Shadow & Gudrun

Rolling Stone: So, let’s start with the boring grown‑up stuff. New solo album, new videos, a growing cult following. How close do you feel to that magical word everybody loves — “success”?

Gudrun: Depends whose dictionary you’re using. If success means stadiums and private jets, we’re not even in the index. If it means being able to make the records we want, with the people we want, without asking permission… we’re doing fine.

Ziggy Harper: And if success means somebody in a small town you’ll never visit pressing play at three in the morning and feeling a little less alone, then yeah, we’re rich as hell. Just not the kind my accountant recognizes.

RS: Come on, that sounds very noble, but you do run a club, a shop, a label of sorts. You must think about money.

Ziggy: I think about keeping the lights on and the dogs fed. Beyond that, money is just stage makeup. You need some, but if you put on too much, nobody believes you anymore.

Gudrun: Ziggy has this rule: “If a decision is only about money, it’s the wrong decision.” Annoying rule, by the way.

Ziggy: Works both ways. If it’s only about art, it’s probably stupid. You try to steer between the cliffs. Sometimes you hit a rock, sometimes you find a bay.

RS: Speaking of rocks — let me ask the question people always dance around. What are you two to each other, exactly? Are Rick and Gudrun… a couple?

Gudrun: That’s the first thing you want to know?

RS: It’s on behalf of the readers, obviously.

Ziggy: The readers will live.

(both laughing)

Gudrun: Look… whatever we are, it’s complicated enough that putting a label on it would only make it less true. We sing together, we argue about arrangements, we get stranded in airports, we share bad coffee at three a.m. That feels more real to me than ticking “couple / not a couple”.

Ziggy: Also, between us — I’m not sure Rick himself knows. And I’m reasonably certain Rooney isn’t entirely sure either.

Gudrun: Exactly. So maybe it’s healthier to talk about what we do know.

RS: Such as?

Gudrun: Such as how this all started. That’s a better story than “status: it’s complicated.”

How it started

RS: Alright, let’s go back, then. How did all this begin?

Ziggy: Reykjavik. Tiny club, bad weather, good beer. I was there on one of my “business trips” — which means I was sniffing around for records, antiques and trouble in equal measure.

Gudrun: He found at least two out of three.

Ziggy: Depends who you ask. Anyway, this place was mostly locals, a few tourists who got lost looking for a more respectable bar, and a band on stage with a singer who made time do… strange things.

RS: That would be you, Gudrun?

Gudrun: Unfortunately, yes. I was fronting a local rock band then. Russian‑Icelandic singer in a Reykjavik bar — that’s a very long story we don’t have time for. We played a mix of things, but that night there was one song that wasn’t in any tourist guide. Completely in Icelandic, no translation, no helpful chorus in English.

Ziggy: And I had never heard it in my life. No clever reference, no secret bootleg in my collection. Just a song in a language I don’t speak, sung in a room full of people who did.

RS: And yet you say you understood it.

Ziggy: That’s the part that bothered me. Halfway through the first verse, I realised something very uncomfortable: I knew exactly what she was singing about. Not word by word — I still couldn’t order a beer in Icelandic to save my life — but the whole thing arrived in my head at once. The guilt, the confusion, the feeling that you’ve broken yourself in ways you can’t fix and you’re still looking for the courage to step onstage anyway.

Gudrun: You told me later you felt like someone had broken into your head with a microphone.

Ziggy: That’s what it was like. I had come in carrying my own stupid questions — about getting older, about whether my life was just a collection of records and near‑misses — and suddenly there she was, singing the answers in a language I couldn’t read but somehow… recognised.

RS: That sounds almost mystical.

Ziggy: Or pathological. Take your pick. All I knew was: the song ended and I had this very clean, very annoying clarity. I understood the song, I understood a little more about my own mess, and I understood one more thing very clearly — if I walked out without talking to that singer, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

Gudrun: You looked like a man who’d seen a ghost.

Ziggy: I’d seen a possibility. Much worse.

RS: So you go up to the singer after the show — very movie‑like.

Ziggy: Painfully movie‑like. I hate doing the cliché “Hi, I’m in the music business” routine, because ninety‑nine times out of a hundred, the guy saying that is not someone you want near your life.

