Ionnalee’s Bilingual Gambit to Hear the End of Every Song

The battlefield of pop music is littered with the bodies of abandoned personas. Musicians have often adopted guises to convey thoughts and emotions from a different perspective, sometimes unbound from whatever image they’ve been painted as in the media.

Yet for every pinnacle of expression like Ziggy Stardust, there’s a neglected concept like Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones. For every eye-catching warrior like Sasha Fierce, there’s the charred remains of the overambitious Chris Gaines. Pop music personas are endlessly fascinating, as they give insights into the mindsets of any artist and show us what they could—or could not—achieve outside of their regular gig.

In 2024, Jonna Lee (aka ionnalee) is doing something wholly unusual, bordering on unprecedented: she’s condensing her personas together.

After trying to make it as a solo artist in her native Sweden in the late 2000s, her 2009 pivot to the mysterious iamamiwhoami project gained her international attention. Under this guise, she put out several blistering, unbound iterations of her boundary-breaking brand of electropop, each record accompanied by a matching visual album. In 2018, she pivoted to a solo artist once more, but now under the more pointed, adopted name of “ionnalee”. She’s released newer albums under each moniker, but nowadays, Lee doesn’t see much difference in her projects.

“It’s not only the audiovisual album format that is iamamiwhoami,” notes Jonna Lee when speaking to PopMatters. “It is a very particular creative process that is complicated to explain. But that process has shifted now. I feel free to use my own name now, no matter the format. To work with the name iamamiwhoami, which is an abstract YouTube account and not a band name from the start, to explain our extensive past with all our amazing creations and backstories to people, the viral beginning, is like dragging a big rock around sometimes, blocking the view of the future, that has been very hard in moments. Explaining this to a new listener is close to impossible.

“I’d rather they find out themselves rather than someone attempting to summarize it in a press release — ‘cos you can’t,” she continues. “My past work is always in me. I love what we’ve made, but we’re still making great music and visuals after 15 years of audiovisuals. We’re still working together. It’s happening here and now. Some fans think iamamiwhoami is ‘something else’, or that I am ‘someone else’ when in the shape of a project, but I’m not. It’s the same Jonna. So basically, here I am.”

After dropping the quarantine-era live event Konsert in 2021 that showed off new angles of her already-impressive songbook, Lee dropped a pair of mirrored standalone singles: “Summer Never Ended the Damage Was All Mine” and its Swedish-language counterpart “Sommaren är min och jag kommer tillbaka”. While Lee has never been shy of her Nordic heritage, this release would soon set her on the path to a bold new era in her sound, dropping English- and Swedish-language albums in perfect parallel: Close Your Eyes and Blund.

“I wrote ‘Sommaren’ and had that title line written down as a reminder of how I wanted it to sound, where the consonants should be rhythmically divided in the sentence to have the right swing, and then I jokingly said to Claes Björklund, my musical collaborator ‘Maybe I should just write this song in Swedish then,’ which I then did without any pressure whatsoever,” Lee explains when she traces the lineage between these releases.

“I thought it’d be a one-off, but then the whole tone in the language that was created when using my ‘English language thinking’ in Swedish wording became something special, and I noticed others around me liked it too. As I started moving back in 2020, when I took over an old cabin from the 1840s in my old childhood neighborhood with this old garden, something clicked in the native language department.

“‘Sommaren’ is the first song in the lucid dreaming theme that these two albums have, but the English version is not a direct translation. It doesn’t belong on Close Your Eyes. It’s hard to explain, but it makes sense to me creatively.”

While Lee’s adult life has been on public display — from her diagnosis of a thyroid disorder in the late 2010s to the birth of her child Bauer on the week of the release of her 2022 iamamiwhoami comeback Be Here Soon — it’s Close Your Eyes / Blund that feels like her most personal release to date. In a statement shared via Instagram, not only did Lee note that this record was designed as a direct sequel to her buoyant 2014 pop effort Blue, but it was made during a time of great turmoil, where she noted people that she loved were suffering while raising Bauer and dealing with several lonely nights (which any new parent can relate to).

“The farmhouse studio is in the making, but it’s a slow process,” ionnalee notes on the development of both records. “I think what had the most impact on me making this album was that a close family member became terminally ill [in] late 2022. Those closest to her tried to keep our hopes up for the one-and-a-half years that she went through absolute hell. Days were so heavy, like bottomless dark in winter, and during this time, I spent a lot of time alone with my then six-month-old baby in a rented apartment in Stockholm, where I still have my label studio (TWIMC) as my partner was away for work.

