If you’re unsure of why Lykke Li named her third album I Never Learn, the last four songs leave nothing to the imagination: “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”, “Never Gonna Love Again”, “Heart of Steel”, “Sleeping Alone”. The titles alone feel like disclaimers—are you willing to live life on these terms? It's worth noting, then, that Lykke Li moved over 5,400 miles from her native Sweden to Los Angeles at the age of 28 after the most painful breakup of her life. It hardly matters that almost none of us will experience anything like that; what is important is that many of us have endured the kind of heartbreak that made it feel like your old self is halfway across the planet. But if you’ve ever just secretly hoped your life could inspire such romantic ideals of romantic failure, wish fulfillment doesn’t come more potent than I Never Learn.
I Never Learn is both spartan and expansive; it's Li’s most ambitious and shortest album, at nine songs and 33 minutes. This is widescreen drama meant to hit with direct and precise impact, so the operative term for advance singles “No Rest For the Wicked” and “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” has been “Spector-esque.” It's a fair comparison, as Li plays a winner-take-all game of “He loves me, he loves me not” accompanied by a host of string players and drums that beat and thump like a flawed human heart. Li relies on classic emotive archetypes as well—excepting “I Will Always Love You”, torch songs don’t get much more literal than “Never Gonna Love Again”, and as with most of I Never Learn, its incapacitating sense of impending emptiness is closer in spirit to “I Have Nothing”.
The power ballads are just what the tag implies: ballads that require an enormous amount of exertion and are about power itself, whether it’s helplessly putting in the hands of another (“Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”), taking ownership of your culpability (“No Rest For the Wicked”), or watching it disappear in a moment of passion (“Gunshot”). Rather than evoking a specific decade of music, though, Li approaches this style of songwriting as musical theater that should be created by something other than a proper band—either by professionals just off-screen, or some kind of studio magic.
I Never Learn utilizes the simplest tools of confessional songwriting: uneasily strummed acoustic guitars and resonant piano chords enlarged for texture and dramatic flair, like they’re appearing from behind a just-raised curtain, or from a radio as you sing to yourself. Thanks to the cavernous production, the enduring mental image of I Never Learn isn’t Li slumping over a glass of whiskey, but rather letting fresh wounds breathe, soundchecking alone in an empty arena.