Gudrun: He came up anyway. Looked like someone who’d spent too many nights arguing with records and not enough hours sleeping.

Ziggy: Guilty as charged. I told her, “I don’t understand your language, but I understood your song, and that’s a problem I can’t ignore.”

Gudrun: I thought he was either drunk or trying a very strange line. Maybe both.

Ziggy: We started talking.

Gudrun: It was supposed to be five minutes. Just the usual after‑show small talk — where you’re from, nice set, thanks for coming.

Ziggy: We closed the place.

Gudrun: We got kicked out, actually. The owner wanted to go home.

RS: What did you talk about that kept you there so long?

Ziggy: Oh, the usual light stuff. Soviet childhoods, immigration forms, why half the best records in history were made by people who were miserable and underpaid.

Gudrun: Also dogs. Don’t forget the dogs.

Ziggy: Right. In my case, two rescue mutts back home in Olympia. In hers — a childhood between countries, between winters, between alphabets.

Gudrun: My mother is Russian, my father’s Icelandic. There were a lot of kitchens, a lot of snow, and more than one language on the table. Music was the only thing that didn’t need subtitles.

Ziggy: At some point I realised I wasn’t talking like a guy who’d just discovered a voice he wanted to record. I was talking like someone who’d just found the duet partner he’d always wanted to be — except life, as usual, had other plans.

RS: You wanted to sing with her?

Ziggy: I grew up on those strange duos — voices that shouldn’t work together and somehow do. I always thought if I ever got truly lucky, I’d end up on stage next to someone like that. But by the time I met Gudrun, I was old enough and honest enough to know my job was different.

Gudrun: He says that now. At the time he just said, “You shouldn’t be stuck in one little bar at the edge of the map.”

Ziggy: And I meant it. The universe doesn’t throw you that kind of singer every Tuesday.

From Reykjavik to Olympia

RS: So how do we get from that bar in Reykjavik to Olympia, Washington, and you managing them?

Gudrun: That part is mostly his fault.

Ziggy: I knew you’d say that.

Gudrun: He said, “If you ever feel like seeing America, there’s a couch in Olympia and a stage at the Yellow Submarine.” Very casual. Like crossing an ocean because some record‑store guy hears his own thoughts in your song is an ordinary life choice.

Ziggy: I honestly didn’t think she’d take it seriously. Musicians say that kind of thing after shows all the time. Ninety‑nine percent of the time, nobody calls.

Gudrun: And yet, a few months later, I was standing in Sea‑Tac with one suitcase, a cheap guitar and a very approximate idea of where Olympia is on the map.

Ziggy: I remember texting my wife, Vera: “The Icelandic tornado has landed.”

RS: Vera being…

Ziggy: My wife, their eventual tour manager, and the person who keeps all of this from collapsing under its own romantic nonsense.

Gudrun: She’s the one who turned a strange meeting in a Reykjavik bar into an actual working life. “If you’re going to do this,” she said, “you’re going to do it properly. Tours, visas, schedules, the whole circus.”

Ziggy: She doesn’t like half‑measures. So one thing led to another — club shows at the Yellow Submarine, longer sets, stranger covers, trips that turned into tours. Somewhere along that road, a Russian‑Canadian named Rick walked into the picture, with his own ghosts and his own dream of singing in a duo.

Why only covers?

RS: One thing that stands out about Shadow & Gudrun — and now Gudrun’s solo work too — is the decision to lean so heavily into covers. In an era obsessed with “original content,” that’s almost rebellious.

Gudrun: It started as survival. When you’re a foreign singer in a new place, people are more willing to listen if they recognise at least some of the melodies.

Ziggy: And then it became a manifesto. We realised we weren’t interested in writing “original” songs just to add more noise to the pile. We were more interested in what happens when you take a song everybody thinks they know and tilt it slightly, so the light comes in from a different angle.

Gudrun: A lot of those songs are like abandoned houses. Everyone’s walked through them, but nobody’s lived in this room, with this furniture, with this view out the window.

Ziggy: We had nights we still joke about — Two Dog Night, Three Dog Night — where we just sat up with the dogs, records and a bottle, asking, “What if we treated covers like short films instead of karaoke?” Somewhere around the third or fourth dog snore, the idea stuck.

Where they are now

RS: And now? Where has that philosophy taken you?

