Singer-songwriter Isak Danielson talks crushes, cigarettes, creative control and life beyond the ballads.
Smoking at the piano makes Swedish singer-songwriter Isak Danielson feel like Édith Piaf. It’s a fitting image for an artist whose music is steeped in old-school romanticism: grand vocals, doomed love affairs and heartbreak that demands, obviously, a poised cigarette at the piano.
“Don’t know if she smoked or played the piano,” he jokes, “but you know what I mean.”
Danielson first entered public view as a teenager, finishing third on Sweden’s X Factor in 2012. After spending two years in Britain studying vocal performance, he returned to Sweden and released his debut EP, Volume One, in 2015. Since then, his dramatic pop ballads have travelled well beyond Scandinavia, appearing in international television productions including Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger and carrying him onto stages across Europe and the US.
In conversation, Danielson is funny, candid and lightly chaotic. He talks about crushes and social awkwardness with the same lack of ceremony he brings to what has now become a billion-stream career. It is this gap—between the operatic scale of the music and the offhand charm of the person making it—that makes Danielson difficult to reduce to the familiar image of the tortured balladeer.
His latest single, Stockholm, is typical of the emotional world listeners have come to associate with him. In a recent interview with Behind The Blinds, Danielson said he wrote the song during COVID, while deeply in love with someone he knew he could not build a life with.
“It was one of those relationships that was never going to work,” he said. “A very destructive one.”
The song imagines encountering that person years later, a situation many of us can relate to, or at the very least imagine.
“It’s about how someone who was once incredibly close can suddenly feel like a stranger,” he explained. “You wonder what it’ll feel like the next time you see them, whether seeing their face will bring everything back.”
Danielson was not immediately convinced the song should be released. “I think some songs just need more time,” he said. “They grow on you.”
This strikes as a rather patient attitude in an industry organised around constant output, where songs are expected to arrive alongside teasers, fragments and campaigns. Danielson’s decision to leave Stockholm alone until it felt ready seems to reflect one of the central values of his career: control.
Asked what remaining independent has allowed him to protect, he keeps his answer simple.
“Integrity, money and my creative vision.”
There is little romantic posturing around the idea. Independence, in Danielson’s account, is not an identity designed to position him against the machinery of pop. It is practical. It allows him to make the work he wants, on terms he can live with, while sustaining the career he imagined for himself.
“Numbers may excite, but they don’t define me,” he says of reaching more than a billion streams. “It has just given me the opportunity to carry on making music for a living, which has always been my dream.”
The figures are substantial nonetheless. With two songs surpassing 100 million Spotify streams and close to a billion streams across platforms, Danielson has built an unusually global audience on his own terms. For all the scale implied by those figures, Danielson says success has not dramatically altered how others treat him.
“Not much has changed really,” he says. “If I’m lucky, a bouncer recognises me and lets me pass the queue at a club.”
That relative anonymity may sit strangely alongside the scale of his audience, but it suits the music. Danielson’s songs retain the feeling of something private, written less for an audience than for one person. He tries to preserve that intimacy even in large venues.
“I go inwards and try to picture the person I’m singing about,” he says, “or someone else that’s taken up the romantic part of my brain lately.”
Danielson’s willingness to use private experience as material is unusually direct. He has included voice notes in songs, used real names and drawn openly from relationships, yet the exposure this entails does not seem to unsettle him.
“Honestly, I don’t really care,” he told Behind The Blinds. “The more personal I can be, the better.”
For someone who admits to overthinking almost everything else, music appears to be the exception. “Being honest and vulnerable in my music is something that is very important to me and always will be,” he told us. Keeping his relationships private outside the work, he adds, is part of what allows that honesty to remain intact.
Away from the emotional intensity of the songs, his life sounds considerably less dramatic. Danielson’s pleasures are fairly uncomplicated. His perfect day off, he says, is “taking a stroll, having a coffee and a cigarette, talking to a cute guy and having a nice dinner with the band.”
The city in which he would most like to do all this is Copenhagen, narrowly beating Amsterdam. In summer, he can be found at Reffen, the sprawling waterfront food market. In winter, he prefers Blågårdsgade in Nørrebro.
For all his ease moving between cities, one very Swedish habit follows him everywhere.
“Avoiding eye contact with strangers and being socially awkward follows me everywhere.”
It is a neat reminder that, for all the emotional directness of his music, Danielson himself is not always quite so forthcoming in everyday life.
As our exchange wraps up, we reach this magazine’s favourite question: what would he not like to die wondering about?
“If I have said everything I wanted to say to the people I love in my life.”
It feels fitting for someone whose work has always been so personal. For Danielson, success seems to matter less as a measure of how many people have listened than whether the people closest to him know what he wanted to say.
