Aarhus-based Carmie has twice before visited us, the first time chronicling her move back to her parents’ home as an adult, having broken up with her partner, and the second time bemoaning the collective failure of Danish youths to wean themselves off the bottle.
Her songs are usually inspiring in a slightly off-the-wall way.
This is the second time in a few weeks that we’ve had a song called ‘Talk to me’, the previous one by Norway’s RABO, and again that title alone puts me in mind of the brilliance of Gabriel and Paula Cole’s live performance of ‘Come talk to me’ back in the 1990s.
In other words, anything with that title or similar has a lot to live up to.
And it usually relates to two people who were once close but for one reason or another no longer are. In Gabriel’s case it was a plea to his daughter to reconnect following his divorce from her mother.
In Carmie’s (Christine Aggerholm) case ‘Talk to me’ contrasts love and despair, the latter, caused by a loved one’s slump into depression and subsequent withdrawal from the world, failing to trump the love for that person, which persists and grows relative to the widening gulf between them.
Ultimately she tries to reconcile a quiet frustration with an unwavering commitment just to be there, even when it feels like there’s nothing left to do or which she can do.
And it helps that she herself has been through this, experiencing a feeling of powerlessness, but also one of profound care. A sort of no-man’s land between flowering tenderness and dwindling efficacy.
If you aren’t singing about a particular, specific incident that you’ve experienced – if you aren’t feeling it – it can be difficult to evoke the right emotions. But not for Carmie.
She succeeds by keeping it what I would call ‘authoritatively up-beat’, by which I mean she uses a tone of the sort that might be employed by a nurse in an old folks’ home; light, cheerful and reassuring.
“Just talk to me and you’ll be fine.”
While it is buoyant throughout, the intensity varies, just as any conversation between two human beings would in this situation while the music, which hangs on a simple but effective melody line, never gets in the way of the story.
There is an even more serious side to this as the song doubles up as an advisory on mental health generally.
You know I can’t help contrasting it with television adverts here in the UK by an organisation, SOS – Silence of Suicide which insists that we all need to ‘Stop the Silence’ and ‘Start the Conversation’, to head off suicide attempts before they happen. Several slightly odd looking people are shown laughing and joking at work but then glum and tortured when they are alone.
You can’t miss them, they’ve been shown for the last couple of years and they are on many channels.
They seem to be highly respected in that community but for me they are spoiled by a female voice that intones that mantra (above) as if she’s working for Big Brother in 1984.
For my money Silence of Suicide would do better to sign a deal with Carmie and let her dictate their artistic direction.
Taking the three songs we’ve featured together, Carmie is clearly a skilled writer already and one to watch out for this year when she will release an EP (her second) that will combine both new and previously released songs.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carmiemusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmiemusic/
