Little bit more than blonde ambition - Lykke Li interview

As Swedish popette Lykke Li prepares for her Scottish debut, Aidan Smith discovers that almost no topic is off limits – except the fairly substantial subject of her homeland

LET'S get this lot out of the way right at the start: sex, saunas, suicide. And there will be no more mention of Ingmar Bergman, Greta Garbo, Ulrika Jonsson, the humble herring, and last and definitely least, Sven-Göran Eriksson. Lykke Li is Swedish but already in her short but promising pop life, she's fed up talking about her homeland.

"Why does everyone ask me about Sweden?" she says in the bar of a London hotel en route to her Scottish debut. What she probably means is: "Why does everyone resort to Swedish cliché and want to know if all my sisters are blonde, whether it's better to give than to receive regarding birch-twig beatings, and the name of my favourite Abba song?" Actually, I was interested in the Swedish characteristics she liked and disliked, but Lykke Li isn't playing. "Yes, we're obsessed with sex and death and, yes, all my girlfriends are slim and beautiful," she says with a chuckle, closely followed by a frown. "But I'm banned from saying anything negative about my country now." By the government? "No, by me. When I've said bad things I've been attacked and I didn't like that. So, as of today, no more Sweden."

Just 22, Lykke Li has all the poise you'd expect of someone dressed in shorts ("high-waisted, like from the '80s"), combat boots, striped T-shirt and glasses without lenses – "for style". She is friendly, but also crotchety, having spent all day in bed with a cold she's had for "a whole year" and requiring her to down "a thousand vitamins" to get through each gig. Lykke Li will claim today that she's "not even really Swedish – only two Christmases there, ever" but when she's alternately sunny and gloomy, she can sound very Swedish indeed.

Her life is so hectic because her first album is so good. Occasionally resorting to theremin, kazoo and megaphone, Youth Novels blends pop, folk and hip-hop – all of it topped off by a little-girl voice she doesn't especially like. On the track 'I'm Good, I'm Gone', she sings: "I'm breaking my back but it's all good." So she must be pleased with the album's success, yes? "Well, I think I'm quite successful, but I reckon my label are disappointed in me because I'm not selling as many records as Duffy. So here I am, still sick and touring again."

Lykke Li says she doesn't know any Swedish jokes, but she has a sense of humour which translates easily into English. "Success has no taste, you know," she says when I ask how her childhood dream of pop stardom equates with the reality. "I used to imagine I would be like Madonna spending all day in bed with my dancers, getting up to do a great show then partying with my famous boyfriend. For me, only the bed bit is the truth, but I'm there on my own, in an Ibis hotel, watching soap operas."

Lykke Li Zachrisson was born in the rural south of that country we're not supposed to mention, and her hippy-ish parents soon had her on the move: to Stockholm, Portugal for five years (with winters spent in India), then back to Sweden and on to Morocco, before she made her own break. Mum had sung in a punk band and hitchhiked round Afghanistan at her daughter's age, so she was not about to discourage her from pursuing the dream in New York, where Youth Novels was recorded.

Many of her songs chart the decline of relationship. "The record's about my loneliness," she says, "and it's still going on." Does she feel lonely on stage? "Even more, although it's sweet when girls say that songs like 'Little Bit' help them make sense of their own situation." Does she get a positive reaction from the boys? "Yes, but why is it that the only ones who ever approach me and say 'You're hot!' are always retarded?"

The album was produced by Björn Yttling of fellow Swedes Peter Bjorn and John, whose big hit with 'Young Folks' delayed the studio sessions, and ironically Lykke found herself among the old folks while waiting for her break. "I worked in an old people's home, which taught me how lucky I am, being 22." When you've emptied a few colostomy bags, you stop wishing you could sing "like Karen Dalton" and learn to be happy with your lot.

Young one minute, Lykke Li will invariably sound wise beyond her years the next – but never clichéd. "So Scotland," she says, "it's like Braveheart, yes?"

• Lykke Li plays Glasgow's Carling Academy on Wednesday; Edinburgh's Cabaret Voltaire, Thursday, and the Arches, Glasgow, on November 26. The single 'Little Bit' is released October 27

• www.myspace.com/lykkeli