00:04
Sharin Foo
I chose the painting A Mountain Climber by J.F. Willumsen, of a woman standing on the top of a mountain looking out. Something about the color palette: expressive, surreal, psychedelic, strong.

00:21
Sharin Foo
Coming from a flat little country of Denmark, living here in Los Angeles, I connect with the desert and the mountain ranges and the Pacific Ocean and that kind of hugeness in nature. I look out and I see three-dimensional mountain ranges and I suddenly have this perspective.

00:41
Sharin Foo
This adventurer that she represents, I kind of have a feeling of that wanderlust that I've had in my life. I see that in that painting as well.

00:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Sharin Foo, a Danish musician and singer from the band Raveonettes. Welcome Sharon.

01:22
Sharin Foo
Thank you so much.

01:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's lovely to have you here. So we meet you in Los Angeles, where you lived for a very long time, but now you are back in Denmark. What made you decide to move back?

01:36
Sharin Foo
Yes. Oh, what a good question. Well, actually I was living abroad for 17 years. London, New York, and then here in LA for about 12 years. And I was homesick. I was longing for Europe and Denmark at that time, this was back in 2019. And I was also, to be honest with you, I had just gone through a divorce, and the Raveonettes was taking a long break, a hiatus, possibly forever.

02:05
Sharin Foo
So it was a total collapse of my personal life as well, and professional life. So I wanted to go back to Denmark and explore my professional options and also start to, I don't know, I was like, I think at this adult stage in my life, I'd like to go back to Denmark and nourish where I come from and be closer to my parents and my sister and my brother and my family there as well. So that was what happened.

02:33
Sharin Foo
It's that thing where, what I was created by, I think, the sense that the country that I come from has soft grass, contrary to the succulents here and cacti, which I love as well. But I think just that sense of the rain and the fresh air and biking around the city, and meeting my people that I know just on the corner of the street, being in a city that I could walk around and bike around, and there was just certain things that I was longing for in terms of lifestyle.

03:10
Sharin Foo
And also at the time, 2019, honestly, the political environment here in the US was hard for me to reconcile with. I thought it was a tough time. And yeah, I wanted to go back and see what was going on in Denmark.

03:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was it like, then, to move back? I've been here for years. I'm sort of worried that I will have a culture shock or something, if I return some day in the future. Was it like, just sort of settle in?

03:40
Sharin Foo
I actually did settle in. I mean, of course, at first it was a little bit like, what am I doing? And what am I supposed to do here? And I was trying to explore my options in terms of work and my artistic life. But I really found that I had a really strong community there still.

04:01
Sharin Foo
And to be honest with you, Raveonettes, we've done great around the world. I mean, we're still touring the US and we get offers to go to China and da da da. But honestly, coming back to Denmark, we are high profile in Denmark, so there's certain possibilities that we have there where it's just easier and more accessible. The US is still a big country to make an impact in, career-wise. So in that regard, being a bigger fish in a smaller pond, rather than little fish in a really big pond, really big ocean.

04:36
Sharin Foo
So there was that. I actually just settled in quite easily. I really loved, I was like, even when it was raining, I was like, oh, this feels so great, I love this. The seasons, which I had missed when I was living in the US or living here in LA where it's more of one season, two seasons. I think I had a kind of romantic experience with coming back to Denmark, actually.

05:00
Sharin Foo
It wasn't that hard for me. I hear it from other friends of mine that have lived abroad for many years, that they feel unsettled. I will say that I did pretty soon start a job there. I'm an adjunct professor at the conservatory in Denmark. So, having colleagues and a place to work, I think, that was also part of integrating pretty quickly into the pulse of the city.

05:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A community.

05:26
Sharin Foo
I mean, sometimes, particularly my daughter will say this to me. She's like, wow, this is so homogenous here, missing maybe the diversity that you experience here. That kind of colorfulness and diversity that we have here in LA is quite, I mean, it's inspiring, and I think that broadens your horizon also.

