På svenska! (my"Swedish" album)

So, after about three or four years of thinking, learning, practising, busking, recording, re-recording, I finally managed to finish my album of Swedish songs (publishing it, rather appropriately, on June 6th, Sweden's "nationaldag". Singing all these songs in Swedish made a nice gift for my Swedish relatives and was also good practice for my slowly-improving language skills.

In the end it turned out to be a mini-album: only 30 minutes. I had planned to do more, to draw the music from a wider variety of sources, but that would have taken another year and I decided it worked well as just eight songs.






Here are some notes on the individual songs:





1. SJÖSALA VALS  [SJÖSALA WALTZ]

Some Swedes detest this song, having been forced to learn it at school. It's one of Evert Taube's most famous tunes, composed in 1941 and featuring his fictitious elderly character Rönnerdahl waltzing around the morning meadow in the Stockholm skerries.

For the rest of us, it's a joyously fresh spring song, and very artfully designed. The first part of each verse is merely tonic-dominant-tonic, but the chromatic melody line disguises this primitivism. Thereafter the melody effloresces, with its key harmonic development being the delayed subdominant following a venture into the minor. The naive line that completes each verse names the four spring flowers shown on my CD jacket:

Gullviva, mandelblom, kattfot och blå viol
Cowslip, meadow saxifrage, mountain everlasting, and heath dog-violet

More about this song: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/09/evert-taube-sjosala-vals.html




2. SOL, VIND OCH VATTEN  (SUN, WIND AND WATER)

A 1973 song by the 17-year-old Ted Gärdestad (with lyrics by his elder brother Kenneth), originally written for Lena Andersson. It's an evocation of a long summer day, beginning with grasshoppers and footballs in the schoolyard, ending with shadows in the valley. Ted recorded his own version soon aferwards.

More about the song here: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/lyrics-by-kenneth-gardestad.html





3. DANSEN PÅ SUNNANÖ  [THE DANCE AT SUNNANÖ]

Another Evert Taube song, from 1953, once more featuring Rönnerdahl and once more set on an island in the skerries. This time the elderly musician gets to dance with flirty young Eva Liljebäck and finds himself going off into a bit of a dream...

More about this song: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/05/dansen-pa-sunnano-dance-in-sunnano.html



4. VISA (MIN KÄRLEK FÖDDES...)   [SONG (MY LOVE HAD ITS BIRTH...)]

The words are a poem by the working-class poet Dan Andersson (1888 - 1920); the intensity of early love, and the loss of that fervour when it grows old. The music is by me.

More about this song: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/10/dan-andersson-1888-1920-visa.html



5. OUR LAST SUMMER

A song by two Swedes, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. It originally appeared on Abba's 1980 album Super Trouper, and was one of the comparatively few Abba songs where Frida sang the lead. It later featured, in butchered form, in the film Mamma Mia! 

A beguilingly complex song (with key changes, lyrical pauses, and a feminine rhyme between lines 3 and 8 of each verse!), "Our Last Summer" combines the après-holiday-romance genre (in which Abba had already filed one classic,  the charming "Hasta Mañana") with a much older genre:  the Parisian list-song (e.g. "These Foolish Things", written in the mid-1930s).  [Their own greatest list-song, "The Day Before You Came", was perhaps already on Björn's horizon.]

My original idea was to translate the lyrics into Swedish, but I would have made many childish errors. As it turned out, the sudden incursion of English makes for some nice variety. (As of course does having a song with a female protagonist.)



6. SOMMARNATT  [SUMMER NIGHT]

Evert Taube song #3, written in 1928 and published in 1936. Summer night in the skerries: an ecstatic invitation to the dance.

More about this song: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/01/evert-taube-sommarnatt.html



7. FÖR KÄRLEKENS SKULL  [FOR LOVE'S SAKE]

Another song by Ted and Kenneth Gärdestad. Ted recorded it in 1993, signalling his return to the public eye after twelve years of mental instability. The song is about the return of spring and claims that the sun shines for "us", the song's two lovers: for the sake of love.

This is the only song on my album where there's an overdub... a bit of extra guitar filigree.



8. SÅ LÄNGE SKUTAN KAN GÅ   [AS LONG AS THE BOAT FORGES ON]

In Swedish, boats go (gå). Not in English, so what verb should you use instead? This is a skuta, a small cargo boat, and it's motorized, so "sail" doesn't really seem the appropriate verb to use.

Evert Taube song  #4. One of his last songs, first performed in 1960. In it he looks back to the adventurous days of his youth, in this case as a sailor in the Caribbean. Exhorts us to celebrate the good times; soon enough the bell will toll for us.

More about this song: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/04/evert-taube-sa-lange-skutan-kan-ga.html