Thinking about how the album is structured, it feels the first half is more about exploring this mind-expanding feeling of interconnectedness and then the second half turns a bit more inward, talking about identity and the challenges of being an individual in this world. Did you want the album to feel like you were taking people on a journey in that way, or is it just a coincidence? 

It wasn’t deliberate, but that has also been my own journey for these past five or six years of making the record. I feel quite far removed, in a way, from everything that happened around pregnancy and the epiphanies I had about life and time and connectedness with everything. 

Of course, as my daughter got bigger and that out-of-body feeling sort of faded away, I became more my old self again. And with that comes back the same kind of personal problems I had before. Not the same as before, but it is funny how, throughout the pregnancy and first two years of motherhood, I didn’t really think about those things at all. It was a very, very strange experience and I wonder how it was for others, and what the science says about it.

I want to talk about “the age of islands” that you sing about in “No Such Thing as Silence”, which kind of feels like a very apt description of modern life. Do you think that idea was something that was kind of left over from, or grew out of, the album that you were making about technology? 

Yeah, maybe it was, because that song is not so much linked to the whole expansion of the mind feeling of the rest of the album.

I think, as humans, it can be so hard for us to understand each other. We like to think that it’s all about communication, that as long as we are expressing our needs, and so on, we are doing all we can for a certain relationship. But I think there is so much more going on between humans than we can possibly express, and silence is a part of that too.

I love to write songs about things that are unspoken and are beyond language, because I think that those things are such a big part of our lives. With this song, it’s a very personal thing and that’s not something I feel like I have mastered yet. I’m not Leonard Cohen, you know? He was so good at putting images and language to all the strange and powerful dynamics that can happen between human beings. In my own way, this song is me trying to describe the power of silence and the hold it can have over us, and how other people’s loneliness can become ours as well.

My mind went straight to "Famous Blue Raincoat” when you said that, one of my all-time favourite songs.

Oh yeah, it’s one of mine too. Oh my god, that song makes me cry.

I really like the way you write about silence here. It makes it feel like a very physical thing: something you can wear, and something you can cover someone else in.

Yeah, you totally can. It's really such a powerful thing. We know that words can be as painful as being physically hit by somebody – they can have the same effect on the brain – and I think that silence does the same thing too. It’s so strange how much we are affected by each other, even if we never exchange words. 

Would you say this song was a painful one to write?

Yeah, a little bit. I think so. It definitely wasn’t as much fun to write as some of the others, like “Laymelli” and “Jenn’s on the Way”, which I had a lot of fun writing plots for. Those songs were more about abstract ideas but with “No Such Thing as Silence” – which, by the way, is very tricky for a Danish person to say so I’ve been trying to avoid it – it was so much more difficult to write about because it’s personal. That’s always the case for me when something hits close to home, and it's something that's not really resolved.

I’m intrigued as well by the closing track “Faustian Deal”, which you mentioned earlier. This one feels like you’re turning a critical eye on your desire or need for transformation, sort of re-evaluating your relationship with ambition and creative intensity. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

No, no, that’s totally correct. I feel like all my life has just been about focusing on the next project and the project after that, and I’ve never taken the time to stop and celebrate, you know, finishing an album and doing it all by myself. I’ve worked and worked and worked and then just gone straight on tour, then home to start a new album. 

That was how I lived in my twenties and all through my thirties. But since I had my daughter, I’ve been asking myself “What am I actually doing?” because it’s really a very strange thing to try and understand where this kind of ambition comes from. I was also thinking about the driving force behind other people’s ambition. What is it that they want to reach and why? I mean, I don’t have the answer for myself, but I think it is a little bit absurd that we allow it to fill up so much of everything.

Do you feel like you’ve had to confront a lot of conditioning from your early years, in terms of the way you learned to think about success and ambition in one way?

I don’t know. It’s a lot about trying to understand why I ended up working so hard, but I don’t have the answer. I feel like I just had so much to say, but it’s also very weird because I’ve always had a big fear of visibility. And I still have that. I’m trying to get over it still, and the only way to do that is to just do what you’re afraid of. 

It’s kind of ridiculous that I ended up releasing music under my own name. I don’t really love the idea of people knowing who I am, unless they are a friend of mine, so it makes the whole promo thing, and all the stuff musicians have to do to make a living from this, quite complicated. I want to fight it somehow, because the whole motivation behind my musical ambition has nothing to do with visibility. It’s a lot about curiosity, but I know deep down there’s something more than that.

It’s funny, when I was a kid I went to music school and was in the same class as these boys who were the kids of very famous Danish musicians. Very early on they were already talking very seriously about this magical world of successful musicians and mindblowing albums, and I think that must have had a huge influence on me as something to aspire to. But it cannot be the only thing. It’s something that I have to figure out.