Meet Asbjørn

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Asbjørn. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Asbjørn below.

Asbjørn, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

When I stepped into the music industry, 19 years old, a lot of gate-keepers wanted to change me and claimed there wasn’t room for a man like me in the pop landscape. What they didn’t know was that I was an expert in bully-tactics and that their attempt came off like a cowardly version of the sucker-punches I used to receive in school.

I grew up in a provincial town in Jutland, Denmark. I had long hair, loved Spice Girls, talking about emotions and making choreographies with the girls during recess. It was very clear that my school-mates thought something was wrong with me and I learned to run real fast. Luckily I could run home to my parents and the art-school that we lived at and where they taught music. The students were young adults, creative, experimenting and they showed me that I could fight for the right to be whoever I wanted to be.

Though the bullying at school continued throughout my time there, it never cracked me. I found my resilience in people who loved me, who wanted the best for me, instead of believing the ones who didn’t. I found resilience in music, creating the safe-space that I needed for myself and my career has been about extending that to whoever might need it too.

I survived school and the music industry by being myself and standing up for what I believe in. So when the label-bosses told me to change, I said ‘no thanks’ and started my own record-label. Pop-stardom is not the goal, free expression is.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

As a self-proclaimed pop-rebel, I’ve always been obsessed with pop-music as a platform to create change, conversation and unite people. Feeling seen and heard in my own heroes music has been an invaluable supportsystem in my own life and being that support for others is my main definition of success in my career. One of the ways I do that is by playing between 50-100 shows a’year on Danish highschools, giving a huge pop-show and starting dialogue with the teens about identity freedom. I want things to be different than in my own school time and this is my way of contributing directly to that development.

At the moment I’m releasing my 4th album ‘The Secret Our Bodies Hold’. I always try to attack pop music from new angles and this time I’ve danced the music to life, translating my own movement into production-elements, with all the unpredictability and shifting energies a moving body can create.

In the making of this album I completely let go of commercial success as a goal. I needed to create a better work-environment for myself that was driven by intuition, emotion and passion and thinking about myself from the outside kind of came in the way of that. I extended that thought to the release-schedule too cos I have NO FREAKING IDEA what a hit-song is today and I don’t think anyone does. So I decided to just release songs from the album with a 5 week gap in between, without thinking much about the commercial potential but instead focusing on giving my listeneres a deep dive into all the experiments I’ve cooked up in my little pop lab. The funny thing is; despite my efforts to avoid playing by the commercial rules, this roll-out has received more mainstream recognition than I’ve tried before, which is a pretty beautiful affirmation to keep breaking, bending and pushing the boundaries of pop.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

(Sorry in advance if this bit comes off self-help-corny)

1. You have to be pretty brutally honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses and what kind of person you are to create longevity in a career. For example, even though I love and admire a lot of huge popstars, I can never fully compare myself to them. I can adapt certain approaches, both in songwriting, music-production and career-strategies but my creative brain is fundamentally not very mainstream. It took me a while to realize that I had find my own lane and accept that it’s a slower one, but now I’m running on an energy that is sustainable to me.

2. Being aware of my values and integrating them in my work. These values are my fuel when things don’t go my way.

3. A no is not a no before it’s really a no (not applying to consent, in which case a no is definitely a no, to be clear). I’ve become increasingly annoying through-out my career and started deliberately misunderstanding ‘no’ as ‘convince me’, which I think has to do with having worked on the first two skills; there’s less fear of rejection once you know who you are and why you do what you do.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

Creative brain versus business brain. The switch between the two is a challenge for me these days and something I have to navigate; I’m releasing music constantly, which goes hand in hand with a lot of admin work and PR, which often has a degree of seeing myself from the outside and becoming quite aware of how people perceive me and the music.

In the beginning of my career I hated this part of the job, but through the years I’ve realized the necessity in that change of perspective. A life of only being creative is my worst nightmare! I’m relying heavily of structure in my everyday-life, trying to make my life with music as much into a “normal” job as possible. This disciplined approach allows me to sometimes just be a record label boss, looking at my career with a more logical and unemotional gaze, than my artist-self is able to. I often experience internal discussions between the two and sometimes they come up with great compromises, like a rather untraditional release-schedule, a video-concept or alternative touring-formats.

However… the CEO has to leave space for the pop-rebel to explore emotions without self-control, discipline and awareness of others. Sometimes it takes me a while to find that space and with an increasingly busier schedule, I sometimes don’t get there in time. Maybe I just have to forgive myself that I can’t be everything at once or maybe the CEO and pop-rebel will come up with some kind of compromise soon.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asbjornmusic
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/asbjornmusic
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/asbjornmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/asbjornmusic

Image Credits

Sebastian Thorsted
Amalie Livi
Camilla Trine
Palm Empire
Pete Lamberto