05:46
Sharin Foo
Yeah, that was something that I was like, wow, everybody's looking kind of the same and having the same bag. And there's a homogenous sort of experience of Denmark, which is both great, and sometimes maybe you can miss that more experimental edginess that we also have in LA or in bigger, more, you know, bigger places, diverse places.

06:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back in time, actually, to the very beginning, when you were born in Emmelev on Djursland. What kind of environment did you grow up in?

06:29
Sharin Foo
Yeah. I was born in Grenå Hospital, and my parents were from the suburbs of Copenhagen and actually were part of a community from around Copenhagen that moved to the countryside to have a different lifestyle of being closer to nature. You could say that it was more like a hippie community that I grew up in. They actually started their own school there as an alternative to the public school that was available for us there.

07:01
Sharin Foo
So in a sense, I grew up in a little bit of, I would say, Copenhagen Island in Jutland. That was my experience of my childhood. We had a lot of music at the school, which I am always very grateful for my teacher there. Jens Falck was very formative for me in terms of starting to play music.

07:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And your dad was a musician.

07:24
Sharin Foo
My dad was a musician. Yeah, he actually was in a band with Jens, who was my music teacher. They were in a band called Djursland Spillemænd, which are known for the song "jyske knejte".... They recorded the song as a kind of a homage, or a celebration of Christiania, the free town. So yeah, that's where I grew up, a very sort of colorful, funky childhood.

07:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you went on to go to Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium, that's a music conservatory in Denmark. What kind of foundation did that give you?

08:01
Sharin Foo
I remember realizing that I was like, wow, you can actually choose music as a profession and a job and you can take an education. So yeah, I applied to study there and I studied there for five years, took my Master's at the conservatory as a singer, which was my main instrument.

08:17
Sharin Foo
I suppose what that gave me was, of course, an education within music, new understanding and learning and acquiring technical skills and musical skills and artistic skills, but also very much of a community, being part of a community and people that played music. So there was that.

08:37
Sharin Foo
But also, when I was getting close to the end of my education, I really also felt, because at the time, I will say the school was not really a school that was very concerned with your artistic expression. It was more of technique, that there was a particular way to play music. I mean, I was missing this notion of, what's the artistic imprint? I was looking for someone outside of that.

09:07
Sharin Foo
I sing a lot of jazz music and I was looking for something more contemporary and something with more of an individual artistic expression. So then I met Sune — Sune Beck Wagner, who's my partner in the Raveonettes, and we started playing together.

09:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was the initial meeting with him like?

09:29
Sharin Foo
Yeah, well, Sune. We were sort of moving around in some circles in Copenhagen that were the sort of indie rock, alternative rock sort of community in Copenhagen. Copenhagen is a tiny city, so you kind of know everyone that's into the same kind of music that you are. So I was moving in the jazz circles and then the indie rock circles, that were my communities, and the sort of avant garde, improvisation, bebop, jazz, and then the rock community.

10:04
Sharin Foo
For instance, I sang a lot with Pernille Rosendahl, who's also a Danish singer. And I was doing backing vocals for her band Swan Lee at the time, for a period of time, and just trying to navigate what was going to happen. And then when I did my, what do you call it, when I just finished the conservatory, I had a big celebration together with Randi Laubek, who's another Danish singer.

10:32
Sharin Foo
And we had a big party at a folk high school. And people were spending the night there. It was like 100 people. And then I had just started this band called Vamp Camp, where I played bass, because I wanted to sort of get back to something more fun. I was a little bit fatigued with education and singing jazz. And so I had this punk band that I started with two girls. One of them was actually Christina Rosendahl, who's a film director.

11:02
Sharin Foo
She played drums and I played bass and then this other girl. And we were making our own costumes, sewing our own costumes. It was just a sort of DIY attitude and fun. And I loved playing bass because I enjoyed having an instrument that didn't feel so serious to me, in a way, just this kind of playfulness. When you study music for five years, with vocals as your main instrument, it becomes a very serious thing, and I just needed to do something that kind of shook it all up.