Ziggy: To more work than any sane person would voluntarily take on.

Gudrun: To more than ten albums scattered across the platforms, depending on how you count.

Ziggy: To a YouTube channel with around seventy videos, most of them little movies rather than simple performance clips. To graphs that, very slowly and very stubbornly, refuse to go down.

Gudrun: No viral miracles, just a lot of people quietly finding us at strange hours.

RS: How would you describe the concept now, if you had to?

Ziggy: Musically, we treat every song as a room we’re allowed to redesign, but we keep the foundations. You still recognise the house, but the colours, the furniture, the ghosts — those are ours.

Gudrun: And visually, we treat each song as if it belongs to a little universe. Sometimes that’s “Middle‑earth” and castles and long roads, sometimes it’s one empty stage and one overhead light. The point is that the video isn’t an illustration of the lyrics; it’s another layer of meaning.

Ziggy: We’re not here to out‑sing the originals. That would be stupid and arrogant. We’re here to ask, “What else is hiding inside this song that nobody’s shown yet?”

Gudrun: And apparently there are enough people in the world who enjoy that kind of archaeology. So we keep digging.

=======================

RS: The obvious question then: how do you pick the songs you cover? Why these songs?

Gudrun: They’re almost never “the best of” anything. Not the biggest hits, not the safest choices. Sometimes, yes, it’s a song everybody’s grandmother knows — something like an old bolero or a standard that’s been sung to death. But very often it’s the opposite: deep cuts buried on side two of a ‘70s LP, B‑sides that almost nobody played twice when they came out.

Ziggy: Or tracks by bands that never got their due. On the last Shadow & Gudrun album, for example, we did three songs by a Belgian prog band almost no one outside collector circles remembers. That wasn’t an accident. It’s our small attempt at rehabilitation — to say, “You missed something beautiful here, let’s shine a light on it for a minute.”

Gudrun: But we don’t sit there with spreadsheets going, “OK, now we need one hit, one deep cut, one obscure gem.” It’s much simpler and more embarrassing than that. We pick songs we’ve already lived with for years — things we tried to sing badly on cheap guitars, screamed along to in cars, lost our voices to at concerts.

Ziggy: If we haven’t already howled it at the top of our lungs somewhere — in a parking lot, in a kitchen, in the back row of a stadium — it’s probably not our song to mess with.

RS: And once you’ve picked them, what’s the actual job?

Gudrun: Turning them into a conversation. Almost every song we take on becomes a dialogue between two voices — even if the original wasn’t written that way. The simplest love song sounds different when it’s not one person declaring something, but two people trying to agree on what happened.

Ziggy: That’s why we gravitate toward the melancholic rock and prog ballads — Pink Floyd’s sense of time slipping away, certain Beatles songs that are half‑prayer, half‑apology, a Queen tune that sounds like a joke until you realise it isn’t. Those songs already have ghosts in them. We just invite them to sit at a table with us.

Gudrun: And sometimes I’ll sing against the original architecture — add a loose, almost free‑jazz scat line over a guitar solo or keyboard run that everybody recognises. We often keep the original instrumental DNA where it matters, not to copy it, but because it’s part of the spell.

Ziggy: For us that’s not theft, that’s reverence. We’re fans first, not virtuoso session players. It would be ridiculous to pretend we can out‑finger Gilmour or Blackmore or out‑piano Wakeman. Instead we say: “This solo is sacred ground; let’s put Gudrun’s voice through it like light through stained glass.”

Gudrun: Same with that nine‑string magic a certain Russian blues wizard does. You don’t “improve” on it; you breathe with it, you answer it. Voice is the only instrument where I sometimes feel I know what I’m doing, so I lean into that.

RS: There’s also a streak of… let’s call it cheerful arrogance in some of your choices.

Ziggy: Oh, that’s all on Rooney.

Gudrun: I plead guilty. Sometimes you look at a song that everyone has declared untouchable — the big closing statement of a band with a crown in their logo — and you think, “Why not? He’d probably laugh.”

Ziggy: “The show must go on” school of courage.

Gudrun: Exactly. It’s half madness, half love letter. Dressing up in a parody of someone’s stage costumes, trying on their silhouette for three minutes — not to pretend we are them, but to say, “Thank you for leaving this song behind. We’re going to take it for a little spin now, we’ll bring it back in one piece.”

