I first heard Stina Nordenstam in the mid-90's; she was featured on a long forgotten TV show in the small hours of the night on ITV. The piece lasted no longer than a few minutes and I don't even recall a moment of it, other than it mentioned the release of her second album, And She Closed Her Eyes. Of course it was the sound of her music that made an impression: delicate, spare, fragile, ever so slightly jazzy; a voice like a child singing in an empty room and lyrics that hinted at whole worlds of experience and filtered through a very European sensibility. Songs that sounded like a Goddard or Truffaut movie in three or four spider-web like minutes. In the middle of the night I was converted and went out the next day to a wonderful record shop in Birmingham called HIghway 61 that was our one-stop shop for cool and obscure music back in the 90's. And against the odds I found that album along with her debut, Memories Of A Colour. Both were promotional copies; I snapped them up and subsequently fell in love with the reclusive woman from Stockholm who rarely gave interviews and hasn't toured since that first album, back in '91.
I've always gravitated towards musicians who operate outside of the mainstream. Scott Walker (whom I've written about in an earlier post) shares the same reclusive tendencies, exercises complete artistic control over how the songs are (meticulously) constructed and produced, and hasn't performed live since the sixties. Walker, like Nordenstam also knows how to use silence as skillfully as sound in song. Although Nordenstam has subsequently gone on to write far more avant garde fare, the first two albums are coloured with warm jazz piano and French horn, and the voice is tremulous, pensive. Dusky and plaintive melodies that draw you in quietly then open out for a moment into something thrillingly gorgeous and mournful. Think of snow falling in Stockholm, the minutae of relationships as they hesitantly begin or slowly fall apart, memories of childhood, faded photographs in wallets, a former lover's clothes in a wardrobe, cold coffee, empty streets, airport inertia... Nordenstam's songs are like morning-after lullabies, gauzy with mystery...
Soon After Christmas
I've called you now a thousand times
I think I know now
You're not home
I've said your name a thousand times
To be prepared if you'd be there
I wanted so to have you
And I wanted you to know
I wanted to write songs
About how we're walking in the snow
You've got me slightly disappointed
Just a bit and just enough
To keep me up another night
Waiting for another day
The city's taking a day off
The streets are empty
No one's out tonight
My life is in another's hands
I wanted so to have you
And I wanted you to know
I wanted to write songs
About how we're walking in the snow
But there's no snow this winter
There's no words for what I feel for you
It's not enough
Though it's too much
Why must it always be like that?
The TV screen is lighting up my room
The film has ended
Every inch of my skin is crying for your hands
And I wanted so to have you
And I wanted you to know
I wanted to write songs
About how we're walking in the snow
You've got me slightly disappointed
Just a bit and just enough
To keep me up another night
Waiting for another day
Of course, all these years later, it's a little easier to learn more about the artists you love, however obscure. Nordenstam gives interviews (even if she gives little away) and there are websites and forums that offer clues, breadcrumbs to follow.
A favourite story about her that I discovered a couple of years ago was that Nordenstam had left her long-term retreat on a secluded island off Stockholm in order to see her family, purely to inform them that she never wanted to see them again. And she never has. Which seems entirely fitting with what I've learnt about the woman.
This year, a seventh album is imminent after 2004's brilliant The World Is Saved, which was a return to the jazz/pop and irresistable melodies of those first two albums that beguiled me all those years ago.
In a way of bringing this post full circle, after consulting YouTube, I discovered this Electronic Press Kit that was produced for And She Closed Her Eyes, and is in fact the feature from that middle-of-the-night TV show I saw all those years ago. Here it is, along with Little Star, the single from that album.
2 comments:
She's an odd one, but I loved her last album. I have her first album on tape... if only I still owned a tape deck.
Her last album was a real return to form, and a lot more like the first two albums. Hope her imminent record follows that trend.
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