With her long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, Danish singer-songwriter-producer Agnes Obel looks like some undiscovered David Lynch muse who just happened to get involved with music instead of dedicating her life to film.

No wonder her music — a fusion of classical influences and Scandinavian folk — bares cinematic traits and has a tendency of taking its listener on a surreal journey. Her third album, Citizen of Glass, that drops October 21, is a highly concept record inspired by the inevitability of total surveillance and looking for love during uneasy Tinder times.

Obel doesn’t take the recording process lightly — whether she’s producing and mixing everything herself or resurrecting an old music instrument from the 1920s to create truly unique glass-like sounds, one thing is transparent when it comes to Obel: talking to her is a journey of its own kind. 

Your biography is well-documented, but which moments from your past do you personally consider the milestones; the ones that made you the person and the artist you are today?

I don’t know… I don’t really look at it like that. I don’t know if I have a milestone [pauses]. No, not really.

Maybe a record you heard when you were a teenager that struck you as genius and made you want to become a musician? 

I remember I had to learn how to play when I was 11. I was not so good at reading sheet music, so my piano teacher told me I should buy a CD and listen to it and learn it like that. I got a CD and listened to it on my CD player in the house. The piece was from a French composer Claude Debussy called “Clair de Lune” (“Song to the moon”) and it was so beautiful. That was a very romantic piece that starts slowly and gets faster. I remember feeling like the whole room was getting bigger and more beautiful. That was the moment I realized how special music can be and how it can take you to another place. 

Well maybe your new record will inspire some young musicians, too. What should we know about the new album?

I’d like for people to listen to it with open mind like I did when I was 11 listening to that record… Okay, that’s very ambitious of me to think that my record will have the same effect. But something like that would be great.

Well you are very much an ambitious artist: on your debut album you wrote, produced and recorded everything yourself. Did you do everything yourself this time around too?

Yes, I did everything myself. I didn’t play string instruments, since I can’t play those, but I did everything else. Why did I do it like that? I like to think that an album is like a journey into a head of another person. I like to make idiosyncratic albums. And when there’s a lot of other people involved, it takes away from how you personally experience things. It becomes less obvious. I have a very direct access to how I experience things when I play most of the instruments and do the mixing and the production myself. That’s the only way you’re sure you’re making something that’s really yours. Especially in this time when music became so commercial with individual expression being less there, when you have 16 songwriters and three producers in one room. It can become, you know, less personal [laughs].

When you’re making a record, do you write lyrics first and then put them on top of music or do you do everything simultaneously? 

I often make up a melody line and the melody line for the voice and I will write lyrics for it. I’m very sound-driven. Sound is the most important thing for me. It all grows from the melody and not from the words.

But let’s talk about the words for a moment. What’s the story behind the album’s title, Citizen of Glass?

I was reading about mass surveillance that’s happening to our technology. And in German media when you talk about an individual losing his privacy, you say that he’s made of glass. He becomes a glass citizen or a glass human. And they say that in the future we will all be made of glass. Everything will be known about us, we won’t have any secrets, as it won’t be possible to hide anything. And this image of human beings walking around being made of glass seemed very fascinating and poetic to me. And obviously very frightening. It really spoke to me.

I already felt like I was made of glass. Often when I perform my music and people look straight into me, I feel this way. And I also feel fragile and vulnerable. Glass is a strong material, but it can also break. I also feel like these days we look through glass on everything. We have these screens and transparency and we’re writing our autobiography on social media every day. So it was fitting for me as a person but also to our time.

Then I started researching and looking for the instruments that sounded like glass or could be glass-like. Was reading books about the ideas of being transparent. Read a book called Envy by the Russian writer Yury Olesha, which had a character who wasn’t made of glass, but who was transparent in a sense of having no secrets and being easy to read.

I approached this in many different ways, which was new to me. I used to collect the songs I liked the best and go “OK, now I have an album.” But this time around I was writing with this theme in mind. Trying to describe how it feels to be watched and how it feels to look at yourself from the outside. I also changed the sound. I used to work with piano and cello, but this time I worked with a lot of different instruments.

Surely one of the weirdest instruments you used was the Trautonium. How did you find it and what was it like playing on it?

A friend of mine showed me a video of a guy named Oskar Sala playing on it. My friend also found a guy in South Germany who got ahold of manuals about making Trautoniums, ‘cause it’s not something that’s in production, you can only see it in museums. I ordered one and it took this guy a year to make it. I got it, but the guy isn’t doing it anymore ‘cause it’s such a big work to make a Trautonium. I think he only made two copies. Now I have this very special instrument at home. It’s really interesting to play on it.

You also explore the ideas of transparency in your music videos that feature surveillance-like visuals. Take your surreal “Golden Green” music video, for instance, or computer-fied video for “Familiar.” Is it in any way a commentary of the modern technology-heavy world?

Yes, I think so. For example “Familiar” is a song about love. And these days, a big part of our love life takes place in the technological world. We are finding each other online. We are watching each other through these prisms of social media. When we lose somebody we love, we can still follow them in a way. Even though it’s extra-painful from a distance. I feel like a lot of our emotions are digitalized. I wanted to write a song that would have this technological dimension in there. My boyfriend made this video, and it was his idea to make me look robot-like. That was his way of commenting on how love, technology and industry intertwine in a very strange way.

How big is your music instruments collection?

It’s okay. I would like it to be much bigger to be honest [laughs]. I have two German pianos, home organ, some keyboards, Trautonium, celesta, small guitars and things like this. I would like to go and buy a bass, ‘cause I used to play it.

Your music calls for very beautiful and mysterious venues. What's the most dream-like place you ever played?

I once played in a little cave in Switzerland. That was very strange; it was a proper stone cave. I also played in France in some amphitheaters, that was pretty amazing. I could see the water as the sun went down. It was very, very beautiful. I recently played in an old monastery also in France.

What should we expect from your March US tour?

I have a new fantastic all-female band: it’s me and three other ladies from different parts of the world. Two cellists are looping the cellos live – it’s very dynamic. It’s new for me to have percussion on stage and to be so loud. It’s a new vibe for me. It’s exciting to present this new record to the audience.