Ziggy: I like to think that most of the people we borrow from — the queens, the floyds, the nameless prog heroes — would recognise what we’re doing. Not trying to replace them, just keeping some of their more neglected children out in the sun a bit longer.

Gudrun: At the end of the day, it’s simple: we choose songs that have already chosen us. The ones that moved in years ago and never left. All we do now is invite cameras and microphones into that conversation and hope someone, somewhere, hears a piece of their own life in the noise.

RS: Don’t you ever worry that living mostly in cover territory means people will just see you as “a cover band”?

Ziggy: Only people who don’t listen past the first chorus. If all you hear is the title, sure, we’re a cover band. If you stay long enough to notice what’s been moved, added, broken and glued back together, you realise that’s where our own music lives.

Gudrun: For us “original” isn’t about owning the chords. It’s about what happens when you drag your own history into someone else’s song and see what survives. Some people write new houses. We move into old ones, knock down a few walls and leave our lights on in the windows.

RS: YouTube nerd question. A lot of people would say your videos have “terrible retention”: slow intros, long shots, guitar build‑ups. Don’t you ever feel the urge to shave off twenty seconds here, add a jump‑cut there, just to keep the graph from nosediving?

Ziggy: You mean fix the art so the spreadsheet smiles?

RS: That’s one way to put it.

Gudrun: Look, we’re not anti‑data. We watch our stats like everyone else. We know exactly where people drop off, where they skip, where they replay. But there’s a limit to how much you should let a graph tell you what a song is allowed to be.

Ziggy: If the first thing a platform tells you is “cut the intro, speed up the shot, don’t linger too long,” what you end up with is a world where nothing ever has time to breathe. That’s great for selling energy drinks, terrible for boleros and long walks through Middle‑earth.

RS: Still, if the numbers say people leave…

Ziggy: Some people leave. That’s fine. If you bail because there’s a forty‑second guitar intro with ocean and faces instead of a jump scare and a caption, you’re probably not our person anyway. I’d rather lose those viewers early than spend four minutes begging for their attention with tricks I don’t believe in.

Gudrun: The people we care about are the ones who sit down with a pair of headphones and think, “Okay, show me a world.” If that takes a slow pan and a long breath before the first word, then that’s how it has to be.

Ziggy: Also, retention isn’t a religion. Our watch time is fine. The channel’s growing. The hours are there. What we’re missing isn’t another three percent on a graph, it’s actual human beings who look at what we do and go, “This is mine.” You don’t manufacture those with jump‑cuts.

RS: So you’re not going to re‑edit anything just because the analytics dip at 0:37?

Gudrun: No. If a video is wrong, we’ll fix it because we feel it’s wrong, not because a dashboard twitched.

Ziggy: There’s a difference between learning from your audience and letting the algorithm art‑direct your life. We’ll use Shorts, teasers, all the toys — sure. But the full‑length videos are the room where we don’t negotiate with the numbers.

Gudrun: The way I see it, the people who are meant to find us will stay. The others will swipe to the next thing, and that’s okay. Not every story is for every scroll.

Tech & Gatekeepers

RS: Let’s talk tech for a second. Between cheap gear, streaming, and now AI, it feels like everyone can record, release and even sell or give away their music directly to fans. That’s great for artists, but it’s killing a lot of jobs in the middle – managers, producers, even engineers. Do you feel any sympathy for the people the industry is leaving behind?

Ziggy: You want the polite answer or the real one?

RS: Let’s start with the real one.

Ziggy: Honestly? I think it’s beautiful. For decades there was this bureaucratic layer thicker than the number of actual artists – A&R, middle‑management, “creative consultants”, people who could kill a record with one indifferent email. Half the time there were more people handling music than listening to it. Watching that layer melt is… satisfying.

Gudrun: We’re not cheering for individual people to lose their rent, but the system was insane. You had to squeeze through a narrow hallway of gatekeepers just to put a song in front of strangers. Now I can record a vocal at the edge of the world, send it to Rick in Toronto, and by next week it’s on the same platforms as the latest major‑label product. That’s a miracle.

