Frida Hyvönen’s biggest inspiration for her second album Silence Is Wild was a little-known modernist novel written by a Portuguese in the 1930s.

Obscure perhaps, but it is not surprising given her fascinating narrative-driven songs, that The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Passoa had such a bearing on her.

That book, written throughout the author’s life and never finished, was one of many written by the largely forgotten Passoa under the heteronym, as he himself called it, of one Bernard Soares. The book is a fragmented collection of psychological confessions, autobiographical vignettes and aesthetic musings from a morose Lisbon bookkeeper.

Ostensibly a million miles away from the uplifting and youthful mood of Silence Is Wild, it clearly touched a chord with Hyvönen.

“I think you should read it really,” she says. “I’m not a good critic and not good at explaining books. But it’s from a special mind, and I like language.”

Passoa once said that the creation of Bernard Soares as a heteronym was a “mutilation of his own personality” in that it put forward that a single unified personality is a myth, while critics describe the novelist as adhering strictly to Walt Whitman’s maxim of “I contain multitudes.”

Frida Hyvönen contains multitudes. Silence Is Wild contains enough versions of herself to satisfy both Passoa and Whitman, all backed by some of the prettiest melodies this side of Joni. One moment she is wistfully childish on the nostalgic ‘Dirty Dancing’, the next she sings the cutting and sardonic ‘Scandinavian Blonde’, and then she is the simmering dominatrix of ‘Pony’.

Though she seems able to slide easily between one character and the next, she does admit that most songs originate from her own experience.

“I wouldn’t say it’s confessional,” she says, “but I’m giving a lot of myself. It’s not important to me to confess or tell things as they were, but I’m using things that have happened to me. Maybe I’m trying to understand them by making them more problematic or more beautiful or something.” And herein lies the Passoa influence. Trying to make sense of a mess is to love the mess, perhaps.

Anyway, Frida Hyvönen is a captivating and charming 31-year-old from Sweden and Silence Is Wild is the follow up to her 2005 debut, Until Death Comes. A forceful, confident and frank presence on her albums, on the phone her voice is soft and mousey to the point that it is inaudible. A bit like Condoleeza Rice’s voice if she were hiding behind a tree in a forest talking lest a grizzly bear a few feet away would discover her.

Having lived in Stockholm for most of her adult life, three years ago she moved back to the rural area where she grew up in the north of the country, near the town of Robertsfors, the setting for many of her songs.

“Everyone was into sport,” she remembers of her childhood in the town. “I tried to play handball but I was really scared of the ball. I played three games. There was no one else doing music really, although there were a few classical musicians at school. I just really liked to sing. I started making my own songs when I was 20.

“It wasn’t my intention to move back here. I had been living in Stockholm for 12 years and certainly did not want to move back up north. But then I was home for Christmas and just found this beautiful house for almost nothing, and now I love it.”

Silence Is Wild is very much a departure from her debut. This record benefits from fuller production, a greater sense of purpose and the volume and urgency that comes from having more musicians and instruments on board. There is also a certain atmosphere that reminds the listener of the 60s-70s golden era of female singer-songwriters, less the slightly unsubtle Carole King than the beautifully idiosyncratic Laura Nyro, whose New York Tendaberry is an obvious reference point for Silence Is Wild. Hyvönen’s favourite singer of all time, by the way, is Nina Simone.

“The first album I only wanted to do with piano and vocals,” she says, “and then we added more instruments but I wasn’t happy with that. I felt it got in the way of the music.

“I only liked it when I played by myself, but when I came to record it I got insecure. There’s not a lot of music with just piano and voice so I felt I really had to take a deep breath, but it was the way I like it.”

The move to incorporate percussion, backing vocals and other trimmings was surprising then, but listening to the immaculate new album, maybe playing with an ensemble is perhaps her natural home.

“Touring for two years gave me a reason to have a band, so it was also a bit for social reasons. I think I like working with more people now.”

That mindset has led to a collaboration with fellow countrywoman and photographer Elin Berge, who is photographing the northern Swedish wilderness. Hyvönen - with her tragic-comic, always poignant take on her home territory – is working on a soundtrack.

Hyvönen’s relationship with Robertsfors is fascinating, making fairytales out of her childhood and sarcastically deconstructing it in equal measure.

By no means the finest song on the album (that would be ‘Enemy Within’), opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ tells the story of a childhood “love of my life” and an infatuation that was inspired by that film. “The story takes place in the 90s and in the countryside and it just felt right to use that film as an enhancement of my young emotion.”

The song is a sad paean to lost times, yet any suggestion that Silence Is Wild is a melancholy album is met with Hyvönen in a rare moment of raising her voice above a whisper.

“Not at all, it’s more rich than that. I think I’m trying to make every song self-sufficient, coherent with itself. It’s a formula – you add this, you add this, and then that, to see the other side.”

Her method of seeing everything from different angles, and her Passoa-inspired belief in multiple selves makes the question redundant of whether she is in any way a typically Scandinavian artist – especially when you consider how brilliantly she pokes fun at her own stereotype in ‘Scandinavian Blonde’. Is there anything particularly Swedish about her music?

“Self awareness,” she says, “and shame.”


Frida Hyvonen plays Bush Hall on 5 February.