11:34
Sharin Foo
And then Sune was at that party. And gosh, this is a long story, sorry. So Sune was at the party and he was looking for someone to start a new band with. And he had written all these new songs in Seattle where he had been staying for some time. And he was like, let's try out these new songs I have. And I'm looking for starting a band with another singer. I want to really try and work with boy-girl vocal harmonies.

11:56
Sharin Foo
He was very inspired by The Everly Brothers and that way of singing together and vocal harmonies. So we sat down and then immediately our voices just blended so naturally and  it just was kind of an instant match musically. So that was the beginning back in 1999.

12:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow. What made you decide that it was gonna be an only sort of boy girl duo? Why just the two of you?

12:24
Sharin Foo
We did actually have a third person in the band at first, but we kicked him out. I guess the simplicity of being two. It's nice to be two and not just be alone, but it's also, there's something very simple about just being two people. We just had a good way of complimenting each other.

12:44
Sharin Foo
The darkness and the lightness. We're kind of a yin yang — yin yang duo. We play live with lots of different musicians. We have different constellations live. But it's a very simple, dogmatic kind of expression with the two of us, I think.

13:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And only two to make the decisions, also makes things easier, maybe. There was a writer from the Rolling Stones who wrote about you after having seen you on the SPOT Festival in Århus. What did this exposure and the fact that he praised you mean to your band, the Raveonettes?

13:22
Sharin Foo
It was a big break for us, in a way. Of course it was very meaningful for us, because David Fricke, he's been through the whole — he's lived that period that we're so inspired by, the whole punk era in New York in the '70s, with the Ramones and Blondie and Richard Helm and the Void.

13:41
Sharin Foo
I mean, he's sort of lived it, and then recognizing that heritage that our music is built on and then, of course, hopefully also contributing with something new. We were very excited that he recognized that and appreciated it. And then it also, of course, gave us an opportunity to try and break into the US. I mean, our big dream was to have a career outside of Denmark. So in that sense, it was a kind of a break for us.

14:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you were pretty ambitious right from the beginning and also pretty business minded. You actually planned for David Fricke to hear you back then. Where did this ambition come from and how did you plan it? Talk about that.

14:29
Sharin Foo
Wow. Where did the ambition come from? I don't know. We were just very ambitious. We were in our 20s, that period of time when you're in your life and you're just like, I want to conquer the world.

14:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Invincible!

14:43
Sharin Foo
Yeah. We really felt we had something special. We really were like, this music is so good and the world needs to hear it. That's really how we felt.

14:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a good thing.

14:55
Sharin Foo
And then, yeah, it was this whole thing where we had a booker — We had really just played, I think when we played SPOT Festival, it was maybe the fifth show in our entire career. We were new. And we had a booker that couldn't get us booked on the SPOT Festival. So we actually had to fire him and hire someone who promised us that he could get us on the SPOT Festival.

15:17
Sharin Foo
And we knew that the year before that Mew had been discovered by the international music industry and got a big record deal in England and we were like, that's what we want to do. And David Fricke is coming and he needs to hear us because he'll get it. And so we, yeah, we got on the bill, actually, in the program. At the time we hadn't even really decided on the name of the band. So in the SPOT program we were The Shades. But we quickly realized, it's too generic.

15:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you come up with The Raveonettes?

15:51
Sharin Foo
The Raveonettes, it's kind of a complicated name, but what it is, it's really, it's "rave on," which is a Buddy Holly song. So that's a reference to our heritage, musical heritage. And then, "ettes", the "ettes," the Ronettes, the Sham-Ettes, the Marvelettes, it's all the girl groups from the early '60s. So it's, in a way, carrying some of our inspirations on our sleeve and in our name. So it's like that, a reference to our musical inspirations.

16:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The attention that David Fricke gave you did end up leading you to the United States. You started in New York, as you mentioned before. How does this adventure start? Talk about starting fresh in a really big city.

16:38
Sharin Foo
Yeah, we booked a show at CBGB's on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, which was, at least in the '70s, the epicenter of the punk scene, with The Ramones and Blondie and a really vibrant scene that we were very inspired by. And so we got a job there, and played a concert there.

17:02
Sharin Foo
David Fricke was there and wrote a raving review on RollingStone.com. And then, I remember, the next four months, we got interest from I think 18 record labels from around the world. We were flown around and wine-and-dined. And I remember we were playing at the Troubadour in LA. It was a crappy slot as the first out of four bands, but Universal Music wanted to see us play. It was all these showcases we were doing, and we were living and staying in these fabulous hotels with free bar and —

17:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Dangerous stuff. Free bar!

17:39
Sharin Foo
It was so fabulous. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I have some memories from LA at the Beverly Wilshire, it was called at the time, which had the view of the entire Hollywood. We were up by the pool and they let us stay there all night because we told him that the guy in the hot tub was Moby. It was really our drummer Jakob, but he kind of looked like Moby. I don't know, it was very, it was kind of—

18:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Rockstar behavior!

18:04
Sharin Foo
It was like rockstar behavior before we had even signed with a label. I don't know. But then at a certain point, we needed just to sign with a label, get this music out because at this point we're just waiting to get started, you know? We ended up signing with Columbia Records, which is on the East Coast in New York. Donnie Ienner, he was the head of Columbia Records at the time, we were like, wow, this is the label of Bob Dylan.

18:27
Sharin Foo
Actually, the day we were signing the contract, we were sitting in his office and he's like, please play a song for me. And he took down this acoustic guitar and it said, "Love you, Donnie." And then heart, Bob. And it was Bob Dylan. Okay. So we were on the 56th floor in Manhattan, and we just played "That Great Love Sound" for him, which was the single off of our first full length album. And then we signed the contract.

18:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What did that feel like, that moment? Columbia Records is—

18:58
Sharin Foo
Yeah, a big deal. I know, it was so wild. We were ecstatic and we just really felt, I mean, it was our dream sort of coming true, but not yet. Cause we wanted to get out and release the album and tour and, yeah, just go around the world and play our music. It was just very, very exciting.

19:16
Sharin Foo
I remember calling my parents and I was like, yeah, we just signed a $2 million record contract, Mom. "I'm so proud of you!" It was bizarre. It was kind of surreal, but it was super fun. We were having a party in the hotel, dancing all night.

19:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Fantastic. So how would you describe Raveonettes' sound? You've been making music for a long time, so obviously it has evolved throughout the years. But if there's a red thread to the Raveonettes' sound, what would it be?

19:53
Sharin Foo
I think that our sound is like this. It really is — we're sort of standing on the shoulders of this rock 'n' roll tradition that's very American. But it's not like bluesy music. It's more kinda like Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, The Everly Brothers. It's these very simple pop sensibility songs that are timeless.

20:17
Sharin Foo
There's a certain dissonance and because we have a lot of sort of dissonance in our music and distortion. And so it has that edge to it, but it has the sweetness of classic songwriting. And then I would say we have a very sort of signature vocal candy harmonies with the two of us singing. I think that's very distinct Raveonettes.

20:39
Sharin Foo
And I remember someone saying that it really sounds like surfing in the rain, which I think, so it has that Nordic tone as well, the melancholy or the sort of Scandi Nordic sound as well, but very American and with surf guitars. And yeah, I guess that was a very long explanation but I think that's part of it.

21:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No, it's great. So America was a good fit for you guys?

21:10
Sharin Foo
Yeah, for sure. Sune, who writes the songs in the band. He's very inspired by, or was, at least, by the Beat poets. And so it does have a very distinct American, it's a little bit like a voyeuristic view on American pop culture, somehow. Not really being part of it because coming from Denmark and growing up in the countryside, but this fascination with this iconic sort of American pop upbringing.

21:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A lot of people sort of imagine that being a rock star, which you did become, and making music, is about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. What was your experience of the music business? I assume that the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll may not always be as fun as it sounds. What was your experience like?

22:04
Sharin Foo
I mean, we've been around for a long time now. I mean, we released our first album in 2003. 2002 in Denmark, actually. So, you know, it's 22 years. I would say there are a lot of different periods in the Raveonettes' life, some more destructive and volatile and debauched than others. And I mean, we've definitely had the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll periods and times in our lives.

22:36
Sharin Foo
But honestly, I think what we learned pretty quickly was how do we keep the artistic drive alive? How do we nurture the art in it? And how to stay creative and inspired and how to actually play concerts and be present. Because I feel like there was a time when it was so much that when you're playing 230 shows a year, there's a certain point where you're just not really even there anymore.

23:09
Sharin Foo
So I think what we've really learned is we'd like to be present, stay somehow inspired and creatively healthy. Yeah, I don't have much faith in or believe in the drugs or intoxicated lifestyle being the muse for art at all. I don't believe in that. So yeah, really staying lit in your head and in your body and in your spirit, and so that's become more of a focus, I would say.

23:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What are the highs and lows of your experiences?

23:48
Sharin Foo
There's different perspectives. You could look at high and lows in terms of career situations, but you can also look at personal experiences. For us, definitely a highlight was performing the David Letterman show twice. That was such a cultural institution and to be able to reach that many people, I don't even know how many million people watched that show. That was quite something. I think we were the first Danish band to play David Letterman.

24:18
Sharin Foo
And so I would say things like that have been, you know, playing Glastonbury Festival or playing these sort of markers for us that just felt like wow, we made it, playing Royal Albert Hall and just like things like that, opening for Depeche Mode on a big tour, playing stadiums was a huge experience as well. So I would say things like that, but —

24:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's nice that you have to think about that. That means that there haven't been many lows.

24:50
Sharin Foo
Well, I mean, I think that at a certain point in our career, we felt that we had reached kind of a status quo, a little bit of an experience of coming back to America, playing the same clubs, with fewer people, not being able to, I don't know, just a sense of, are people even listening to our albums anymore?

25:07
Sharin Foo
I mean, that's when we actually ended up taking a five year break from 2017 until 2022. We had a five year complete break from the Raveonettes and actually not really knowing whether we were going to pick it up again. So I would say, yeah, and that was definitely because we were stunted, and also like I was talking about earlier, this notion of, are we even inspired anymore? Do we even still have love for this music and this band, and do people still want to hear us?

25:39
Sharin Foo
And so I think we just needed a little bit of a time out to figure out whether that creative spark was still there, and do other things. So I would say that was, that's a low. But on the other hand, I think it was healthy. And I will say there's been times in our career when Sune and I have been on stage and we really haven't had a good relationship and we've played shows where we —

26:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Between the two of you?

26:08
Sharin Foo
Between the two of us, just not even being able to have eye contact, and it's just such an estranged experience, because it's just been too much.

26:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does that affect the music?

26:22
Sharin Foo
Yeah, it just feels disconnected. So I suppose that's the internal experience of a low, when you're not in a good place with each other and the working relationship is not doing well. I often think about that as that was for sure a low in our band. We really couldn't stand each other at a certain point in time.

26:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow, which is normal. I mean.

26:44
Sharin Foo
And it is, I mean, this is the thing you hear about bands all the time, right? It's such a strain on a relationship to be together 24 hours a day. And like in this really sort of adrenaline-fueled place of going on stage every night and having to perform. And at a certain point you're just emptied out, dried out. So yeah, we've had some times like that.

27:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's understandable. Yeah.