Ziggy: Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined being even what I am now – a Russian guy in Olympia running a record shop and quietly producing this strange duo, with people in Brazil or Japan stumbling on our Pink Floyd covers at three in the morning. And Gudrun could have stayed in that bar at the end of the map forever. Now she can walk out of a gig, put her headphones on, upload a track and it actually finds its people, even if it’s a small tribe. That’s huge.

RS: There’s also the argument that with so much music out there, it’s impossible to stand out unless you’re part of a massive “project”.

Gudrun: That part is true. The mainstream is mostly projects now. Teams, storyboards, moodboards, rollout decks. You don’t get to be heard by millions unless you’re built for that from the inside out.

Ziggy: If you want the big machine, you basically have to be a big machine. And the machine doesn’t like risk. Do you honestly think someone like Dylan or Zappa could get a major deal today with that voice, those lyrics, and albums that sound like fever dreams? Ummagumma? Tales from Topographic Oceans? Today those would be Bandcamp curiosities with a few thousand lunatics worshipping them. Which, by the way, might not be the worst fate.

Gudrun: There’s that film Yesterday, where a guy wakes up in a world with no Beatles and becomes a superstar by “remembering” all their songs. It’s cute, but completely backwards. In our world, if some unknown kid came in with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”, most big‑league people would tell him it’s too naive, too simple, not playlist‑friendly enough. He’d end up uploading it from his bedroom and getting politely ignored.

Ziggy: Look at us: Rick and Rooney are out here singing actual pearls – masterpieces of rock, country, Euro‑pop, metal, forgotten gems – with a ridiculous amount of care, and we have what? A few hundred devoted lunatics scattered around the globe who actually pay attention. Which we’re grateful for, by the way. But there’s no Ed Sheeran knocking on the door with a double‑bill offer.

Gudrun: And that’s fine. I’d rather have a couple of hundred people who genuinely show up than millions who half‑listen between ads. The idea that every musician should aspire to be a stadium act is just another industry myth.

RS: You mentioned big pop names. Are you saying they won’t last?

Ziggy: Time decides, not us. But let me ask you: how many covers of certain mega‑stars’ songs do you actually hear out in the wild? In bars, in other artists’ sets, in thirty years of people messing around with their favourites?

Gudrun: People love to tell us, “But look at the numbers!” Sure. But twenty years from now, which songs will still be alive because other singers are dragging them into new lives? That’s the real canon, not the day‑one stream count.

Ziggy: Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in the world are already out there doing… let’s call them very questionable covers of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Gudrun: I saw one of those. Managed about twenty seconds before my body said no.

(laughing)

Ziggy: That’s the point. The machinery can make anything huge for a season. What it can’t do is make it matter on a thirty‑year horizon. Technology gives you both options now: you can chase the machine, or you can build a small, stubborn, honest little world and invite people in one by one.

Gudrun: We chose the second option. We don’t sell tickets through Ticketmaster; we pass the hat in a Yellow Submarine. If fewer people come but they’re actually listening, we’re okay with that.

SHADOW/LESS

RS: Let’s talk about the new record. Gudrun, you’ve got a solo album coming out on June 25, titled SHADOW/LESS. The name looks like a typo and a confession at the same time. What does it mean to you?

Gudrun: It’s both, really. On paper it’s one word, “shadowless” – no shadow, no weight, no past. But I wanted the slash in there, because the whole album lives between those two states: shadow and less. There’s a part of me that can’t exist without Shadow, without Rick, without all the ghosts we’ve collected. And there’s a part that wanted to see what would happen if I stepped out of that frame for a moment and stood there alone.

Ziggy: Also, the designer had a minor nervous breakdown when he realised we really meant the slash.

Gudrun: He forgave us. Eventually.

RS: Conceptually, what kind of album is it? Is this you breaking away from the duo or just changing the lighting?

Gudrun: Definitely not a break‑up record. More like a side‑quest. Shadow & Gudrun is still home – that’s where the big films and the long road trips live. SHADOW/LESS is me in a smaller room with the lights turned differently. There are still covers, of course; that’s the language I think in. But the centre of gravity shifts: the arrangements are more intimate in places, more dangerous in others, and the “other voice” is sometimes a choir, sometimes an echo, sometimes silence.

Ziggy: Think of it as an alternate timeline. In one universe, Rick and Gudrun keep walking together, arguing about key changes. In another, she takes a side street for an hour and lets us see who she is when nobody else is in the frame.

