Track By Track: ‘It’s Always Nice To Be Wanted’ by Sara Flindt

Sara Flindt searches for home

Danish-born, Iceland-based artist Sara Flindt takes us through her most recent EP. Having previously worked under the moniker ZAAR, Sara joined fellow musicians Salóme Katrín and Rakel Sigurðardóttir to produce the 2022 split album While We Wait. The album received a 2023 Iceland Music Awards nomination. Sara released her debut album under her given name, It’s always nice to be wanted, on May 5.

Across two countries, four years, six living arrangements and nine hairstyles, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to belong somewhere. Each track of It’s Always Nice To Be Wanted is made in a place that I called home at some point, recorded with only the objects and instruments from that space.

Don’t look back, carry on
Sound artist Francisco López talks about field recordings as “a creative way of interacting with reality, rather than representing reality.” In this way, they’re not so different from memories. Remembered conversations melt into the cello and the flute, fragile and intimate. The voices of this track grew and divided like little microbes as I clipped and nudged them into place – the smallest changes in timing changed meaning. In the demo, the rain was recorded from my bedroom in Vesturbær. But over time, the memory outgrew that recording. I had to find a new one.

Blue mountain
Coming back from the Westfjords, stopping for burgers in Hólmavík, my friends taught me an Icelandic proverb: “Fjarlægðin gerir fjöllin blá.” Proverbs are the sound of thoughts echoing through time. Here I’m singing to the mountains across a valley; the echo is a shepherd’s song, a call back to safety.

Is it too late to come home
I was complaining one day to my friend Áslaug Magnúsdóttir, who also produced this track, about how I couldn’t fully express my heart through my vocals. She advised me to just record directly into the computer mic. I did. I was pretty vulnerable, on a couch in Nuuk, feeling far away from home. My dear friends Salóme Katrín, RAKEL and Sandrayati sing back to me through the computer.

In between the cracks
Early in the project, I began recording people to discover how they understood home. Eventually the talks felt less like one-on-one interactions and more like a larger conversation happening around me, the voices speaking directly to each other. But they spoke in the logic of dreams.

Organize (IANTBW version)
This track feels like the kind of practical advice you might get from a mother. But organising isn’t about order, it’s about creating and forgetting. This track exists in many versions: I began shaping this version in 2019 with my dear friends and co-producers Jonathan Jull Ludvigsen and Bjarke Amdrup. Another version lives on last year’s split album While We Wait with RAKEL and Salóme Katrín.

It’s always nice to be wanted
This song came to me when I was at a residency in 2019 alone. The chorus is recorded on an electric organ in the living room of one of the six places I called home during the development of the EP. I couldn’t afford a string orchestra, so I used my pedalboard and my voice to create vocal-strings – the sort of transformation that happens at dawn, suspended between dreams and actions.