The rural maximalism of Amanda Bergman

Medical texts often describe this weird, ecstatic release as ‘terminal lucidity,’ but the phenomenon itself has been observed for thousands of years. The idea that the end can feel like a brief crescendo rather than a gradual fade out is one that’s repeated in cultures all around the globe. In some forms of Buddhism, for example, what’s left as our senses dwindle is said to be something closer to the mind’s own, true essence, uncovered in what’s called ‘the clear light of death.’

Among Inuit people, this short window of clarity is often seen as something like a parting gift, through which wisdom can be passed down that might otherwise be lost, while in Hindu traditions it can be seen as something directional, as if the dying mind is bookmarking its next spiritual chapter and not just scrawling The End. Not to be outdone, in the Aboriginal communities of Australia, spiritual continuity is sometimes connected to a cosmological order that exists beyond their daily lives. Here, the sudden lucidity at death arrives as a result of having one foot in this alternate plane – often called The Dreaming, though it goes by many other names in Indigenous languages – where places, music, and people from the living past actually exist and are not just remembered.

From a medical perspective, all of this can sound like romantic projection on top of a failing nervous system, but science has a benevolent framing of its own. Okay, make that pseudoscience, since the evidence is shaky at best, but regardless there’s a popular idea that, split seconds before death, the brain floods itself with a chemical called DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen found in the plants used to make, among other things, ayahuasca.

For Swedish singer/songwriter Amanda Bergman, the idea that everyone meets the same blissful end, even for a moment, is a comforting one. “Whether or not it’s true almost doesn’t matter,” she says. “The idea holds for me because it feels true – that at the brink of disappearance, the body itself might offer consolation. That the same circuitry that made us afraid could also let us go gently, with one last hallucination of love.”

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Bergman uses that consolation prize as a jumping off point for her third solo album, embraced for a second as we die, a searching, unresolving, and ultimately surrendering record that burns both true and gold. Sonically it leans on the ‘80s output of Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney (“real staple food kind of music”), complete with gated drums, which Bergman says she was briefly obsessed with in the run up to recording. “I do think that snuck into the album quite a lot,” she tells me, almost sheepishly. “Accidentally.”

Speaking to BEST FIT over video call from her farm in southern Dalarna after a planned visit in person was nixed by heavy snowfall along the route of a 7-hour drive, Bergman is in the middle of preparing a release party of sorts. Part gathering of friends, part rebellion against the attention economy, the night at the farm is designed to be down-home and deliberately unhurried, not just like sitting down by the fireplace with Bergman and her band but actually exactly that. She jokes that it’s inspired by Swedes’ obsession with The Great Moose Migration, a televised, timeline-cleansing livestream that millions tune into each spring, but her motivations are more personal too.

“To be honest, I’ve been having a hard time the last couple of years just being part of the music industry,” she explains, pointing to the long list of expectations – whole occupations, even – that musicians are now expected to do and to be, for the sake of the insatiable social media maw. “As people trying to represent culture in a fucked-up world, the more we buy into the capitalist circus, the more we are getting away from ourselves,” she huffs. “I guess I'm getting more and more obnoxious about that.”

It’s hardly surprising that time has become more precious to Bergman. The summer before last, while touring her 2024 album Your Hand Forever Checking on My Fever, her husband, bandmate, and producer Petter Winnberg was involved in a terrible road collision, breaking almost every bone in his face and neck, and barely survived. “My body really thought that he had died,” she says. “I could feel the disconnect between what I knew, that he was mercifully alive, and what my systems were telling me. The shock that goes through your body when someone almost dies like that is so powerful, I think it’s inevitable that you are changed by it.”

She describes feeling not just gratitude but “meta-gratitude” in the months that followed, in the sense that the jolt was one of those rare times in life where you get to “just sit in the aftermath of near disaster and observe what that blow does to you, both short-term and long-term.” “For us as a family, and as humans, it taught us a lot about what it is most meaningful in life,” she says, “and that naturally led to thinking about the passing of time and how to use the capital you have, in terms of time, thoughts, and actions, wisely – and how the fuck do you do that?”