Ziggy: Mind if I smoke?

RS: As long as you don’t ask me to join. It’s charmingly old‑school, though. Very “back in the day” interview energy.

Ziggy: Good. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the cliché police.

RS: The artwork and design for SHADOW/LESS look very deliberate – almost like a small film poster. How did that come together?

Gudrun: The idea was to show someone who is halfway between presence and absence. We used double exposures, reflections, bits of stage light and bits of ordinary daylight. On one side it’s me with all the usual armour – leather, hair, guitar – and on the other it’s almost just a contour, like the shadow has walked out of the frame.

Ziggy: We joked that the cover should look like a missing‑person poster the singer put out for herself. “Have you seen this woman? Last spotted between a mic stand and a ferry terminal.”

Gudrun: It’s also practical. If you’re going to call your record SHADOW/LESS, you can’t just slap a normal promo shot on it. The image has to argue with the title a little.

RS: You mentioned sides – Fall Side and Climb Side. That sounds very old‑school vinyl.

Gudrun: It is. We structured the album as if you had to physically turn it over. The Fall Side is the part where things are slipping: older songs about losing time, losing love, losing illusions – the quieter boleros, the darker ballads, the ones where the ground is moving under your feet.

Ziggy: That’s where you put the songs you whisper to yourself at four in the morning when you’re sure nobody’s listening.

Gudrun: Exactly. Then you flip the record and the Climb Side begins. Those songs aren’t happy in any simple way, but they’re about motion in the other direction – getting up, leaving, choosing, sometimes just refusing to stay in the same room. The arrangements open up more, the choirs come in, the guitars get bolder.

RS: So it’s not “sad side” / “happy side”.

Gudrun: No. It’s “fall” and “climb”. You can be terrified on the way up and strangely calm on the way down. I wanted both of those states on one record, with the needle actually crossing a line between them.

RS: Let’s talk about Rick. His name is all over your duo work, but this is a Gudrun album. Why is he not on the cover, and what is he actually doing here?

Gudrun: He’s doing what he always does: almost everything you can’t see. Producing, arranging, playing, arguing with compressors and trying to keep the chaos inside the speakers. He sings a little, but this time the lead voice is mine almost all the way through. That was important symbolically – to have one person in the centre, even if the songs themselves are still conversations.

Ziggy: Think of him as the ghost producer who forgot to stay invisible. His fingerprints are on the guitars, the keys, the way the drums breathe in and out. If you know Shadow & Gudrun, you’ll hear him. If you don’t, you’ll just think, “Oh, this woman has a very patient mad scientist in the next room.”

Gudrun: We didn’t call it “Gudrun & Rick – SHADOW/LESS” on purpose. This is my fall and my climb, with his scaffolding.

RS: Song choices. You’re known for covers that are… let’s say daring. What kind of material made it onto SHADOW/LESS?

Gudrun: The record opens with “Let’s Fall Together” by Thea Gilmore – a song that treats falling not as failure but as a decision, a kind of reckless pact. It rolls straight into “Sounds Good to Me”, which on the surface is all warmth and reassurance, but underneath is two people trying to convince themselves they still believe their own promises.

From there we go down into the wall: “The Cask of Amontillado” – straight out of Alan Parsons and Poe, that quiet little horror about sealing someone up brick by brick for reasons that are never quite explained. After that you get a lullaby that isn’t really safe at all, “Hushabye Mountain” from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a song written as a bedtime spell that somehow carries all this longing and exile and waiting inside it.

Then comes “A Day Before You Came”, which was already one of ABBA’s bleakest stories before Steven Wilson turned it into something almost surgical; we lean into that tragic version and then push it a little further, with the choir where there used to be just one lonely voice. That’s pretty much the point where the fall side ends and the climb side begins.

On that climb you get a standard that’s lived several lives already, “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, born in 1930 and sung by everyone from dance‑band crooners to Mama Cass, here treated as a fragile, slightly haunted wish rather than a cosy standard. Then we stumble into our corner of Queen with “My Melancholy Blues” – their first real flirtation with jazz, already half a cabaret confession, half a goodbye – and we try to hold onto that cigarette‑and‑piano intimacy.

