Hear the Album Björk Recorded as an 11-Year-Old: Features Cover Art Provided By Her Mom (1977)

Iceland’s biggest export, aside from vol­canic ash, is that pixy­ish pop singer, Björk. Or at least that’s how it seems in the Amer­i­can pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. Björk’s first three of albums were pret­ty much required lis­ten­ing in cer­tain cir­cles dur­ing the ‘90s.  Since then, her stature in the indie world has only grown.

Yet before she had a run of beau­ti­ful and strange mas­ter­pieces; before she was sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly tor­tured in front of the cam­era by Lars Von Tri­er in Dancer in the Dark; and before she was singing about birth­days with her break­out band The Sug­ar­cubes, Björk cut her very first album. It was 1977, and Björk was only eleven.

Björk, whose name rhymes with “work” not “pork,” land­ed the record deal after a tape of her singing Tina Charles’ 1976 dis­co hit “I Love to Love” played on Iceland’s one and only radio sta­tion. The album, called sim­ply Björk, was some­thing of a fam­i­ly affair. While Björk sang and played the flute, her step­fa­ther Sævar Árna­son played gui­tar while her mom, Hildur Hauks­dót­tir, designed the album cov­er. (See above.) Over­all, the record sounds exact­ly like what you might expect an Ice­landic album from the ‘70s sung by a tweenaged chanteuse might sound like – part Abba, part King Crim­son and part ear­ly Miley Cyrus. Björk does pret­ty groovy cov­ers of The Bea­t­les’ “Fool on the Hill” (top) and Syree­ta Wright’s “Your Kiss is Sweet (mid­dle),” both sung in Ice­landic. There’s also an equal­ly groovy psy­che­del­ic instru­men­tal track ded­i­cat­ed to painter Jóhannes Kjar­val, (below) whose work is on Ice­landic cur­ren­cy. Björk report­ed­ly went plat­inum in Ice­land. You can lis­ten to more tracks from that album on WFMU.

via WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Björk and Sir David Atten­bor­ough Team Up in a New Doc­u­men­tary About Music and Tech­nol­o­gy

Ice­land in the Mid­night Sun

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.