It’s a question that is absolutely central to embraced for a second as we die, which wrestles with ideas of endings and impermanence, and the relief that comes with learning to accept them. In that sense it’s perhaps most closely aligned with Joni Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, also an album that’s not explicitly about death or dying but about transience and coming to terms with the fleeting nature of existence and identity. But, as Bergman is quick to point out, not all moments of reaching self-awareness are relieving. It can be unsettling too, serving only to dig you into a deeper hole if you’re not careful. “I think Winston Churchill said this, but you can’t really solve a problem with the same types of thoughts that put you there,” she says. “I try to remind myself of that when I feel I have troubles.” Does that work? “Yes,” she grins. “But there’s sometimes a delay.”

Before becoming a parent – her kids are now 7 and 8 years old – Bergman had a pretty easygoing relationship with time. Unlike her four older sisters, who felt the pull of the wider world from an early age, she was content with the slow pace of life in the riverside village of Gagnef, where she grew up. By the time she did eventually move away, aged 30, she was already a household name in Sweden as one-fifth of Amason, a supergroup of sorts co-fronted by Bergman and Gustav Ejstes of Dungen, with the rest of the band rounded out by Bergman’s now-husband and his brother Pontus Winnberg (aka Avant of Bloodshy & Avant, and co-founder of Miike Snow), together with drummer Nils Törnqvist. Their debut album Sky City won a major Swedish Grammi, and Bergman’s first solo record, Docks, arrived a year later, in 2016.

The move to a farm of her own, which now doubles as a recording studio for visiting artists, is part of what she describes as a desire to shape a full life in a way that is true to her core, and to her roots. “I remember I was always so surprised by my sisters,” she says. “They were so eager to expand their geography and their spirituality, and I didn’t want any of that. I guess I’ve been looking for a way of living that’s maximalist in terms of the way I think and the way I approach things, if that makes any sense.”

At the heart of that search, she says, is a rejection of the cultural norms of well-being and the stranglehold of society’s demand that we all be functional people, all the damn time. Life as a farmer has shown her how animals behave when conditions are not meeting their biological needs, and how plainly that often applies just as equally to humans. To illustrate what she means, she describes a herd of 30 cows crammed around just two feeding stations. “They’re not gonna play out the best versions of themselves if you give them too little space,” she explains. “You’ll be like, ‘Why are you all so upset?’ and it’s because you didn’t give them room to have a hierarchy.”

Bergman speaks from the perspective of someone living under a bell jar of anxiety, separated from ‘normal’ experience by an invisible barrier. Except, as she points out, anxiety is biologically normal too. In the animal world, some have the role of sentinels, of watchers, more finely attuned to look out for danger, and that’s both a comfort as well as being deeply uneasy to sit with. “Sometimes I think about how I can be feeling a really, really deep anxiety and the person next to me is just sitting there thinking about what kind of sausage they’re going to have for dinner,” she says with a hollow laugh. “It amazes me, but it frightens me too, because sometimes I feel hopeless, like I’ve been put on this earth just to be anxious. I guess you’ve got to laugh about it.”

Perhaps, but having spent most of her adult life thinking her anxiety was a personality flaw rather than something biological, Bergman holds a certain amount of resentment. Not just for herself, but on behalf of anyone, especially women, forced to try and “meet impossible emotional standards.” She talks of emotion being “moralised instead of understood through the body,” and connects that to the 19th century philosopher boys’ club from which much of our present-day social code stems. “We’re so obsessed with intellectualising everything that we’ve become detached from our bodies as something that shows us the way,” she explains. “We rely on science, but our bodies are part of a system that has been around and evolving for a lot longer. It feels stupid to me that listening to our bodies has become something that’s considered alternative.”

Throughout embraced for a second as we die, Bergman returns to the same pain points. Time is cast as both tormentor and container, exhausting and consoling in its forward momentum, while fractured love, parenthood, and grief are shadowed by a lurking abyss, where social and moral structures feel unstable and old models of protection – hi, United Nations – are nowhere to be seen. Among the notes she shares for each of the songs, she writes of “quiet panic,” “disbelief paired with longing,” and a fear of “being swallowed by detachment” – all relatable moods in the geopolitical hellscape of 2026 – but there’s no grand catharsis to her outlook in the end. Only her wool-soaked-in-saltwater voice, toughened by experience but still sumptuously warm, singing out an epilogue that aches for hope without attachment to fixed outcomes, “a way to exist without needing to make sense of everything.”

