Alexander Rybak – “En Katt på Min Kudde” (A Cat on My Pillow).

    Hiya people! 🙂 

   I thought that for today I’d like to share with you a really cool, cat-themed song. I don’t think we’d ever had a cat-themed song on here before, even though we had several songs that were either about or by various Mishas. I absolutely love this song for its lyrics, because it’s very relatable and it shows very well what an amazing thing it is to just be able to lay down next to a cat, daydream about everything and feel it purr and feel safe and cosy, lots better even than being someone super successful and having a breathtakingly adventurous life. 

   This song comes from Alexander’s album called Visa vid Vindens Ängar (A Song at the Wind’s Meadows), from which I have previously shared the title song and which is a collection of songs written by Swedish singer and poet Paul Matson. I have also shared several other songs by Alexander Rybak before and by looking at them you can see that he’s a very versatile singer and finds himself well in a lot of different genres and stylistics together with his violin, which is something I personally really like in musicians. Oh yeah and he’s been Sofi’s crush on and off for years. He is of Belarussian descent, but his parents emigrated to Norway shortly after his birth, so Norwegian is his native language and his Swedish on this album does sound quite Norwegian which is cool. Below is the translation of this song made by Bibielz. I’ll just add that there’s a Swedish idiom in the last verse which literally translates to “if you take the devil onto your boat, you will have to row him ashore”. The English equivalent is apparently “if you dance with the devil, you have to pay the piper”, but I thought translating it literally made more sense here because otherwise it would be rather clunky to phrase. 

  I wish I was a Tarzan
Who floats on a liana,
Who fights tigers and lions
In the jungle all day
 I wish I were a a he-man
A Top secret agent
Who gets to taste the hardest blows
Who got to know the prettiest girls
But a cat is lying on my pillow
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now
I wanted to be Casa Nova
Who could do anything in sex
Ten, twelve women a night
Without the slightest complex
A guy for the porn agencies
To invest a sum in
It would be many millions
in the bank book it would be written
But a cat is lying on my pillow,
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now
I am sitting alone here and humming
and write a song sometimes.
 It is this devil in my boat
That I am able to row ashore
But a cat is lying on my pillow
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now

Ida Redig / Alexander Rybak – “Visa Vid Vindens Ängar” (A Song At The Wind’s Meadows).

Here’s another kind of poetic cover sung by Ida Redig. The song was originally written and sung by Mats Paulson in the 60’s, and is quite a classic example of a visa, visa is a Swedish sort of ballad, it’s a bit like a separate Scandinavian music genre. This is a summer visa, and it has a very lullaby-ish feel to it, which I like. But apart from the version by Ida Redig, which is again quite different from the original, I’m also going to show you another one that I like even more than hers, and it is Alexander Rybak’s version. Alexander Rybak is the guy who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009, he has Belarussian parents but lives in Norway, he sings and plays fiddle, and he sang the song “Fairytale” at the Eurovision. I really like him, and even more so does Zofijka. Alexander’s version is more similar to the original, as well as longer than Ida Redig’s. It comes from his album, which is also called “Visa Vid Vindens Ängar”, and the album is entirely in Swedish, which is fun since his mother tongue is Norwegian. I’ve heard people saying that they don’t like that he has such a strong Norwegian accent on here, but I think it’s very nice! I also have the lyrics for you.

 

There goes a wind across the wind’s meadows

A curtain of tulle flaps

And I shall write a summer song

With sun and smell of flowers in the melody

I wanted to sing about Katarina

To wooden flutes and cymbal

But the tones of the wind become summer songs

I only listen in the birch leaves hall

There goes a wind across the wind’s meadows

A curtain of tulle flaps

And I shall write a summer song

With sun and smell of flowers in the melody

There goes a girl in the aspen grove

I have a yellowed photography

With the years she became a dream, a saga

A lonely wanderer’s sympathy

I wanted to write a little song

Where instants become eternity

But words become mute and tones deaf

And the song’s thought secret

There goes a girl in the aspen grove

I have a yellowed photography

With the years she became a dream, a saga

A lonely wanderer’s sympathy

There goes a wind across the wind’s meadows

A curtain of tulle flaps

And I shall write a summer song

With sun and smell of flowers in the melody