How did moving to big, bad NYC from sweet little
Bergen, Norway, impact your music, if indeed it did?
Yeah, I'm sure it did in many ways that I'm not even
aware of. When I first moved to New York, I loved that there was so much
going on, and there're all these impulses 行 that definitely affects you in
one way or another 行 but then you can also isolate yourself very much, and
when I came here I really loved that. I really loved just shutting the door
and trying to write for days and weeks on end. And there was something
about being in the middle of a city that is so active and...filthy [laughs] that I really liked, and I guess that comes
from knowing that you just open the door and everything is happening, there are these impulses. So you can control it,
in a way.
There's so much creative energy, there's so much happening,
especially here in Williamsburg and Brooklyn. Now, Bergen is a very
musically creative city as well, but there's something very special about a
big, big city like this. You happen upon a lot of things you wouldn't come
across anywhere else, and that you wouldn't seek out if you weren't here.
I've been to Bergen, a long time ago. I was told
to go because it was very beautiful. It was summertime and I literally
could not see 4 feet in front of me because it was so foggy. So, I went to
Bergen but I can't remember what I saw, because in fact I didn't see
anything.
Anyway, you didn't feel isolated in Bergen, did
you?
I felt very part of a community, in a way. There's a
lot of different tendencies there. I always had friends and people who I
could work and collaborate with, from an early stage, and when I was only
10 years old I was already at some of the rock clubs and places like that,
where I wouldn't normally be let in, 'cause my sister worked in these
clubs. She would let me into shows and I would be allowed to come and hang
out at the bar and see all those bands I didn't know anything about. There
was that sort of openness for me because I had an in. But when I got a little
older, when I started writing songs, or when I started succeeding at
writing songs when I was 13, I started playing some of the open-mike shows
at some of these clubs I was still not old enough to get in.
In a small town, in Bergen, stuff like that happens; it's nice to
get encouragement, places to try to develop what you do later on. This was
really nice and fun and safe in Bergen. But then, when you've done that for
a while, you've gotta go out and face the world outside of that.
The great Norwegian musicians that I know about
seem to come from a very flexible, tolerant place, that is, they come to
all kinds of music without prejudice. In your case, how much awareness did
you have of the esteemed prog- jazz scene right in your own home in Norway,
the ECM artists Terje Rypdal and Jan Garbarek, for example?
Well, it's not stuff that I grew up listening to, but
it's definitely stuff that I crossed paths with just out of curiosity, like
with Garbarek and Rypdal and all these great musicians. They're very famous
in Norway, and I don't even know if Norwegians know how prestigious those
names are outside of Norway. It's not something I investigated in depth,
but I realize it's a big thing for a lot of people, especially here in
America.
You're not a jazz musician, you are decidedly a
pop musician, but it's fascinating to hear how much from other musical
spheres you bring into your pop worldview. Meanwhile, you're only 26, and
you've done so many albums, been very prolific, and the songs on the new
disc sound effortlessly great. Do songs flow easily for you?
Actually, this album was harder than ever to write,
and I think that's because I wanted 行 you know, you set out to write great
songs every time, of course you have to, but this record, I felt I really
wanted to push it in terms of the writing. And just living here and playing
more and more in America, with an English-speaking audience, you become
more aware of the potential of lyrics, what you can put into it, how much
it means to people; and of course you become aware of what an
amazing medium it is, songwriting.
I've always approached it from a more sort of musical standpoint, I
still do mostly start up with chords and melodies and harmonies. As you can
hear from the record, it's very much a focal point, but I really wanted
this record to be distinct and concise, and ideally with some new elements
lyrically, and really try to push myself. But I also wanted it to be a record where we could go anywhere
potentially in the studio, and experiment with all sorts of different
directions and arrangements, and in order to do that and really be free, I
have to trust that the material can hold up and that the song is strong
enough that you can really play around with the arrangement without losing
the songs. I was really, really tough on myself in the songwriting process,
and it was really tough to begin with, because it definitely didn't come by
itself in the beginning.
But I believe in having some discipline when you
write 行 you can't just write songs when you feel inspired, you have to keep
chasing it. So I sat down to write for a long time without feeling that it
was worth anything, really. I felt I was going nowhere. But I just kept on
doing it. You know, you can't set out to write the masterpiece every day,
but I figured I'll just keep writing and see if I get into a flow. And
eventually, after months, things started happening, and it wasn't all for nothing, and these songs started
appearing. Some of the songs I'd been carrying with me half-finished for a
long time, and all of a sudden I could make sense of them; I could get the
lyrics to where I wanted them to be.
It was a very challenging album to write, but all the
more it feels rewarding when it's done now and I get to play it to people
and people seem to get into it.
You've had the good fortune to work again with Sean
O'Hagan on this album. I assume you're a High Llamas fan.
Oh, yeah. They were one of my favorite groups, I
think I heard them when I was 14, 15, and they made a huge impact on my
world, 'cause I was trying to write songs and I was so
hungry for anything that could help me identify exactly what I liked and
what I didn't. I was so keen on discovering what I was really about, and
when I heard the High Llamas, I heard Hawaii, which I think is a masterpiece, and they've made so much
beautiful music since.
So to work with him, which I did for the first time on the Faces
Down record [2001], and then again now
is just a thrill. He is one of the very best arrangers of the type of
harmonies that he does, and when I was starting to plan this recording, I
knew that I wanted to work with him for this album. Because I hadn't done
strings for quite a few albums 行 the last couple of albums were very dogmatic and more in one direction, in keeping the ensemble sort of
small.