27:12
Sharin Foo
Honestly, even a marriage, I don't think you spend time with each other like that, and you don't see parts of each other where you're just like, I just, I can't believe you just did that. Also I have to say, during interviews, and you're sitting there next to each other and I'm like, did he really just say that one more time? I can't, I mean, come on, come on, come up with something more fun or more original or more— And I think we had that experience, we just got tired of ourselves and each other.

27:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's a long time to spend together. You created a family here in LA. You got married, you had a daughter, and you managed to keep your career running parallel with this. How does one's creative energy change when one becomes a mother and has a family? You know, you have domestic duties and responsibilities. How does that affect one's creative life?

28:08
Sharin Foo
Yes. I think this is something that should be talked about a lot more. It's how to be — how to create that. This is such a huge topic, honestly.

28:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, we could talk about this forever.

28:22
Sharin Foo
We could talk about this for a long time because I mean, I think within the arts, we're really just now starting to recognize and understand what it means to be a woman and have both a career and motherhood and balancing that. For me, I knew that I wanted to have that part of my life also, to be a family and to have a family and to have a child. But it was definitely, I mean, Molly came on tour with me when she was literally three months old.

28:57
Sharin Foo
And really what I was missing was some role model, someone to talk to, someone that could share some kind of experience with me or what, how do you even, what about maternity leave when you're an independent rock star? That doesn't exist. Molly was on tour with us the first two years of her life because I was still breastfeeding. So yeah, sometimes her father was there, or my sister, or my mom, or my mother-in-law at the time.

29:20
Sharin Foo
And I guess I wish that someone would be there helping me out with Molly. That was challenging. I worked it out, but I do remember Sune, damn Sune. I do remember Sune having a hard time embracing that part of my life. I remember he was like, please don't talk about motherhood with interviews. And I'm like, why not?

29:44
Sharin Foo
The most radical thing ever is being able to be a mom and play rock 'n' roll like this. What's not to be really impressed, you know? So I think he was maybe a little bit more stuck in a very old fashioned perspective on being a rock 'n' roller. I'm like, this is the most rock 'n' roller I've been in my life. It's being able to do this at the same time. Yeah, we did it. We did it. I played and I stayed active and I also still managed to be a mom.

30:12
Sharin Foo
And I think Molly, I'm pretty sure she'll say that she hasn't suffered too much. Maybe at a certain point in her life, she'll be sitting with a therapist complaining about her mom going on tour. But I suppose it's just a different approach. But what I have missed is, I suppose, more of having someone to talk to about it and someone to share that lifestyle with, because there haven't been many people that I know that have done that.

30:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I can imagine. Your daughter Molly is born with two cultures. Her dad that you mentioned is American. So she's Danish American. Do you find that this is a privilege or is it a curse?

30:57
Sharin Foo
Yeah, no, I think, mostly it's a privilege. I actually was talking to someone in Denmark a few weeks ago who was like, come on, that's amazing, she has the two best citizenships of the world in a way, to be Danish and American, and have that in her life and those options and possibilities that she has. It's quite a privilege. But of course it's also vilkår, what do you call that in English, premise in her life and in our life, is this being torn between geographical places and cultures.

31:34
Sharin Foo
I have just been away from Molly for two months while she's been here and I've been in Denmark. The missing is a lot. So I suppose that's part of it as well. But mostly we feel, especially now that Molly is 16 and she really feels the privilege of wow, I actually have these two countries that I belong to, and she's lived in Denmark and gone to school there. She really understands what kind of a country it is. And she really connects with that, and then she's a very SoCal girl as well.

32:09
Sharin Foo
So I think she really understands now that's a huge sort of privilege that she has in her life, actually, but of course, you know that we are torn also and sometimes I'm like, wow, she really is a different cultural breed than me. She grew up with a different experience, sense of weather, and just cultural upbringing, just different literature, different TV than me. There's just something about that she really is a little American and I'm completely Danish. Well, except I'm actually a quarter Chinese also, but.

32:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, your grandfather was Chinese, right?

