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‘I Never Learn’: Lykke Li’s Masterclass In Breakup Pop
Warner Music
In Depth

‘I Never Learn’: Lykke Li’s Masterclass In Breakup Pop

Intense and expansive, Lykke Li’s 2014 album, ‘I Never Learn’, affirmed her belief that music ‘has to be personal if it’s going to be great’.

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Jeanette Leech
15 November 2024

“It’s been a dreadful process,” Lykke Li said, speaking of what was to be her third album – 2014’s I Never Learn. “I’ve had so much in me. I’ve been awake every night because I can’t perfect the vision I have in my head. It’s almost like walking into a house: a dream house, opening a door, another door, then another. I’ve exhausted myself and gone crazy. In order to save myself I have to let it go.”

That this record took such a toll on Lykke Li is hard to hear, yet unsurprising when the album is absorbed. A life-changing relationship breakup underpinned it, and I Never Learn is a dissection of the feelings and aftermath it brought. Its sadness is such that even the director David Lynch, who had collaborated with Lykke Li on his 2013 album, The Big Dream, told her “Oh, Lykke Li, life is not so serious”.

“I try to think that,” she said, of Lynch’s advice. “But I don’t know if it works.”

Listen to ‘I Never Learn’ here.

When was Lykke Li’s ‘I Never Learn’ album released?

Lykke Li’s I Never Learn was released on 2 May 2014. It was her third album, and had originally been conceived as the final act in a trilogy following her previous albums, Youth Novels (2008) and Wounded Rhymes (2011). “I signed a three-album [deal] when I was about 21,” Lykke Li told Time magazine in 2014. “I’ve been trying to chronicle a woman in her 20s and her search for love and herself. I think everything in life comes in threes: heartbreak and all that. You’ve got to do the full round in order to learn.”

Heartbreak – and all that – was the clear focal point of I Never Learn, to an even greater extent than the Lykke Li albums that preceded it. The rawness of I Never Learn, the bare sorrow and unflinching – almost aggressive – emotion it reveals, is bracing. “I’ve always been a person that is searching for truth and always wants to go further, deeper,” Lykke Li has said. “So it’s just natural for me to try and go as deep as I possibly could. And strip away. It’s almost like you go hunting.”

Sleeping Alone, the album’s closing song, encapsulates this perfectly. The sense of space and loneliness on the track is palpable – everything sounds far away, shrouded, as if it would decay when exposed to the sun. “The thing that an album does to me is that I go into the process as one person, down a tunnel in search of light, and I come out on the other side as another person,” Lykke Li said.

What were the influences on ‘I Never Learn’?

Even though I Never Learn is sombre in tone, Lykke Li has spoken of the wide range of musical inspiration underpinning it. She delved back into the demos of great artists, specifically Bob Dylan, Harry Nilsson and Bob Marley, to understand the unvarnished ideas beneath their well-known songs. Although she later said it was “really difficult” to recreate a similar feel, the process did seem to give Lykke Li’s own demos a new weight in her mind. She then wrote the song Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone and recorded it to tape. Two weeks later, she listened back to it. “I just simply couldn’t see how anything I would add to it would make it better,” she said. “And that’s why the song still has some hiss on it. It’s from the actual tape.”

As part of Lykke Li’s breakup process, she moved from Sweden to California: the home of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, another famous – and unsparing – portrait of relationships at disintegration point. Fleetwood Mac were “always with me,” as Lykke Li told Mojo magazine at the time of I Never Learn’s release. The timelessness of the album, along with its subject matter, is something I Never Learn also shares with the Buckingham-Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac.

Lykke Li’s contemporaries, particularly in rap and R&B, have also strongly influenced her. She has spoken of her admiration for Drake, Beyoncé and Rihanna. A remix of I Never Learn’s first single, No Rest For The Wicked, featured A$AP Rocky. Like Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone, Lykke Li’s vocals on this track are drawn from her original demo, and they contrast powerfully with Rocky’s verses – where his swagger attempts to mask his own vulnerability.

What songs did Lykke Li write on ‘I Never Learn’?

Unsurprisingly, given that its songs are so personal, Lykke Li wrote or co-wrote all nine songs on I Never Learn. Her main co-writer is Björn Yttling, of Swedish group Peter Björn And John, and Yttling also co-produced the album with Lykke Li. The album was – appropriately enough – recorded in both Sweden and California.

“I’m not a passive viewer when it comes to time spent in the studio,” Lykke Li said around the release of her fourth album, Eyeye, on which she also worked with Yttling. “Every second that Björn is sitting in front of his computer screen, I’m right there by his side. ‘What are you doing? Can we move this to the right? What’s happening with that bassline?’ Screaming and complaining. Interfering in every note and sound. I honestly feel so sorry for anyone who has to work with me! Having to deal with my shit for eight or nine months. That’s hard work!”

Greg Kurstin, who co-produced two tracks on I Never Learn, Gunshot and Sleeping Alone, has worked with some of modern music’s most successful artists, among them Adele, Sia, Kylie Minogue, All Saints and Kendrick Lamar. One of his most distinctive previous productions was Lily Allen’s 2009 album, It’s Not Me, It’s You – another intensely personal record, albeit one whose style and tone is totally different to I Never Learn. Gunshot, I Never Learn’s second single, is a collaboration between all three co-producers, and a tense, psychological nightmare – a song that pushes the limits of conventional pop music.

What did Lykke Li do after ‘I Never Learn’?

Following I Never Learn, Lykke Li released So Sad So Sexy (2018) and Eyeye (2022). She has also used her music as the basis for a pioneering immersive installation, 2022’s Ü & EYEYE, at Los Angeles’ Broad Museum. For an artist who is all about the inner world and the way our own little hooks snag our carefully laid plans, the move into an explicitly multimedia space felt natural.

But it is I Never Learn which epitomises the Lykke Li habitat – intense, touch-sensitive, expansive in musical scope but pinpoint in lyrical detail. “The type of art that I can relate to and that’s changed me is the most revealing and personal,” Lykke Li said in 2014. “I think it always has to be personal if it’s going to be great. And if it’s going to be able to reach someone else you have to reveal part of yourself.”

Buy the ‘I Never Learn’ 10th-anniversary vinyl reissue.

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