Elin Lyth & Daniel Östersjö (Sweden) – Love comes along (single/track from Nordic Source Vol.2)

It’s Saturday night and time for a touch of class, allied to nostalgia.

We’ve featured the Nordic Source project previously, a collaboration between the music company COMEDIA and activist singer-songwriter Jan Hammarlund and which takes previous works, often poems, and usually in Swedish, and reinvents them into more contemporary and previously unreleased versions, sometimes – like this one – in English and aimed at an international audience.

A mover and shaker in this is the multi-talented Daniel Östersjö from central Sweden, who has been recognised in these pages several times, both as an individual artist and as a member of the duo Le Lac Long 814.

Complementing him here is the Stockholm-based singer Elin Lyth who garnered praise earlier this year for her album ‘Galopp galopp’.

Here they present an English version of Nils Ferlin’s poem ‘I folkviseton.’

The new recording is based on Torgny Björk’s score and the English translation was made by Fred Lane.

I mention ‘nostalgia’ because the pair evokes an era long forgotten and even never directly experienced by most of the people on the planet, the 1960s and 70s, when male-female duos were plentiful and usually top class (think The Carpenters; Captain & Tenille; Dollar; Peters & Lee; Sonny & Cher; Ike & Tina Turner; and Eurythmics in the 1980s.

There are still some around of course, Beach House springs to mind, but there’s little in the way of easy listening like you’ll find here, never mind the one-take recording capability with guitar strings zinging away over simple piano and heartfelt vocals.

Elin Lyth delivers the vocals while Daniel Östersjö is credited with “singing, whistling, guitar and piano” (which means of course it couldn’t have been done in one take unless Mr Östersjö has four arms or plays guitar with his feet).

Some songs are there to be manipulated, others, like this, to be delivered au naturel. A dish served without garnishing, for your delectation.

In October, last year’s first volume in the Nordic Source series will be followed up with this album, ‘Nordic Source vol. 2.’ The single is accessible on streaming services now.

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