This is a relatively new artist for me, she is a folk vocalist, and she seems to write very interesting lyrics, often about politics or social stuff that – I think – aren’t too easy to write about in songs. Grace Petrie is from Leicester, and she is also an avid Shakespeare fan, and this song has been inspired by Shakespeare’s play “Othello”, more exactly the main antagonist Iago, the one who was supposed to be Othello’s best friend and manipulated him. The Iago in Grace Petrie’s song is more like a metaphor, it’s about insecurities that people struggle with in their love life, and Iago is a personification of those insecurities, so it’s like each of us has our own Iago who’s telling us bullshit. I really like this Shakespeare inspired metaphor! And the song is fabulous!
Here’s another of my most favourite songs by Kate Rusby. I think it’s one of the most melancholic, at least musically, songs that I’ve ever heard, and the lyrics are also touching especially because of Kate’s expressiveness. The song is from the point of view of a ghost, who is witnessing that the love of his life no longer loves him and both she and the man she now loves live on his land. While I am not extremely fond of paranormal novels with ghosts or stuff like that, for some reason I find folk songs written from a ghost’s perspective very touching and interesting. I’ve shared another quite similar one in a way some time ago, it’s
I decided to show you another song from Janice, this time in Swedish, and with a rather different feel. It is a collaboration between her and another Swedish pop star – Ji Nilsson. – I’ve always thought I listen to a relatively big amount of Swedish pop, I mean not crazily enormously huge, but definitely more than Polish or English pop, and I know some popular Swedish pop singers. But turns out I’m still too niche/too ignorant because before I looked her up today, I had no idea who is Ji Nilsson, haven’t heard her music before, at least consciously haha.
I also had no idea who X Models are, which is though probably even more understandable because I’m not particularly crazy about the typical eighties pop in any language, and X Models are a Swedish band that was popular in 80’s. But why am I talking about them now?
Because another thing I didn’t know, although I know this song since… I guess a couple months, is that this is actually a cover. And X Models were the band who performed it originally. The song was written by Efva Attling.
To prepare somehow for this little post, I looked up their version, but, meh, it’s so eighties-sounding, not for me.
I’m not crazy about Janice and Ji’s version either, but I do like it, hence I share it. I think it’s much more interesting than the original, although it’s just a plain and very catchy love song.
I’m not a particular fan of this song in its original version by Rihanna, generally I’m not a fan of Rihanna I think, but I kind of like this song in this girl’s version. It’s nothing particularly original, especially for those who think I listen only to very niche music, as many people in my surroundings seem to still believe đ but it’s just cool. And as for Ingeborg Fosse, she is another Norwegian singer I want to show you – I’m having a little Norwegian period as for the music I listen to right now – and she was a participant in Norwegian Idol. Tomorrow I’m also going to show you another Norwegian singer who covered a popular, mainstream song, she was also discovered thanks to a music show, and even her name is the same – Ingeborg. But that will be tomorrow, today I have “Love On The Brain” for you, and I hope you’ll like this version. đ
This is a beautiful song in my opinion. I’ve translated the title as “I Miss You”, but in fact it is “I Lack You”, though I wasn’t sure if such phrase actually exists and is natural in English, it doesn’t look like it is. There even is a line in the song that “I don’t miss having you here any longer, but I lack you”, so I guess we should differentiate missing from lacking. So do Swedes, so do we Poles, and maybe the Anglophones do as well but I just don’t know. đ As for Frida Andersson, she is the moreinteresting for me that she is from Finland, and she is a Swedish native-speaker. For those of you who don’t know, yes, there is a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, of people who speak Swedish as their first language, and Swedish is also another official language of Finland after Finnish, and also is teached in school as a second language, compulsory, I guess, and don’t worry if you didn’t know it and think you’re ignorant, because I – a Swedophile and Finnophile – didn’t know it until just like 2-3 years ago, I learned about it years after my fascination with the Swedish language started. That’s ignorance! đ And even my Dad – who is a very good geographer and taught me capitals of all the European countries and which currencies they have and other stuff – he was very surprised when I told him that. Finns are way too secretive. đ I say it’s interesting because Finnish accent in Swedish sounds very interesting. It’s actually cute and funny to me, doesn’t sound so serious, elegant and regal as Swedish in Stockholm for example. I like it, I like different words they have for things, like for example in standard Swedish the phrase a little bit is “lite”, but Finns often say “pikulite”. Or they have a word “pirrig”, which means jittery (or something like this đ ) and from what my teacher told me it’s used by Swedish-speaking Finns, though I’ve seen it used bo non Finns too.
Anyway, putting my Finnophilic musings aside, I was going to, and tried, to make translation of these lyrics, as they’re not very difficult to understand, but I find it rather tricky to translate stuff from Swedish to English or vice versa, so I left it, still though, the song is beautiful.
