In the UK if a singer gets to be described as “legendary” that usually means they are past it, over the hill, good only for the leg ends spot at Glastonbury on Sunday afternoon when everyone is still paralytic and half asleep from Saturday.
It’s the equivalent of the Chairman’s ‘Vote of Confidence’ in the Football Manager, 48 hours before he is sacked.
Fortunately, none of this applies in Denmark where legends are exactly what it says on the tin.
And one of them is Kira Skov.
Kira has been a member of several bands, including the wonderfully named Butterfly Species which sounds like it emerged out of late 1960s San Francisco counterculture (except that she hadn’t been born then), and is best known for Kira & The Kindred Spirits, which she formed in 2002, and her more experimental solo work.
She’s racked up 16 albums along the way with the 17th scheduled for later this year.
For now she returns with ‘Only the Dream’ which she explains as “a celebration of the mystery of life and all that we will never know for sure.”
The question is, is what we believed to be reality actually real? I don’t perceive a political perspective here although if she intended it that way it would be quite apposite given that you just don’t know for sure what is real and what is fake these days.
It appears to be to do with identifying the difference between reality and dreams, given that these days everyone is urged to ‘fulfill their dream’ almost as if you can have it, even entitled to it, on demand like Instagram or TikTok, which of course most people cannot.
And she tellingly refers back in the song to the simpler days of her own childhood when such things didn’t exist and dreams “were roaming free”; more realistic ones perhaps like getting the chance to ride a horse, or going to a first pop concert without mum or dad. Or that first kiss.
Am I sounding nostalgic here? Perhaps that’s the effect she has.
Musically, it’s like poetry set to music, the sort of thing Melanie Safka used to do back in the day, complete with that sudden rush of urgency she would suddenly find in her songs.
Or if you want an antipodean comparison, how about with The Seekers, with the charming Judith Durham and her beautiful voice?
If that carbon-dates Kira back to the 1970s, so what? It was an era that produced some of the best pop music ever.
So just lie back and dream of it.
Find her on:
Website: https://kiramusic.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kiraskovofficial
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kiraskov/