And at the very end, of course, there’s ABBA’s “Thank You for the Music”. Originally it was part of a little stage musical about a girl with golden hair who thinks fame is the answer and then finds out what it really costs. In our version it’s less a curtain‑call and more a crooked smile: a thank‑you from someone who knows the music hasn’t always been as bright as she once hoped, but is still grateful it was there at all.

Ziggy: And as usual, the rule was: if the original is perfect, don’t try to out‑sing it, just walk into the same house and rearrange the furniture. Sometimes that means a quiet, single voice. Sometimes it means a full ominous choir where there used to be only one person.

Gudrun: I wanted each song to answer the same question from a different angle: “Who are you when you step out of the shared frame?” Sometimes the answer is “still a duet, just with ghosts.”

RS: Last one, then. Creative plans. You’ve clearly put a lot into this album. Are you going to catch your breath after June 25, or are you more of the “don’t stop at the stop, run, rabbit, run” school?

Ziggy: We know we’re not in that song, but the sentiment is familiar.

Gudrun: Rest is a nice theory. In practice, by the time one record comes out, the next two are already making noise in my head.

Ziggy: The hole is always half‑dug.

Gudrun: There’s more Shadow & Gudrun work coming – we still have entire corners of other people’s catalogs we haven’t walked through – and there are a few ideas that only make sense if I stay in this “shadow/less” space a bit longer. But we’re not mapping out a five‑year plan on a whiteboard.

Ziggy: We finish one road, we look around, and there’s another one that wasn’t there yesterday. Then we argue about which guitar to bring and go.

Gudrun: As long as there are still songs we’re afraid to touch – that’s the direction we’ll be heading.

Extra scene – Ziggy Stardust & stardust in other lives

RS: One last rumour to clear up. Is it true people around here actually call you Ziggy Stardust?

Ziggy: Unfortunately, yes.

Gudrun: He pretends to hate it. Secretly he keeps a little glitter in his pocket just in case.

Ziggy: Don’t start lies in a serious magazine, Rooney. It was never about the Bowie thing at first. I was just “Ziggy” for years. Then someone – I think it was Vera – said, “You keep crashing into people’s lives like a meteor, you might as well own the Stardust part.” It stuck.

RS: So you’re the comet that smashes into bands?

Ziggy: More like the guy who shows up, makes a mess of your plans and then leaves you with songs you didn’t know you had. From there to “Stardust” is not a long walk after a few drinks.

Gudrun: And then Rick went and wrote a whole novel where the main character is literally called Ziggy Stardust, which did not help.

Ziggy: That’s his revenge for me dragging him into this in the first place. People keep asking how much of book‑Ziggy is actually me. The answer is: enough to be uncomfortable, not enough to be used in court.

RS: In the book, that Ziggy is definitely stardust for Liora – he turns her whole world sideways. Do you feel like that in real life with the people you work with?

Ziggy: Sometimes I think I’m just the taxi driver who missed the exit. But yes, with Liora in the book, with Gudrun in real life, there’s this pattern of meeting someone whose life is already on fire and simply… adding a different colour to the flames. I didn’t write that part, but I recognise it.

Gudrun: He won’t say it out loud, but he did throw a handful of stardust at my life. Reykjavik, Olympia, Yellow Submarine, tours, castles, middle‑earth, all of that came from one very stubborn man deciding my little bar wasn’t big enough.

Ziggy: Careful, people will think I’m useful.

RS: If he’s stardust in your story, what is Gudrun in his?

Ziggy: Trouble.

(laughing)

Ziggy: Also, those eyes are not as innocent as they look. Everyone sees this quiet Icelandic‑Russian singer with a guitar and thinks, “Oh, how sweet.” They don’t realise she’s a Lokadottir.

RS: As in…

Ziggy: As in: somewhere far back in the family tree there’s a trickster god taking notes. She’ll smile at you, sing you a song, and by the time it’s over you’ve agreed to rearrange your whole life and you’re not entirely sure how that happened.

Gudrun: That’s an exaggeration.

Ziggy: Is it? You tell me. She walked into my club, sang in a language I don’t speak, and I came out of that night with a new band, a new job description and eventually a fictional alter ego. If that’s not mischief on a mythological level, I don’t know what is.

Gudrun: I just sing. He’s the one who keeps turning it into stories with dragons and submarines.

Ziggy: See? Classic Loki move. Never trust the calm ones.