Björk’s Work-Life Balance Improved After She Swapped Touring for Mini-Residencies

As one of music’s most eccentric figures, Björk is usually the odd one out. But throughout her career, the musician has grappled with the oddities of the industry — and not the intriguing, creative kind that she prefers and evokes. She found the normalization of consistently grueling workdays on tours strange. It’s why, after her 2011 album Biophilia, she made the decision to swap our traditional touring practices for mini-residencies that prioritized not just her own work-life balance but her crew’s, too.

“The nuts and bolts are more flexible,” Björk told the Guardian. “Maybe being a woman, or a matriarch, or whatever, I try to make it more that people can actually have a life. I have gently fought, since my teenage years, this macho way of how people organize both films and tours. ‘Oh, let’s now work 18 hours a day, every single day, until everybody throws up.’ I always wanted to coexist. You can have a personal life. You can have your kids. You can have your partners there. I’m not saying I’ve succeeded,” she says, laughing, “but at least I’ve tried to create a world that is more open to things like that.”

Björk has been touring since 1993. She completed six international runs before implementing her residency approach with the Biophilia tour. Since then, she has scaled back from performing between 58 and 105 shows on a single tour. Her most recent tours have consisted of between 20 and 45 performances spread out over the course of more than a year. And even when she isn’t spending multiple nights in a single city, her concerts are always a few days, if not weeks, apart.

These days, Björk spends most of her time in Iceland when she isn’t on the road. “When I’m there, I don’t do any press or I don’t go to any openings,” she said. “I just live a very quiet sort of low-key life. So people usually don’t know I’m there, as well.”