Axel Flóvent grew up in Húsavík, a fishing town on the north coast of Iceland, and he still lives there as much as touring and recording allow. He sat down with Jason English in the middle of 2024, a few weeks after releasing his second album, Away From This Dream. One thing comes up again and again in their talk: he wants to spend his life as an artist, but the more he wants that, the more he knows he has to be a good businessman to fund it. He's an introvert who built a more extroverted version of himself to do the job.

Flóvent loves the writing and recording most, and the rest of the work is where he struggles. He talks with his manager almost every day about how to focus on the art and hand off more of the business. "It's becoming more important to be a good business person than a good artist," he said, and the album title is partly his own argument with himself about that.

The title is literal, about his relationship with being an artist, and it is also about relationships and self-doubt from his early twenties. On the song "Honesty," he writes about people who stay with someone they can't stand rather than be on their own. "It's hard to be alone in this world," he said, pointing to his own mother, who has chosen to be alone since his parents split when he was four.

Flóvent traces his sound back to a small town with a surprising number of musicians, an uncle who taught him guitar, and a lot of empty space. "When you're always listening to quiet or nothing, you get inspired, you get inspired of nothing," he said. At fifteen he could shoot a music video alone in an isolated forest, because he knew no one would be there.

He also gets into how "Forest Fires" took off almost by accident, the dozens of songs he wrote to find the ten that made the record, and why he won't recycle the ones that didn't. Watch the full conversation below.