In a year-in-the-life-of documentary made for Swedish TV that aired in 2023, Bergman is frank about the challenges of running a sustainable small farm, tending to flock and herd while juggling family life plus creative work and all the admin that goes with it. When the pressure is at its worst, thoughts of quitting the land to work on music alone do bubble up, she admits in the film, but if her husband’s accident didn’t sink them, it’s hard to see what could.

At the time of filming she was also dealing with her dad’s declining health, and her grief at his eventual passing from cancer was a pillar of the songwriting on Your Hand Forever Checking on My Fever, “My Hands in the Water” especially. Thinking back now, she recalls a childhood memory that came back to her during that time, and again while making embraced, of something her father would say each time one of the Bergman sisters’ many rabbits, roosters, and other barnyard animals died. “He would always ask us if we wanted to bury the body at home, or if we wanted to go up the mountain, into the forest, and leave it there,” she explains. “It was always up to us. He didn’t really preach. And at a certain point, I started to choose the second option, to let my precious creature be food for a fox and go back into the system.”

Later, in the last weeks of his illness, he found comfort in the notion that energy is never truly lost, only transformed. “Listening to him talk about that, I realised this idea had existed in my family’s thought patterns for a very long time,” she says. “But of course there’s a huge difference between knowing something intellectually and actually being at peace with it emotionally, as he was.”

“I think it’s really important to realise that life, in a way, is about preparing for death,” she adds, aware that, for some people, it might be quite an offensive thing to say. “Our culture is so poor when it comes to dealing with uncertainty and the fact that we’re all going to die. We don’t have the tools for it. We’re so lost as a collective, spiritually, and I think we underestimate how much that affects us at certain times in our lives. We overcompensate for so many unhandled feelings and do stupid things. And when billions of people do stupid things at the same time, the world is truly fucked.”

“The conclusion I came to in the whole process of making this album is not that it’s no use searching for the meaning of life, because of course that can be important,” she says. “I just feel like that’s not going to serve my own situation. What's going to help is to be more mindful about where I place my energy, my thoughts, my money, and my time.” If we must insist on a position, Bergman’s is as simple as do no harm. “I mean, it’s tricky enough to find the version of yourself that doesn’t make stupid choices,” she says, laughing. “That feels like a full-time job sometimes. But I find some comfort and hope in that it’s always an option.”

As much as the state of the world sometimes makes Bergman want to lie in a corner and cry, it’s her kids that keep her on her feet. She knows that difficult questions are coming as they get older, and, like any parent, feels an obligation to prepare to have answers. Do no harm does not mean telling children that there’s no need to worry, she says. “We all have to worry, and we have to have the tools to live with that. There has never been a perfect version of the world, but I refuse to be cynical because I feel like that’s taking the easy way out. It’s like being some kind of living dead. But if I can’t go that way, where do I go?”

The obvious answer to that is simply "where the heart leads." When Bergman sings in “mexico”, “I never liked Jesus, for times this cold / say with dead eyes, I need an Eden,” she imagines the garden as a sensorial rather than a religious destination, a personal paradise of warmth and belonging. “The world is so dark, but I want it to be soft,” she sighs towards the end of our call. “That would be the best thing for it right now, to soften. We can’t go on like it is at the moment.”

Two nights later, at the farm, joined by friends including Klara Söderberg of First Aid Kit, Bergman plays effortlessly through most of the new album, streamed online as well as performed to an in-house crowd. Listening in on my phone, I’m struck by something she says after almost every song – a simple Swedish phrase, “Tack ska ni ha.” It's something I’ve heard hundreds of times since moving to Sweden four years ago but never really thought about its literal translation, “You shall have thanks.” There’s something warmly old-fashioned about it. Something reassuring, almost prayerful even. It might be today, it might be tomorrow, it might be at the gates of death, but you’ll have it all the same. A little splash of oxytocin, the brain’s own drug of bonding and belonging – an embrace, for a second, as you smile.