So I had three songs that I earmarked for him, and I sent him the
demos, and he really got a kick out of the songs. I feel this collaboration
has taken us a step forward 行 it's been a couple of years, and I have
progressed, and he really responded to the material. So, I 行 just as a fan
[laughs] 行 it was a real kick for
me.
I'm a fan of his as a human being as well.
Yeah, he's a terrific guy. He's so generous and
gracious, a true British gentleman. You know, I did this record without a
label and no budget or anything, and he was just so accommodating. And he
just does it for the music and 行 [laughs] we just now paid him for it 行 he's been very patient and very cool.
Like you, Sean is also someone with a fascination
for the essence of a timeless song. And like you, he wishes to expand what
a pop song can be. But when we say that he arranged some of the songs on Heartbeat Radio, would that extend to
having re-written your chords or even melodies for the final result?
I would send him my acoustic version that I played on
the guitar. And I would maybe have a couple of thoughts about directions;
you start imagining what you're after, but you start imagining it in a
language that you don't actually speak. It's like I was thinking, Oh, I
want something Impressionist here, and I'm not even sure what exactly I
mean. But he's very good at picking up when you're sort of going beyond
your musical vocabulary and trying to reach for something. He does
sometimes expand on the chords in his voicings and in his arrangements, and
he did that a lot very effectively when we worked together before; on my
first two records, he added a lot in expanding the harmonies; a part of his
style is elaborating on the chords and really bringing out the juice.
Of course, you have your own excellent ear for
harmony, which has been quite noticeable since your first album. It's a
gift that makes a small handful of songwriters stand out.
That's part of what I do, or part of what I love to
do. I think it's something where you have a certain kind of love for
certain kinds of harmonies, chords, and discovering a new chord that's
either suspenseful or just has this different character can open up the doors to so many new songs 行
just that one chord. It's something that I like to do. I guess I take some
pride in it as well.
One characteristic of your songs is their high-flying, surprising melodies and harmonic shadings, which bear
a vague resemblance to the musical games of the Brazilian masters.
Brazilian music is a constant source of inspiration,
because it's so unpredictable. Even the bossa nova standards that have
become familiarized, it's so juicy, you know. "Girl From
Ipanema," that song is so incredibly beautiful, and it has a lot of suspense, if it's played right 行
of course it can be messed up like anything else.
But that to me is a great inspiration. Milton Nascimento is my
favorite. Some of his records especially from the '70s are amazing. And
also rhythmically. Especially for me, coming from the West, it's so exotic;
it's so awesome how when I listen to it I have no clue: How did they do that? How did they make it sound so effortless?
And songs with such a sincerity but also with the same sort of obviousness
that you would perform folk songs and traditional songs. But at the same
time it's a really intricate and extremely sophisticated harmonic world
that they navigate. Brazilian music has a beautiful sensitivity, and it's
got humor and it's very unpretentious. Yet it's so ambitious, and there's
something about that combination that just appeals tremendously to me. It's
that combination of the wildly ambitious with lowered shoulders and just
some amazing instinct.
Tell me about the arrangement on
"Good Luck" The string section is truly audacious on this track;
I'm told it was based on a wild piano
improvisation.
My co-producer Kato
乨land and I were trying to find an arrangement
for something at the end of the song, and we were playing with some ideas
at the keyboard, mapping it out. But somehow those chords led us to all the
clich巗, just stuff that was sort of playing up to the chords. We wanted
something more definite, that didn't play up to the chords. So we tore apart the
chords, in a way. We had my piano player, Erik Halvorson, do an
improvisation with different approaches over these repeating chords. And so
he would do one sort of Duke Ellington and one more like Bill Evans, and
all these avant-garde types. And we had all these very typical...[laughs] Coming from not being a jazz player myself, it's
exciting to work with people who are, and you can just throw anything at
them and you get something exciting back.
So then we would just handpick our favorite
phrases from all these different solos, and Kato arranged it for cello and
violin. And that became for me one of the most exciting parts of the
recording. It's a very unusual turning point in the song when the strings
approach this sort of rollercoaster ride with so much bravado and
confidence, but they're really balancing on the notes and the harmonies of
the song.
That song combines hope with something approximating
the bittersweet. The emotional terrain is a bit knotty.
You set out to do all sorts
of things, and this album sums up a lot of elements that I've dealt with on
the other records. But it has something more, something new for me
personally in combining the emotional sources, and complexity, for
lack of a better word. I have at least the hope that the songs will convey,
in both music and lyric, a whole bunch of different emotions. Even if it's
a major-key song doesn't mean that it should only be happy and whatever.
I'm hoping to touch on a lot of different things during the course of the
song.
It's fascinating, how pretty much all of
these new songs deserve to be No. 1 smashes on pop radio.
Oh, wouldn't that be fun?
It'd be great. They are so accessible 行 and that
is where the real magic lies, how you've done all this subtlely intricate
music that is so easy to absorb, even for non-muso types.
Well, that's a challenge
that I like to try to deal with. Because, after all, it is pop music, and I
really wanted this album to communicate; I didn't want it to feel like a
lonely album, where somebody's just sitting and, you know, doing all his
tricks. I wanted it to be really motivated, and come out and communicate.
And that's something that's so beautiful. You touched on that with
Brazilian music: It has these complexities and all that, but you wouldn't
really know it 行 they don't wear it on their sleeve, and they're not afraid
of entertainment.
And I think that is really important.
Especially when you're a sensitive singer-songwriter like myself! [Laughs] There's this fear of entertaining, which sits pretty
deeply with a lot of people in our day and age 行 and I try not to be afraid
of that. I like to embrace it.
