Pitchfork: How does it feel to be putting out a record this personal?

Björk: I’m a little nervous. Definitely. Especially coming from an album like Biophilia, which was about the universe. This is more of a traditional singer/songwriter thing. When I started writing, I fought against it. I thought it was way too boring and predictable. But most of the time, it just happens; there’s nothing you can do. You have to let it be what it is.

Pitchfork: Did you know this was the record that was going to come out of you?

B: No, no. With most of my albums, I don’t really know what I’m doing for the first year or so. It’s afterwards, when it’s almost ready and I start mixing and doing the photographs, that I can see it for what it is. With this album, it was a big surprise. When I listened to the songs, it is almost like a diary.

Pitchfork: It sounds like an album about partnership, motherhood, and family—things that bond us—and your worst fears about them...

B: [chokes up] I’m sorry.

Pitchfork: The minute your children are born, underneath every thought is: How do I protect them? How do I keep this family surrounded in love? Then you quickly figure out that you can’t always protect them. All of that is on this album, very nakedly.

B: That’s why I was nervous. I’ve never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi Annan—I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe. If you can make nature and technology friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That’s what women do a lot—they’re the glue between a lot of things. Not only artists, but whatever job they do: in the office, or homemakers. Biophilia was like my own personal slapstick joke, showing I had to reach so long—between solar systems—to connect everything. It’s like the end scene in Mary Poppins, when she’s made everyone friends, and the father realizes that kids are more important than money—and [then] she has to leave. [chokes up] It’s a strange moment. Women are the glue. It’s invisible, what women do. It’s not rewarded as much.

When I did this album—it all just collapsed. I didn’t have anything. It was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life. The only way I could deal with that was to start writing for strings; I decided to become a violin nerd and arrange everything for 15 strings and take a step further than what I’ve done before. I had like 20 technological threads of things I could have done, but the album couldn’t be futuristic. It had to be singer/songwriter. Old-school. It had to be blunt. I was sort of going into the Bergman movies with Liv Ullmann when it gets really self-pitying and psychological, where you’re kind of performing surgery on yourself, like, What went wrong?

Then I got really lucky. I’m not religious but I must have earned some good karma at some point, because as one thing got taken away from me, Alejandro [Ghersi, aka Arca] came. [smiles, tears up] I don’t want to brag, but I get a lot of requests to work with musicians and a lot of time I say, "I’m very flattered, but it’s not right.” But he approached me almost two years ago, and it was just the most perfect timing ever. I’d just written like a scrillion songs and done these string arrangements, and the subject matter was so difficult that I wanted to move away from it. Then he came on a visit to Iceland, and we just had the best time ever. He’s the most generous, funny person I’ve ever met. It was such a contrast, the most fun music-making I’ve ever had, with the most tragic subject matter. Somehow, he could just take it on.

Usually I do half of the beats and then I will get someone like Matthew Herbert to help me with the chorus of the song, or another guy to help me do other bits. But this time around, maybe because it’s a relationship album about the duality between you and that person, doing a whole album with just one person made perfect sense. Towards the end, we needed someone to mix it, so the only other person who came into it was a guy called Haxan Cloak. Literally, just the three of us. Really simple. That’s been really fun.

Alejandro knew all of my albums from his childhood—apparently, I’m big in Venezuela. [laughs] He knew my songs better than me. I would say, "Oh, can you make that third beat like…" And he’d say, "Oh, you mean like the third break of song five of album two?" He was like a library of my music. At first, I was really defensive; I’m not good with people who are fans. But it just wasn’t that energy at all. It was a really healthy energy, like a student. Suddenly, I got to be a strange kind of teacher. I would literally sit next to him and, for the first few songs, the heartbreak songs, I would be the backseat driver. I would describe all the beats, and then he would do them and add stuff. We did it together. I’ve never done that before. So I just sat next to him for weeks, and we did the whole album. It’s the quickest I’ve ever worked. He’s so incredibly talented and so eager to learn. It’s one of those crazy things in life where people from opposite ends meet, and you’ve got so much to teach each other. It’s really equal, what you’ve got to give to each other. It’s been a strange album—the most painful one I’ve done, but also the most magic one.