Sol Heilo dropped a shed load of clues online about this, her third recent single and a candidate, I’m sure, for her second full length album after 2017’s ‘Skinhorse Playground’ in a solo career punctuated by pandemics and maternal duties.
I’m reminded that her most impressive song (for me, at least) on an impressive debut album was ‘Walk a little further’, one in which she found solace in ‘Café Solitaire’ on ‘Lonesome Street’ and one in which she encouraged herself to undertake that walk, with “brittle nerves of glass”, to challenge herself, to plough on through ever-deepening snow to reach her goal, and to do it alone. Because she can, and in her heart she knew it then and knows it now.
One does get the impression that loneliness and solitude have played a large part in her life as a musician.
In her social posts in advance of the song’s release on 21st March, the Spring Equinox and a day traditionally associated with positivity and hope, she wrote,
“When the stage lights are turned off and the applause dies out, the silence can be deafening. It’s in this space, between a good flow and where you only see your own flaws, that loneliness sneaks in.
Loneliness occurs in a relationship where you no longer have genuine contact. Where you can’t find the reasons for being lonely and a chain of unhealthy, addictive relations replace each other.”
To emphasis the point she attached a video of her old band, Katzenjammer, playing a live version of the celebrated ‘A Bar in Amsterdam’, Sol blowing away into her trumpet like she was attached to an iron lung before gathering her breath again to sing at a hundred miles an hour.
Then she closed the 22-second clip with a five second image of herself looking detached and confused, lost and afraid; a mug shot as if the tour bus had just been stopped and the police had found a huge consignment of drugs fresh from Medellín wrapped up in the instruments.
Sol Heilo is an artist in many ways (she’s just had her first major art exhibition) and a deep thinker. I’ll tell you this. That video imagery is freaking world class. A five-second video shot is worth 10,000 words.
In another post, she observed,
“For artists and people who seemingly have everything, the loneliness can be a hidden shadow behind the limelight; an emptiness which cannot be filled with applause or millions of streams. But luckily the theme is easier to talk about now than earlier.”
That put me at my ease because I suspected that whatever the problems of that Katzenjammer era amounted to (they were on the road continuously for 12 years) they were still being perpetuated today.
But her reply to a question I asked on Facebook was met with the disarmingly to-the-point response “well, history it is…”
Not only that; she feels she has moved on and no longer seeks sympathy, only to be able to spread the word that success and applause and endless replenishments outwardly will not help if you are empty on the inside. On the other hand, if you are at peace with yourself and love yourself you can live in a shed and be satisfied!
I suspect motherhood may have contributed to that peace, as it has with so many other artists and venture that is suggested in her artwork for this song.
Compared to its predecessor, the gloomy ‘Black Crow Cloud’, ‘Further down the road’ is as upbeat and joyful as anything she’s written as a solo artist. Ever since ‘Happy Song’ in fact, the ultimate track on ‘Skinhorse Playground’ but which wasn’t happy.
It’s a fast-paced, three and a half minute, rapidly picked and plucked banjo and guitar extravaganza complete with choral voices and even a banjo solo. By the end it has taken on the form of a country hoedown voiced by Norway’s answer to Dolly Parton.
Sol Heilo is in danger of becoming an institution, a national treasure, and that won’t be much further down the road either.
Find her on:
Website: https://www.solheilo.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/solheilo
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solheilo/
