My parents signed me up for a rhythmics class when I was one. We hit things and made sounds. Eventually, I aged out of rhythmics and into opera. Since I’m from a small Swedish town famous for opera training, that was the only musical option.

I turned 15, and opera was no longer cool. I wanted to play the guitar and hang out with boys. Opera wasn’t working any longer, so my parents were insistent in saying, “You should find your own voice.”

I love Kate Bush and attempted to imitate her sound, but it wasn’t right for me. When I applied to music school in London, the admission requirement was a written song. That was one of the first pieces that I wrote. I realised it’s so much more fun to sing lyrics that you wrote yourself, that actually mean something.

More Water Than Anything [GERD’s album dropping in June] started in my hometown. We have a small cabin on its own island, so you have to go by boat. It’s in the deep forest. We have swimming moose, which is such a cool thing. It’s super scary if you’re going swimming, but never mind that… At this cabin, I’d have a glass of wine and sit at the piano in solitude. That peace becomes very inspirational. Everything these days is so curated. It feels pathetic. When you’re out in the forest, on an island with moose, you realise you’re just a person. The environment helped me to create songs that are raw.

It’s a safe space for my listeners. Go to a GERD concert and cry with other people, or listen to it at home with a glass of wine. I hope my music feels inviting and human, with a bit of magic. Today, we invite everyone into what we had for lunch, or exactly what we did last night. Sometimes I think we’ve lost a little bit of that magic. I’ve set out to find it.

I love the idea of everyone having their own version of the song. It connects them to me and to each other. I want us all to feel something that’s real.

I try to do the concert like a story. This relates back to my musical days. The set design, costuming, ambient sound; everything points to, ‘How can we feel like this whole room is not just strangers?’ The goal is to build a community that gathers to feel something together.

I welcome the ugliness of human nature. In that regard, I named the album More Water Than Anything because of a nature documentary I watched. It’s strange to think that I’m mostly made out of water, as is this whole planet around us. We are over-complicating things. This needs to be acknowledged for our sanity and to empower us.

This is such a new era. I had a huge gap, which involved connecting with myself again, trying to figure out why I’m doing this, and finding inspiration for the new songs. I’m evolving, and fully embracing that.

I do this so I can be a happier person outside of music. I love doing live performances because of the community, but I wonder, ‘Why did I write this?’ Now I have to relive it 20 times this summer. It is a blessing and a curse, because it does bandage the wounds when people connect with the songs. We are trying to do something with intention.

It’s my middle name from my grandmother. At school in London, people couldn’t pronounce my first name [Elin]. If you translate Gerd to Swedish, it means a woman who takes care of her own. It is a Viking woman’s name. That became the foundation of the kind of artist I want to be and who I see myself writing the music for.

Truth Be Told’ is about the feeling that I was losing my light. In making the song, we played around with key changes to evoke that journey. The lyrics discuss losing a part of myself without really noticing that it happened. I needed a song that could take me from a dark place to a lighter one. I used the key changes to push myself forward.

It’s the DMs from the people that mean the most. It’s making a listener realise, ‘Someone else gets it’. It is still so insane when people come forward and say my song made them feel less alone. That is my greatest takeaway.