With a mind-numbingly boring General Election campaign here in the UK I’d welcome one of those red MAGA baseball caps right now but with MMF emblazoned on them instead.
Not that I can imagine Laevendel (Charlie Skibsted – the moniker doesn’t translate) ever dirtying his hands in politics, or his songs being used for those purposes.
He’s about as far away from the political ‘classes’ as you can imagine, hailing from the west coast of Sweden, between Gothenburg and Helsingborg, from where I assume he gets his ‘salt-splashed folk’ tag.
It’s funny how you tend to associate pure unadulterated acoustic folk music with certain places. In the Nordics parts of Norway and Iceland come to mind first for this sort of work but it has definitely put his region, about which I know little, firmly on the map.
The nature of the brief ‘Make me forget’ has changed for him over the 10 years since he wrote it. Initially he says, it was about a young heart being broken, possibly for the first time but has shifted over time towards being one of loss.
And indeed you can read either scenario into it although I would add that I got the impression that the ‘loss’ would be felt on reflection, rather than being one experienced in the here and now; of a first love, perhaps. One that he would rather now consign to history, perhaps.
And he mulls over how it will be perceived in another 10 years.
It’s a simple, straight to the point, song, from the heart, untainted by the electricity that got Bob Dylan shouted down, a string arrangement and choir that could have stepped off a heavenly cloud and a voice that bears comparison with no other because no-one else that I know of sounds like him.
My only complaint, if that is the right word, is that it finishes about 30 seconds at least before I expected it to, and quite abruptly. I was preparing myself for a final verse that doesn’t exist. Hope he didn’t forget it. (Only joking 😉 ).
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laevendel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laevendel/
Photo: Maja Karlström.
