
– I see you! She says happily, talking into the phone.

The next ten minutes becomes a little, messy… Loreen is the type of person that hugs you one second and the next lecture you with the vocabulary of a character in Sopranos.

She says that a good song is ”Just love, man” and the next describes her show with tightened fists and dark eyes. ”It must be like Terminator, you know?”

Lorine Zineb Noka Talhaoui, or Loreen as we know her had her breakthrough when she came 4th in the Swedish edition of Idol. Then she disappears. Seven years later, 2011, she appeared from nothing in Melodifestivalen. 
The song My Heart Is Refusing Me lost in the second chance, but became a huge radio hit. In this years Melodifestivalen she was a favorite all the way with her song Euphoria, and the Västerås girl with Moroccan roots suddenly becomes Sweden’s biggest artist.

The 28-year-old women is surrounded by a strange mystery. She choreographed her performance in Melodifestivalen with an asian martial arts influence. She could spend a half interview talking about Sufism, the deep spiritual path of Islam.
Nobody seems to be able to find out what she really did between Idol 2004 and Melodifestivalen 2011.

You disappeared from the peoples mind for a while.
– Good!
Loreen takes out a bag of wolf berries from her hand bag big as a junior hockey trunk. She throws in the red berries, famous for their healthy effect, in her mouth in groups of four.
– You want some?
No thank you.
She nods understanding.
– They taste despicable but you feel so damn good!
 She laughs, that kind of unruly laughter that bounces between that bounces between the tables as if it tries to overturn porcelain. Her answers are long and honest. She doesn’t only answer the questions.
Example – like the one about that even if she have become famous for Idol and Melodifestivalen she still keeps so much ”cred” in the business.
– I don’t like the word cred. What is ”cred”?
”Credibility” then.
– Yeah! Credibility! Why do you use ”cred”? Fuck cred.
Doesn’t cred come ”credibility”. Swedish word ”trovärdighet”.
– Well then! Love it! Go.
She waves with with her arms and the wolf berries rains over both of us.
– But what is credibility? People are different things. Darkness and lightness. You see me in Melodifestivalen, but before that I was at a meditation camp for ten days in total silence. Just me and the silence, you understand?

She leans over the table with eyes like an interrogator in The Wire.
– Have you been to something like that?
No.
– The third day is the worst. The silence… people can’t take it. That’s when it will be determined if you control your brain or if your brain controls you. 
I don’t think I would like it.
– That’s why you need it, man! She throws in more 
more wolfberries. Loreen leans back and suddenly looks thoughtful.
– What was the question?
Honestly, I’m not certain anymore.
– You asked about Idol, didn’t you??
Not really.
– My sister talked me into it. I didn’t get anything.
Did they try to control you?
– Of course they did! But they have their program. Everyone need to pay their bills at the end of the month, right? But the longer the program proceeded they worse I thought I sounded. 
She looks down, rejects a phone call on her cell. She looks serious.

– But my God, Idol taught me so much about myself. Being a performer is like being a painter. It’s got to come from yourselves. You understand? It’s like when you write articles, you would not like it if someone would say: ”No, write like this instead”. Right? Fuck them! Right? You are doing your shit.
I’m director at the magazine. That is exactly what I’m doing.
– Well well, but when you do your shit.
This is my shit.
– Okey, okey, okey. Are you certain that you don’t want wolf berries.
Yes.
– Okey.

Have you always wanted to do music?
– I don’t like the word ”music”.
Sorry?
– I like “sound”. I never dreamed of being Whitney Houston as a kid. I just got in a trance by sounds, like the Sufi in Morocco. I was a little oddball.
In what way?
– I was precocious. Grew up fast. My mom got me when she was 16, she had been in Sweden for a year. I had 5 smaller siblings. I was the ”little mom”, I didn’t have anything in common with the children my age. I thought they were so immature so I was in my little bubble. Locked me in the darkness of the bathroom because it was acoustic there. I skipped school, got into churches just to hear how the song sounded. I got into a lot of trouble.
Do you have any contact with your father?
– He moved to Spain when I was little. I.. Eh, I don’t know. It was too cold for him here. He died when I was 13.
Do you still feel like an oddball?
– Yes, but I have accepted it now. We all are oddballs, some are just better at hiding it.

Loreen is born in Sweden, but says that she feels like a foreigner.
– But in Morocco I’m super Swedish: ”Where is the cheese? Where is the butter?” Haha!
During the following minutes she quotes both the Koran and the Bible. Calls herself ”spiritual” but ”absolutely not religious”.

She grew up in a ”liberal Muslim home, but with classical values”, which she early stretched the boundaries of. In a interview with the newspaper QX from last year she tells us about how she once in her teens took home a lesbian girl and said to her mother ”This is my friend, she likes girls and she will sleep over here.” In the same interview she said ”It would be wrong to say that I only like guys… I’m open.”
She shrugs her shoulders. Chews on the wolf berries.
– People want boxes to put everything and everyone in. But love is what love is. Maybe some people just falls in love with genitals, what do I know? Just pure physical attraction. But sometimes you fall in love… here. She puts her hand to her heart.
– That’s me anyway. Man or women, who cares? Love is where you find it. It’s not like I’m sitting here and tell you who I’m fucking, but I don’t understand why you can’t talk about sexuality. As soon as people can’t categorize something, they reject it. That’s a bug in humanity.
I ask if it feels weird to get this type of personal questions.
– Yes, but we’re sitting here. Should we talk about my favorite color? Come on… But there is stuff that is private. Like for instance when you ask about my dad, you can see that my energy just becomes… She tighten her fist.
– Then you can see that I don’t want to talk about it. Because maybe I’m not done with it myself.
It’s the first time during the interview that Loreen is quiet more than a half a minute.
– What did we talk about before this? She says eventually. Idol, right?