“I’ve lived in Stockholm for 22 years but just left, and I felt like a stranger walking the streets. I saw my neighbors on the street but didn’t live there anymore. The move has been a huge transition. So, as my baby was sleeping at night, I was able to write this album in a stranger’s apartment. Some songs I whispered in demo vocals to not wake him, like ‘Not Your Cherry’ and ‘Darkness Is a Real Place’, which is Camilla’s song. She recently lost the struggle with cancer, and whilst that has been a heartbreaking journey, the music needed to be hopeful. I wanted to feel that purpose even when there really is no hope to give. It had me looking back and forward in ways I haven’t before.”

While the record contains lyrical themes of darkness and distance (“I’m not using your worn vocabulary / It’s not my song, you sing it,” she notes on “Not Your Cherry”), the music is lively, colorful, and fully bodied. While the harsh synth textures and occasionally industrial interludes of early iamamiwhoami records have long since ebbed, Close Your Eyes/Blund feels like a deliberate embrace of her past sonics, using tight drum loops, lilting synth patterns, and her choir-like voice echoing in canyons of reverb to anchor her bilingual lyrics musically. Her music has gone through multiple evolutions in the past two decades, and these two albums feel like a “return to form” of her early, musically wild days under the iamamiwhoami moniker but imbued with a newfound sense of emotional maturity in her writing.

“I just think sometimes music makes itself,” ionnalee explains. “As Be Here Soon was so earthy and stripped, nude, this time I needed color, shimmer, to be dreaming away. Some of the earthiness is still there, I think. I absolutely look at my whole body of work and let it be part of each new step. That power was so needed, and me and [producer] Claes Björklund had lots of fun making this album.”

It’s a powerful listen, but one that is more indebted to records by Western artists than those from her homeland.

“Growing up, my mom’s vinyl collection was my only source of music, besides what public service radio was playing,” Lee says when describing her music tastes growing up. “The music in her collection wasn’t self-chosen, obviously, but it still made an impact. Chaka Khan, Prince, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, David Bowie. I learned to love the music, though it was a bit too mature for my young ears. Very thankful for that now. Madonna was my first big self-discovered hero, both her songs and boldness, as I watched her videos on MTV when visiting my dad. She stayed with me for a long time.

“Björk‘s ‘Human Behaviour’ video made an impact on me as a kid. Mariah Carey and a bit of Whitney, too, on the vocal side; I was bullied in music college for having big vocal ambitions, thanks to that. High-pitched wailing didn’t fly in the Swedish countryside in the 1990s. Pet Shop Boys. My dad also had great taste in music, with lots of melodic, organic synths. Very little music sung in Swedish stuck with me, though. Then, the Spice Girls changed everything for this 13-year-old. I think F.R. David deserves more love.”

Yet, in embracing her influences, the need for expression across two languages proved a distinct challenge. While ‘Sommaren’ proved some of her concepts are better expressed in other languages, putting out two albums simultaneously gives the full depth of her art while reaching the totality of her fanbase. Splitting the difference between them was where her efforts truly paid off.

“Some of the Swedish-sung songs were so hard to make, and I realized early on that I won’t be able to convey the same message but to write a ‘second song’ instead,” ionnalee explains. “The English lyrics were written first. ‘Innocence of Sound’ is very different from ‘allting vill rinna ut i sand’, for example, which is much less hopeful, whilst ‘not your cherry’/ ‘ett minne’ is the same message sung in two different ways. Both versions have their thing. Some Swedish songs like ‘ur en klardröm’ and ‘ett minne’ are favorites, whilst some English-sung ones are as well. My cringe radar is extremely sensitive so there were a lot more moments of self-hate than usual in the writing process. You could say I threw myself out there with Blund.”

Both records are now out in the world, communicating her vision broadly while compressing her personas into a nebulous whole. When listening to “Darkness Is a Real Place”, a song about keeping your connection to those loved ones even if it’s songs that are holding those memories for you, Lee is joined in by “The Choir of My Dreams”, with Imogen Heap, Zola Jesus, Austra, Jennie Abrahamson, Nina Kinert, Sophia Somajo, and Tess Roby all blending their voices together for a sentimental pop moment. It’s, unsurprisingly, one of Lee’s favorite tracks on the record.

“This song is dear to me but also hard to touch right now, but I’ve never written a song like that for someone to say goodbye. I just wanted my dream vocalists to be on it, and they all said yes. Can you imagine each and every one of these voices together? Working on this production was incredibly challenging. Having all these incredible voices come in and out, shine through, get their space, and also become a unit. I loved every moment of the process but cried a lot through it.”

It’s funny: while iamamiwhoami and ionnalee have served as separate vehicles for Lee’s work, the fact that she now embraces both as the same shows that throughout her storied, powerful, and expectation-defying journey, she ends up coming back to Jonna Lee. The name may be stylized, and the artists may be listed separately on her record label website, but they all add up to the whole of who Jonna Lee is. In creating and exploring these personas, Lee ultimately came around to her most radical artistic form yet: her open, honest self.