Nanna Oland Fabricius is poised to be the next multitalented artist to take the music industry by storm. And we’re not talking hyperbole. The former ballerina designs her own costumes and instruments, in addition to writing her bouncy electropop under the moniker of Oh Land.
But despite all that talent, the gorgeous Dane is quite modest about transitioning to the music world from the dance world after a back injury prevented her from continuing as professional ballerina.
“That was a very tough time for me, because I felt completely rootless and I’d spent 10 years of my life thinking I knew who I was and where I was going to be — but suddenly all that changed,” Fabricius explains. “When I started making music, I didn’t even know how to play one chord. It was just something that I had a very strong intuition about in a way that I don’t think I’ve had with anything else.”
The ease with which Fabricius makes her music is obvious, considering the infectious way her hooks can implant themselves in the brain. But such an effect is probably the result of how she writes her music in the first place.
“Every time I walk by a construction building, I hear it as a rhythm,” she says. “I guess I’m a little crazy with sounds, because I hear rhythms in everything. In the beginning when I moved [to New York], I felt like it was always keeping me awake, because there was so much to explore — the police car sirens, the traffic — that whole wall of sound made a mythological meaning to me, like the sailor on the sea who hears the sirens and gets a call to go and do something.”
