CULLMAN — At 33, Swedish musician Sofia Talvik has already had a pretty full career.

With five albums, her own record label, stints at major festivals like Lollapalooza and SXSW, and the sort of notoriety in her home country that led Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt to enlist one of her songs in support of his ruling party, she could be forgiven for relaxing her schedule a little bit; for cherry-picking her tour dates.

Instead, she’s touring intimate U.S. music venues with her husband in an old RV, giving comparatively small audiences a chance to hear her modern take on folk music in a setting that puts performer and listener almost face to face.

For some, that may sound like a lot of work, but Talvik likes it that way. It’s just a good use of the freedom she’s been able to enjoy as a hardworking independent musician.

“It’s more about the venue than if the town is big or not,” said Talvik Wednesday between stops in Tuscaloosa, Nashville and, tonight, at Berkeley Bob’s Coffee House in Cullman. “We played at the Bama Theatre in Tuscaloosa Monday with a local band, and it was awesome — they were great, and it was packed. A festival is always fun, but you don’t get the same kind of connection with the audience. This tour is more like an ongoing experience with me meeting people, and being able to show people who I am is such a big part of that.”

Calling her sprint through the U.S. Southeast the ‘Driving and Dreaming’ tour, Talvik is ostensibly promoting the release of The Owls Are Not What They Seem, an acoustic  album she purposely recorded with as little embellishment or studio distraction as possible. Recording Owls by singing and playing in the same take, Talvik exercised full control over the album’s sound, as well as its art, promotion and distribution.

That’s the sort of creative freedom she prizes, and if that means doing everything herself — well, that’s its own reward.

“That’s one of the big things — to be able to do your own thing,” Talvik said. “Yeah, I have a lot of freedom — I run the record label and I can do whatever I like; I don’t have to go through a lot of executives and publishers and work out a lot of weird contracts and stuff. If I want to put out a song on the internet tomorrow, no one can stop me or say that it’s a bad idea. It’s one of the big things for me — to be able to do your own thing.”

Finding an audience in the musically and demographically diverse U.S. is at once both easier and more challenging than doing so back home, where society may be liberal — but also very homogenous and, in a way, isolated.

“I have my own record label back in Sweden; I’m one of the most do-it-yourself artists in Sweden, and I guess it’s well known [there] because of that,” said Talvik. “Apart from that, because I sing in English, I have my best response to my music in the U.S.

“To be a big star in Sweden, you have to sing in Swedish. It’s hard to have the same kind of success when you have a musical style that’s more accepted in the U.S., and I’ve really been working toward being in the U.S. in the past couple of years.”

Talvik said venues like Berkeley Bob’s are typically where her music finds its most appreciative audience — even if it’s often the first time people are hearing her music.

“Venues like this one let me be close to the audience; sometimes when you’re on a big stage, it kind of builds a wall between you and the audience,” she explained. “The thought of doing this tour is to reach all those people who haven’t heard you — if I always went to the same places where people have already heard my music, that would be kind of fruitless.”

Talvik performs at Berkeley Bob’s tonight around 7 p.m. The show is free to attend — a rarity on Talvik’s tours.

Discover more about Sofia Talvik and her music online at music.sofiatalvik.com.

 

* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com, or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 270.