I remember when I met him, my reaction was just like: WHAT? LOL. Like, it wasn’t even like I was scared or something or like I was freaked out. I was just sort of like, taken aback, you know? I mean, the way he was talking to me about my life and like, all my shit, it was just like, there was almost this very clinical vibe he had. He wasn’t shaking with excitement or like, trying to touch me or screaming his head off or anything. It was almost like, I mean, it was almost like actually seeing me in the flesh wasn’t all that different from reading about me or watching videos or listening to the albums. He actually sort of talked to me like a person, which I totally wasn’t expecting. I think because he was just so familiar with me and like, so deep in my world, actually meeting me wasn’t that surprising for him.

The whole reason I even met him in the first place was that he won this contest on the radio station in Oslo where they were doing a trivia thing ahead of my concert there. He must’ve called into the contest from the seed vault on Spitsbergen, and he obviously knew more about me than anyone else, and so the prize for the contest was that the winner got to come backstage after the concert and hang out with me, and I don’t know, I think there must have been some sort of charity component or something or else I probably wouldn’t have agreed to it. But anyway, Oddvar came backstage, and like, we started talking, and I was sort of expecting it to be the normal kind of shit, you know—I mean, honestly, I was expecting a fourteen-year-old girl—but here comes this like, well-dressed, kinda intellectual-looking dude, who’s like, thirty-six and doesn’t look like a crazy person at all, and he was so calm, you know? He was so gracious and nice. And like, I asked him a few questions, just trying to be nice, and he kinda blew me away with how much he knew. He started rattling off facts about my middle school, and like, all of the different producers I had worked with, and like, my vocal range, and then sort of the craziest thing about the encounter was that he just started asking me questions, but like, they weren’t the kinds of questions that most fans would ask. It was more like—I mean, honestly, it felt like the whole point of meeting me for him was to fill in the gaps in his knowledge, you know? Like, he was almost treating me like I was research material, or like I was a very rare book about the Civil War or something and he was finally going to get the answers that he had been searching for after all these years of studying me. He didn’t care about the fact of meeting me so much as he saw meeting me as the ultimate opportunity to answer the questions he couldn’t answer without me. And, I mean, honestly, it was wild, because we were just supposed to hang for, like, half an hour or something—I think that’s all that the radio station had promised him—but I ended up hanging out with him all night. He came out to dinner with us and like, we all had drinks together—he didn’t really drink much, but we got him to take a shot or two—and after a few hours, like, he left early. He was the one who ended up saying to me: I have to be up early tomorrow for my boat ride back to Spitsbergen, but it has been a pleasure meeting you. And then he just disappeared. LOL. All he asked for was my email address, which I gave to him, of course, and he was like: Would it be all right if I contacted you in the future with questions about your work? And I was like: Yeah man, of course, this was dope. And that was it.