Pitchfork: What was it like to work with Timbaland?
Björk: Yeah, that was very...very different. Um, to be honest I work so much on my own, which I enjoy very much. 90% of every album is me editing on a computer or writing, walking outside writing melodies, or writing lyrics, or, as in the case of this album, doing brass arrangements, so it's a lot of solitary, which I love. But when it comes to collaborating, I'm really excited about leaving all that behind and just merging with somebody who is hopefully quite different from me.
In Timbaland's case-- he sampled my song "Joga" like 11 years ago, and said many times in the press that he really liked my song from 14 years ago called "Venus Is a Boy". We recorded the string section in Bollywood for that, Indian strings, and he was really fascinated by that, and we've met at parties and there has been mutual admiration for years. [We] sort of talk of doing stuff, but it never happened. And after doing two or three serious projects in a row, I was just like, "Okay where's the fun?" And I called him a year ago, and said, "Let's do something." And we always felt, even though we're really different, we have this mutual ground, and it was interesting to go into a studio with a person that you haven't met that often.
We did in three hours like seven songs, just totally improvised, nothing prepared. And then what happened afterwards, he went off and did the Justin Timberlake album and I think Nelly Furtado. So he sort of didn't have time to attend the aftermath, really, which turned out to be a blessing, because it meant I could noodle with the results for a year, and edit the fuck out of them, and add musicians like Konono and Chris Corsano and Brian and the other instruments. I think it's actually the first time that he's done that, that he's relaxed with giving his tracks or his material away and letting somebody else complete it. So I would send him stuff and he would say, "Yeah I love it."
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/42181-interview-bjrk