Alba August – “Lights”.

   Hey people! 🙂 

   Today I’d like to share with you a song that I know thanks to Sveriges Radio, that is Swedish public radio. I guess they don’t play it as much anymore but some time ago you could hear it in many Sveriges Radio stations uite regularly. I felt quite neutral about it at first but then grew to quite like it with time and at this point I ike it enough that I thought I’d share. Also as someone with weird sleep patterns, sleep paralysis and all sorts of things like that, I can oddly relate to these bits of the lyrics in quite a literal way as well, even though I guess she didn’t meant it to be taken literally when writing the lyrics, or whoever wrote them, haha. Alba August is half-Danish and half-Swedish and comes from a family who are famous in the world of film. Well, I’ve no idea about the world of film so I’m not really the right person to say if they’re famous or not, I’ve only first heard of them whenn I wanted to learn who Alba is, but they must be all talented and successful people. Her parents are directors Bille and Pernilla August. The screenwriters Anders and Adam August are her paternal half-brothers, and her sister Asta Östergren is an actress (interesting to me as name nerd what a strong liking for A names they seem to have 😀 ). Alba herself is an actress as well, actually I guess she’s more well-known as such but like I said I’ve no idea about film so I don’t really know, it just looks like she’s played in lots of films already and she’s only in her twenties. One of the major roles she played was Astrid in the biographical film Unga Astrid, about early life of Astrid Lindgren. 

Sjaella – “Northern Lights”.

   Hey people! 🙂 

   For today, I have a very beautiful, choral piece for you. As you can guess from the title, this composition is inspired by the beauty of Aurora Borealis. As i understand Ola Gjeilo-s – the composer – words about this piece, it is also inspired more generally by this serene, yet heartbreaking, or “terrible” as he says, kind of beauty. He was writing this on Christmas day, in an attic in Norway while northern lights were happening, and he thought that this phenomenon reflects this kind of beauty very well. Ola Gjeilo currently lives in the US, and says that Northern lights are one of his more Norwegian works. The lyrics come from the Latin translation of Song of Solomon. 

   The version of this piece that I am sharing with you is performed by a six-piece female choral ensemble from Leipzig called Sjaella. Sjaella is a made-up word based on the Swedish word själ meaning soul. I really love the sound of this composition sung by them. Here are the Biblical lyrics in English: 

   Thou art beautiful, O my love,

sweet and comely as Jerusalem,

terrible as an army set in array.

Turn away thy eyes from me,

for they have made me flee away.

Daniel Lloyd A Mr. Pinc – Goleuadau Llundain (London Lights).

This is a song that I really like since a few months and I hope you’ll like it too. 🙂 It’s in Welsh and the lyrics are in the video.