EVELINA

PRESENTED BY THE OUTDOOR COLLECTIVE

Life motto

“Don’t listen to your brain because it’s a lazy motherfucker”

Location

Stockholm

Occupation

Music producer

Instagram

@fatshadoww

Life motto

“Don’t listen to your brain because it’s a lazy motherfucker”

“Don’t listen to your brain

because it’s a lazy motherfucker”

“Don’t listen to your  brain, it’s a lazy motherfucker”

 Meet Evelina, Swedish music producer, originally from Norrland and now based in Stockholm.

“Life inspires my creativity, cheesy but true”

– When I was living in Norrland I picked cloudberries with my grandmother, mushrooms with my mum and went hiking with my friends. I later moved to Stockholm and couldn’t figure out why I suddenly started to feel a bit low. I decided to move to the suburbs where I had a small
mountain outside my house, and I went there whenever my brain felt overactive or my body was tired. This experience made me understand how being close to nature had a huge impact on me and my creativity, something I had never reflected upon before.

“Everything in life is a source of inspiration. When you had a break-up or
a fight with a friend, you at least always know that you will have a song
about it in the end”

 How do you boost your creativity?

1. Don´t stop creating just because you don´t feel inspired. If I sit down and wait for inspiration to come, I will just end up in a black hole and nothing will happen. Don’t listen to your brain because it’s a lazy motherfucker. You need to create to make inspiration come to you,
so my advice is simple, just go for it.

2. I have a schedule on my bedroom door where I make a plan for every day. My head is chaos so I need a lot of structure around me. I use symbols for different things that I do during the day like playing the piano, writing text, producing, etc. Following the schedule, will eventually create a long line of checkmarks. Now my only task is to not break that chain. This keeps me motivated and boosts my creativity.

3. Don’t feel ashamed to record a sound right away if you get inspired! Even if you are on the subway and have people around you. Don’t think that you will remember the melody when you get off because you won’t. I have lost so many good melody loops because I was too scared to record it in front of people.

4. Does something feel scary? Do it! Most of the time when things feel scary it’s because we care so much about about not making mistakes. For example, when writing a song, you want it to be perfect right away even before putting the words on paper. That means that you have already limit yourself in your head before giving yourself a chance. Don’t get me wrong it’s totally okay to be scared, you just need to confirm if the feeling of fear is justified or if it’s just your brain that’s fooling you.

5. Do things that triggers your imagination! To me creativity and imagination goes hand in hand. Everytime you create you are thinking of something that didn’t exist before. To be able to do that often and under a long time you need to think outside the box and for that you need your imagination. Whatever triggers someone´s imagination varies, but there is a way for everyone!

6. Dare to remove all the stimuli! It can sometimes be good to gather your inspiration from other art forms, like watching series, read books,listen to music, etc. But our brain gets so much stimuli from different sources all the time these days, you make dinner and watch youtube at the same time, shower and listen to music, walking and listen to podcasts or sitting on the bus and playing games on your phone. The list goes on. So what happens if we dare to shut down once in a while? If you are on a walk and are actually just… walking? I, for example, get extremely bored at first since my brain is so used to getting that quick fix. But it’s what happens after a while that’s interesting, when you get over the hill of boredom and get out on the other side. It’s often in this place where I come up with funny concepts, the weirdest lyrics and the most genuine melodies. I have also noticed, in this place, that I start to reflect on things that are truly important to me. I’m not thinking about if I remembered to turn on the washing machine or not, I think about things that I have carried with me for a while but that I haven’t really dealt with for various reasons. It can be exciting to let the mind wander on its own and see where it takes you, instead of pushing it in a certain direction.

Great thanks to EVELINA /THE OUTDOOR COLLECTIVE