I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DANIEL NORGREN-Tiny Desk Concert #929 (January 3, 2020).

I feel like I’ve heard of Daniel Norgren, but I really don’t know anything about him.  In fact, when I first started playing this Tiny Desk Concert I was surprised at the kind of music this Swedish musician played because it was steeped in American roots music.

Daniel Norgren has been self-releasing his analog recordings for nearly a dozen years. At the Tiny Desk, he and his band sampled music from three different records.

For the first song, “Putting My Tomorrows Behind,” Norgren plays piano.  There’s a slow, simple drum beat from Erik Berntsson.  And when the chorus comes along, all four sing with gorgeous harmonies.  There’s a pretty bluesy guitar solo from Andreas Filipsson.

Throughout the five minutes of this slow song, it feels like a piece of working-class Americana:

I hear myself saying, I’m doing fine
My life is a walk through the pines
But I’m sick and I’m tired, spending my time
Putting my tomorrows behind

The sky is big and white and I’m locked inside
Working all day with a frown
I guess I’m just a coward who would need to get fired
And banished from this town

For “Everything You Know Melts Away Like Snow” Norgren switches from piano to guitar.  This simple song runs 6 minutes with minimal lyrics.  But it has some lovely backing vocals and an interesting lead vocal melody that seems to go nicely with the guitar lines that are picked out.  As he played,

the bluesy Swedish musician kept his eyes tightly shut, as he seemed to tap into old souls to help conjure his tunes.  His body sway[ed] and writhe[d] as he and his band create[d] a dream state calming enough to slow the day’s hectic pace to a crawl.

Norgen takes the guitar solo on this song (mostly on the lower strings–a very bluesy kind of solo).  You’d swear this song came from an American band from the sixties.

You can’t really hear his Swedish accent (you can hear a fraction of it when he sings) until he introduces the band.  I also like that Anders Grahn plays the upright bass as Norgren is talking, giving everything they do a musical feel.

“Moonshine Got Me” is the oldest song he plays–it dates back to his 2011 EP Black Vultures.  The title sounds like Americana but the song also is not about “moonshine,” the liquor, it is about the actual moon shining. It’s over ten minutes long and opens with beautiful intertwining guitars–both he and Filipsson play different lines that feel like leads but which keep the melody perfectly.  His voice is the most aching on this song.

There’s a lengthy slow jamming middle section, in which both Andreas and Daniel take solos.  As the song slows, Daniel moves back to the piano and picks out a quiet melody to bring the song to a close.

[READ: January 6, 2020] “Linda Boström Knausgård’s Post-“Struggle” IKEA Trip“

I don’t usually write about short pieces like this.  But this is about an author who I’ve recently read and whose new book I am quite interested in.  Plus, Linda Boström Knausgård is the ex-wife of Karl Ove Knausgård and she was written about so much in those books that I feel like I know her (fairly or unfairly).

This piece is, indeed, about Linda Boström Knausgård in an IKEA.  She is in New York for a book tour for her new novel Welcome to America.

It’s odd to feel you know things about a person when you have never met them and your only exposure to them is from someone else’s point of view.  There’s not a lot that Linda Boström Knausgård can do to get away from what we “know” about her.   But this little story does show her to be a bit more upbeat than the way she was left off in the novels.

It also made me laugh that the author of the piece felt the need to explain IKEA as “a notional store from Sweden.”

She is in IKEA ans she asks, “Do you hear that buzz? …. That is the sound of IKEA.  We are in Hell and we will never leave.”  She continues, “Every couple that comes in here starts to fight!”

Welcome to America is not set in America, but rather in a Stockholm apartment.  After she separated from Karl Ove three years ago, she settled in Ystad in southern Sweden.  When her mother died this past summer, Linda moved into a Stockholm suburb.

This novel commemorates her mother, but not in a simple manner.  It is semi-autobiographical, although her mother had mixed feelings about the book: “After the thing with Karl Ove, she was just exhausted with being written about.” 

In the book, the main character, Ellen, stops speaking.  She is the daughter of an actress (Linda’s mother was an actress).  But Linda says she changed a lot for the novel.  I love that she picks this detail as the example:

That part where the brother pees in bottles so that he doesn’t have to leave his room?  I made that up. … Actually I talked to my brother later, and he once had a job where he had to walk down so many stairs to get to the bathroom that he did pee in bottles.  He asked me, “How did you know?”

She talks briefly about Karl Ove saying that he is caring about his children, but that he was bored being a full-time parent.  “He would act like he was dying when I got home from work.”  She was hurt by the idea that he only wanted to spend time with his books, not with them.

In January, she will move again, this time to London were her four children live with Karl Ove.  Her new boyfriend (a Chilean songwriter) will stay in Sweden.   It’s an adorable (if maybe sad) ending that she says, “He is considerate. When I am too quiet he goes ‘You have to tell me what you’re thinking. I want to know.'”

I’m curious what this new book will be like, because her previous book The Helios Disaster was bizarre and wonderful.