Review by Nicolay Løvvold
Judging by his last name, I was curious if Ola Kvaløy might be hailing from Tromsø or at least close by (because that would be an interesting coincidence), but it would seem that he dwells in the western parts of the country.
His Wikipedia-page hints that he must be from around Stavanger or Bergen, working as… a professor at a university?! And he does music, too? And (!) for this single, ‘Everybody knows’, he had Norwegian national pop-legend Morten Abel as a supporting artist?
Kjære vene, markedsverdien på denne karen her sprenger jo alle grenser, jo! (You can translate that and learn that it’s a compliment, if you don’t know the language. Ola does, he’ll know what it means)
Seriously, though, this is incredible! Call me intrigued, and then some!
Learning these things, I quickly discarded the idea that I might get something Leonard Cohen-ish (the title gave some associations), and instead anticipated something closer to folk-rock; with just a smidge of eccentricity sprinkled throughout, perhaps?
Well, the song gives you a clue right away. The guitars and overall ambience makes me think about Jason Mraz’s remedy, how Counting Crows wants to be Bob Dylan or pass as cats, and actually also… you know what? Yeah, Jarle Bernhoft urging us to come on and talk to him.
I don’t get the strong sense of someone lamenting that “everybody knows that you’ve been faithful… give or take a day or two,” that I wondered about initially. But that was never a must, either.
It’s ironic how the lyrics repeats the phrase “everybody knows” several times, yet leaves the listener with quite a lot of ambiguity. From the first verse; where the day fades away and there nothing more to say; to how everybody worries about the world they live in; and then looking up, down and at me – then there’s nothing more to see. The irony seems intentional, and it adds to the song in a positive way because it becomes layered.
The song thus becomes something that’s largely open to interpretation, like how people might worry about different kinds of things. This makes trying to analyse the lyrics to make sense of it much more interesting than if the point is plainly stated outright. Additionally, the implied audience becomes far wider than it already was to begin with (this song should be palatable for most, I dare say) because it’s easy for the listener to relate what’s being sung to own personal experiences.
I still can’t get over how Ola got Morten Abel to partake in the song (as indeed he did on the last song reviewed by NMC – ‘The City’). I mean, I was just sitting here at home not thinking much about anything, and then I see the name of someone I’ve been humming along to since the start of the 2000s, when he taught us all that we didn’t have to be gay to make our friends feel good.
What’s up with that? Are they close friends; do they know each other from since long ago…? Or is Morten Abel perhaps a far more approachable celebrity than one might think?
Regardless, it’s a very fine addition to an otherwise great song! I can see myself putting this one on while driving to work, or when it gets late and I need to causally slow down the pace after a long day.
‘Everybody knows’ is the third single from Ola Kvaløy’s forthcoming album.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/okrentseekers
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/olakval/
