Jóga

is my favorite Björk song

Björk looms large both in my musical and non-musical life. One of the main things that made my wife and I initially respond to each others’ online dating profiles was our shared Björk fandom. Our wedding recessional was “All Is Full Of Love.” We have been to several of her shows together, and our kids are starting to get interested in her too. I have performed several of her songs in various bands: “Hyperballad”, “Human Behavior”, “Possibly Maybe”, “One Day”, “The Pleasure Is All Mine.” My favorite one to perform, and listen to, and think about, is “Jóga”, the first single from Homogenic, my favorite of her albums.

Homogenic is an important album in Björk’s career, because it’s the first one that sounds consistently like her. Debut and Post are wonderful, but you don’t get the sense that she had fully assimilated all of her eclectic influences yet. Those albums sound like compilations of collaborations between Björk and various other artists. Homogenic sounds like a Björk album. That sonic palette of orchestral strings, unusual acoustic instruments and heavily processed beats and synths has defined her music ever since (though she hadn’t yet started using choirs, that came later). Her song "Arisen My Senses", released thirty years after “Jóga”, uses flutes instead of strings, but the overall vibe is the same.

Both Homogenic and “Jóga” are confusing titles. Homogenic is a play on “homogenous”, describing Björk’s intention to make the album cohere stylistically. “Jóga” is Björk’s longtime friend Jóga Johansdóttir, and the lyrics are about their relationship. It’s such a refreshing change of pace for a song like this not to be about romantic love.

The South Bank Show did a wonderful documentary about Björk in 1997, which includes a look at the recording of “Jóga” starting at 45:04.

You can see her singing scratch vocals with lyrics that didn’t make the final version of the song. She writes melody-first, as she explains in Q Magazine: “What comes first? The melody, always. It’s all about singing the melodies live in my head… I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.” This is something I admire most about Björk as a songwriter: she respects the intuitive logic of her melodies and bends her language to fit them, up to and including using nonsense syllables. More on this below.