Yes. Where did you go those seven years.
– I seeked myself. The only thing Idol taught me was which person I don’t want to be.
I worked with different producers, tried to find my voice. Went to New York and Florida. Hung with dark song writers and producers. Hunted my own expression.
Did you found it?
– Yes, but it took me seven years. I can’t become an artist because of the fame. It must be for me. I want to do it for the feeling in my cheast.
How did you earn money during this?
– I did TV. I know a TV-producer in New York, hung with her at her work, and then I slipped into the TV-business in Sweden as a component producer and director.
What did you do?
– Reality series: “Food emergency”, “Wife free” and “The boyfriend academy”. Haha, my God! But you earn hell of a lot of money doing TV. I took everything and bought time in the record studio.
To record what?
– My shit! I financed my own education. Payed good people and took everything in.
In seven years?
– I’m a slow bastard! Damn. I’m sure I have hundreds of recorded songs with crazy expensive productions laying around. Once I rented a symphony orchestra of 30 people to add string instrument on a ballad I had written.
For who?
– For me.
That must have cost a fortune.
– Man, you can’t even imagine what it costed!
But you never published it?
– Published it? I haven’t even recorded it to people.
Why not?
– Sometimes you got to do things for yourself.
She smiles. Her eyes grows to lakes.
– But do you get I… I wrote the song from scratch. Did everything myself. Payed for the whole recording. Did all the notes. And then I sat them at my chair and heard the orchestra play my song. That was my gift to myself.

Måns Zelmerlöw‘s company logo often appeared in the newspapers presentation of Loreen before Melodifestivalen even though the two of them only worked together during a short period of time with the song My Heart Is Refusing Me.
– Journalists are often hung up on that because it is a good story that I am ”Måns Zelmerlöw’s artist”, she smiles.
Does that bother you?
– Haha, certainly not. I love Måns. He’s an air sign, you know.
No.
– Air sign! Full of energy all the time! Just happiness! What star sign are you?
Gemini.
– Måns too!
Ok.
– My Heart Is Refusing Me, no record company believed in it. So I was thinking about letting it go but then Måns heard it and became excited and wanted to start a company. I thought “Cool, lets try it out”. We needed a platform for it, that’s when Melodifestivalen showed up.
You feel like a unexpected duo.
– I have no social codes. If you are good you are good, if you are an idiot you are an idiot. I don’t care what close you wear.
It was the gay audience that first picked up the song after the competition.
– Yes, of course they were. The gay audience is always the early adopters. They understood that it was more than just a dance song, that it was a nice story. They are not afraid for things that is different, so they adopted this oddball in the family: “Loreen is with us now, no one will pick on her!” haha!
Concerning my question about cred: Melodifestivalen has a certain label to have artist that are…
– Lame?
Commercial. That’s the way you’re heading…
– When things doesn’t work out for me?
No, but it is……
– An ego-boo? There is a lot of Hubba-bubba in Melodifestivalen. Soulless and beige. But every act is an individual. Can I do my thing? Yes. Can I make my own show? Yes. Will I get an audience? Count me in!

I look at my notes. Loreen leans forward and peeks at them.
– This is a weird interview, right?
It’s not completely organized.
Loreen put her hands in front of her and look dream like.
– I thought that you could start with… “Loreen: She’s schizophrenic.”
She starts to hum “Loreen is schizoph-renic”, as if it’s a exasperating children song.
What do you do on your spare time?
– Being with myself. I like being alone. I work a lot, and know… everybody. I’m over social. But I have about four real friends. If I have some spare time I prefer to go to a café by myself. Just sit there and stare in the air doing nothing.

There will not be a lot of that to come. On May 25 Loreen will compete with Euphoria in the semifinal of Eurovision in Azerbaijan. When I ask how the days after Melodifestivalen looked like she answers:
– Well… shit… heeectic! I haven’t thought about going to Baku this spring. I actually had plans!
On TV you didn’t even seemed to know where Baku was.
– I thought it was in like Caribbean!
You wish.
– Now I will go to Azerbaijan. I will probably say something stupid about their view of women’s rights and the next day newspaper will say. “Loreen is missing” Haha!
Have you read about the political situation?
– I try. I’ve asked my record company to put up meetings with people from different human rights organizations.
That’s not directly be the first thing you hear from a winner of Melodifestivalen.
– I might not be able to change anything but music is a powerful force. The competition is a huge thing for the people over there. I will be interviewed. It would be irresponsible not learning anything about the country or not trying to say something if I have the chance.
Do many want to talk to you when you’re out?
– Are you kidding me! And not just children, old people too. They come up and want to say that they like you. I’m about to cry all the time. I usually use public transports. Yesterday a usual 15 minutes long ride took two hours
Have you become “People crazy?”
– I don’t know. I don’t like that word. This time people liked it. Next time it might be different. I am who am.

You can definitely say that. In a time when most artists sees Melodifestivalen as a open door and stands ready to release an album five minutes after they have flourished. It feels undeniably typical Loreen that her album wont be released until… September.
Loreen mostly longs for the silence in the meditation treat during the meeting.
– The record company must be out of their mind, but I need to get away soon. Clear the energy, you know?
She eats the last wolf berry and folds the bag.
So still an oddball?
– Always an oddball, man. You know that.

• Original text: http://gallery.lovely-loreen.com/thumbnails.php?album=539
• Translation: Amanda | http://12points-to-loreen.tumblr.com/post/84545853836/caf%C3%A9-interview-part-1
• Photogallery: http://gallery.lovely-loreen.com/thumbnails.php?album=539