Björk Discusses Her “Lost” Song and Rosalía Collaboration “Oral,” a Single to Save Wild Salmon

What made you want to revive this particular song for the cause?

It’s sort of a long story because I wrote it between Homogenic and Vespertine and it was just too poppy. It just didn’t fit into either of those albums. I just put it on salt. I programmed the original beat, and I guess I was sort of going for some sort of a dancehall mood. When I was listening to the track, I was like, Hmm, Rosalía, her last album was sort of experimental reggaeton. I can really imagine her voice inside this. Maybe that’s a better way to get a guest vocalist, who sort of represents now, and there’s this tunnel into the past, us having this kind of conversation.

I’ve known her for a few years, so I just texted her, and she immediately said yes, before even having heard the song. I think she was also wanting to support the cause. I told her about the fish farming, and we’ve been chatting about it. We translated the press release into Spanish, because it’s a huge problem in Argentina and Chile. I’m hoping it will somehow encourage people in all these other countries to do something.

The way you said when we win makes me think of the line in the song, “The dream and the real, get them acquainted”—you weren’t necessarily thinking of applying that to environmental causes when you wrote it so many years ago. How does that idea fit into your advocacy angle for the song’s release?

You’re right, obviously, I was not thinking about salmon then. There are other songs, for example—“Declare Independence,” I wrote for the Faroe Islands and Greenland. I wanted to challenge this kind idea of what a protest song is. So I was like, “Let’s do a punk rave song that is a protest song.”

But this song is not like that at all. I like the fact that it’s happy. We are focusing on the solutions, to give people a voice. If we get more money than ust for this court case, we are also going to go into all the legislation, and more into the infrastructure of Iceland’s legal system [about] how we can have strict regulations here. We also understand that this is not a sprint, this is like a marathon. This might take five years, so who knows? One of the reasons why I picked this case is because it is still possible to stop the mutant Norwegian salmon. It is still possible to get our fjords back.