Árný Margrét knew exactly what she wanted to do with her second album. She knew it had to be different. After releasing more stripped-back stories on her 2022 debut they only talk about the weather, and her 2023 EP dinner alone, the Icelandic singer and songwriter wanted to add more layers, and instrumentation, to her second album I Miss You, I Do.
At first, Margrét didn’t realize she was making a new album, just exploring new sounds and direction, and ended up writing everything in 2024. She wanted an “American sound,” and “more folkier,” and captured something more Americana by incorporating some banjo, harmonium, and pianos. “The plan was never to make an album,” shares Margrét. “I knew I was going to make another album, that was always going to happen, but I didn’t know how or when. I knew I wanted more instrumentation and a little bigger sound.”
She also wanted a change of scenery and pushed herself out of her comfort zone, of Iceland, to record with different producers in the Hudson Valley, New York, and the Southeast and Southwest of the United States.
Crisscrossing the U.S. following a tour in the spring of 2024—when she opened for artists like Wilco, Julian Lage, Leif Vollebekk, and Blake Mills—Margrét made stops to work with Josh Kaufman (The National, Bob Weir, The Hold Steady) in Kingston, New York, Durham, South Carolina with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), and Boulder, Colorado with Andrew Berlin (Gregory Alan Isakov), before returning to Iceland to record three final songs with longtime collaborator Guðmundur “Kiddi” Kristinn Jónsson (Ásgeir), who also mixed the album.
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Another unexpected challenge Margrét faced was working on an album with predominantly English-speaking producers. “It’s different to work with people in a different language,” she says. “You’re a different person in another language—a little bit. More than the language, you have to get to know a person to work with them in this way.”
She adds, “I’ve spoken English for a long time, and I can’t speak about whatever I want, that’s the problem,” says Margrét. “It just takes a bit more out of you. I’m still the same. I can still say the same things. Sometimes it takes more time.”
Toward the end of her tour in 2024, Margrét first connected with Cook, which started the snowball effect of I Miss You, I Do. Both worked on the homesick-bound ballad “Greyhound Station”—My fourth time in America / I’ve been a little bit scared … I’ll be home in the morning—and “Took the Train ’til the End,” a song centered on feeling invisible that brought Cook to tears during the recording.
“The newest songs are always the most fun to record,” says Margrét, comparing the more drawn-out process of working on songs she had for some time on they only talk about the weather. “It all connects pretty well because it’s the same time period and in my mind during a certain period of time.”
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After working with Cook, Margrét made her way to Boulder, where South African-American singer and songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, who inspired her to first start performing, has a studio and linked her up with Berlin before she finally connected with Kaufmann in New York.
Throughout I Miss You, I Do Margrét takes all the thoughts running through her head and transposes them into musical vignettes, textural reflections of loneliness, hope, life and death, and other sobering revelations.
Opening on the title track, which came out of her session with Kaufman, “I Miss You, I Do” was written the evening before she met the producer. Margrét wanted a good song to bring to Kaufman and wrote it in an Airbnb.
“Crooked Teeth,” another personal account from her childhood of feeling overlooked or unseen because of appearance—I swam so fast / Got all the A’s / You didn’t notice / Well, anyways—was one of two tracks she worked on with Berlin.
After Margrét’s whirlwind journey, “I Love You,” along with the moodier “Day Old Thoughts,” and the penultimate “Born in Spring” were recorded in Iceland during the fall of 2024. I thought about dying, thought about life, thought about people before me, Margrét sings on “Maybe I’ve Wasted My Time,” a repetitive contemplation on life, dying, and making sense of it in the present and the second song she worked on with Kaufmann, along with “You’re Mine, I’m Yours.”
The end of I Miss You, I Do is also a beginning in the sense on Margrét’s unlikely holiday song, the closing “Happy New Year.” Not the most joyful holiday song—it almost didn’t make the album cut—and it moves from a painful Christmas Eve—You make a few jokes and tear our hearts apart—to New Year’s Eve: It’s New Year’s Eve / Worst day of the year / You raise your voice / And then you say to me, Happy New Year.
At 23, Margrét is ready to experience more and find her way to new songs. “All of these songs are like a diary entry,” reveals Margrét of the album. “It’s not that I want to do this. It’s just that I like to do this. It’s a part of me. I need to do it. It has to come out.”
She adds, “The music, it never stops.”
Photos: Guðm. Kristinn Jónsson
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