32:49
Sharin Foo
Yeah.

32:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And she does speak Danish, you told me.

32:52
Sharin Foo
She speaks Danish.

32:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you manage to do that?

32:56
Sharin Foo
By being very stubborn about it. I was really determined for her to have that. I remember reading about being bilingual and how important it is to actually hear the language spoken to you, especially the first two years of your life. And that made an impression on me, that it really is to hear to get the sounds really embedded in you. She was really annoyed with it. Why do I have to speak Danish?

33:25
Sharin Foo
And she would speak English back to my mom, for instance, when my mom would speak Danish to her. So she was not really wanting to do it at first, but then she realized in Denmark that the kids didn't speak English. So then she was like, okay, if I want to communicate with the kids, I better start speaking Danish. But yeah, I had to stay on it for sure when she was little. She was not happy about it.

33:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you traveled the world on tours. You've been to Hong Kong, you were in India at some point in your life studying, I believe.

33:55
Sharin Foo
Yeah, I mean, I have wanderlust in me, even before the Raveonettes, I have, partly because of my Chinese heritage as well. My grandfather took the whole family to China a couple of times. Well, three, four times I've been there with him, the first time when I was three years old. And yeah, I guess I've always been really, I've had that curiosity about traveling around and meeting different cultures.

34:22
Sharin Foo
Hence also studying Indian classical vocals when I was at the conservatory. I did an exchange there. So, some kind of, yeah, like I say, wanderlust. Also, I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on this two masted wooden schooner when I was like 19 years old. So I guess I have an adventurer in me in that sense. Yeah, it's a drive that I have. You learn a lot about yourself when you meet different cultures than your own, and I think also you can then actually really appreciate what you come from and understand it.

34:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that something you want for your daughter to do too?

34:58
Sharin Foo
I want my daughter to do what she wants for her. That's the most important thing for me. It's just for her to figure out what she wants to do.

35:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sharin, what do you like doing when you're not working? Do you have a hobby?

35:10
Sharin Foo
My hobbies?

35:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, or do you knit and —

35:17
Sharin Foo
My hobbies? Yeah, I love cooking. For me, that's a very life-affirming kind of sensual experience. I love fermenting stuff and making kombucha and sourdough bread. I like that. I feel it's very meditative for me. When I'm here, I really love gardening. I have a huge garden and I have an avocado tree and a grapefruit tree and lemon trees and a persimmon tree and a loquat tree. And so I'm really into California natives. And so I love that. That's also very meditative for me, being in the garden. I would say that those are some kind of big hobbies for me.

35:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
If I speak to you in ten years, what is your dream reply if I ask you what you are up to?

36:07
Sharin Foo
Wow. That's a tough question. I'd like to be able to say that I'm still artistically engaged in creating. I also am currently doing a practice-based artistic research project. And I really like that nerdy sort of investigation, more academic approach. And hopefully living really close to my daughter.

36:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you. Do you have a bucket list of things that you want to experience in your life, still, both personally and creatively, things that you need to tick off? And if yes, what would they be?

36:53
Sharin Foo
Oh gosh. I feel like I should be a lot more ambitious than I am, but I guess for me it's much more related to being in my life in a healthy way, both in mind and body, and spirit and art. And I mean, that's really the thing that I'm mostly focused on. And I don't have this, I mean, it'd be fun to win a Grammy, but my happiness is not dependent on that for sure. It's just not.

37:24
Sharin Foo
I mean it'd be amazing to be touring with the Raveonettes. Imagine if we suddenly had this huge hit, a Billboard Top 10 hit song. That would be fun. Right? Those kinds of things would be fun, but mainly, I just want to be strong and healthy and creative and that kind of stuff.

37:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much, Sharin, for being with us today. We really appreciate it.

37:48
Sharin Foo
Thank you for having me.

37:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Sharin Foo chose J.F. Willumsen's En bjergbestigerske, or A Mountain Climber from 1912 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.