Hi people! 🙂
Today I’d like to share with you a song from a really interesting Norwegian singer whom I have liked for many years now. Siri Nilsen’s definitely one of my most favourite Norwegian artists who are somewhere in between folk and pop, not quite fitting the “normal” pop box, but not the very rootsy folk either. Some people classify her as a visesanger (vise singer, with vise being the same thing as visa is in Sweden – it means song and is the name of a Scandinavian folky ballad genre) and I thhink that fits her music best.
Siri is the daughter of another Norwegian visesanger – Lillebjörn Nilsen – and American singer Shari Nilsen. Btw, as a name nerd, I like seeing all sorts of fun or interesting or weird patterns that people have in naming their children and I think it’s quite interesting that there’s Shari, Siri and Sara (Siri’s sister) in their family). And since I’m already talking about name nerd stuff anyway, I really like the name Lillebjörn because it essentially means the same thing that Misha means in Russian (“little bear”). 😀 But it doesn’t really sound like what it means, unlike Misha.
Aside from being a singer, an acclaimed songwriter, writing almost exclusively in Norwegian, a multi-instrumentalist, she is also a voice actress and ballet dancer.
I like her bright and clear vocals a lot, and also I think it’s very cool that she writes her music mostly in Norwegian. I read that she once said somewhere that, as a young girl, she felt the lack of Norwegian-language music that her generation would listen to, so that’s how she started writing her own songs. She said that even thoughh some people do not consider Norwegian a very musical language (I wonder what language IS musical for such people then, if Norwegian isn’t 😀 I guess only Swedish can compete) she thinks that every language is poetic in its own way. I totally agree with that, and so I think she must be my peep, I would only just add that each language is also musical in its own way, in that every language sounds kind of like a different piece of music with different qualities to it, but it’s still a piece of music even if it’s less melodic than a different piece of music might be. Think of Finnish, for example – it sounds fairly monotonous compared with the sing-songy Norwegian and a bit staccato but it still can be very musical in an absolutely beautiful way. –
Below is my translation of the lyrics:
Give me what everyone looks for
Give me what makes the fog lift
What makes everything become clear
Give me what fixes everything
What silences the voice
The one that says everything is wrong
Give me what fixes everything
Like dust over my days
Like a shadow of a wind I am chasing
Everything is like under water
Like looking for traces in the sand
For what silences the voice
The one that says everything is wrong
Give me what fixes everything
Give me what everyone looks for
What they whisper about during their nights
Everything is just almost here
Tell me what it is
What silences the voice
The one that says everything is wrong
Give me what fixes everything
My Inner MishMash 