Johanne – Håb om lys (Hope for light) (single)
Readers might remember Johanne from 2023 and 2024 and her haunting songs about infertility, aired and bared by way of a series of singles and an EP.
Now she returns with a different tack, delivering a tribute to the people who catch us when we fall.
She says the song is a tribute to the women in her life, who are always there when she needs them the most, providing a consistent community that carried her through a crisis during which she wrote it, even though she is the one who really had to make the decisions.
In the photograph above dancers make a chain whose movements influence each other like a series of cogs in a machine, offering combines support to Johanne at the front – the one in the public eye – and that is the essence of the song.
At the same time – and this is an interesting concept – they also represent all the wild emotions that rage in a life crisis, creating the feeling of being caught in the middle of a storm.
So both fracture and support at the same time. How do you go about that lyrically?
Well you do it by offsetting those lyrics against the music.
The song is replete with a sense of hopelessness:
“I’m not the person I thought I was…I’m stuck in a home I no longer know…I stand here, like a blank piece of paper…” (and that’s just a small part of it)
But it is made to contrast with a particularly upbeat percussive beat that lays the foundation for what sounds more like a celebration at having won the national lottery than having found oneself in the middle of a crisis and especially in the chorus, which represents the swirling emotions of that crisis and its banishment, courtesy of those “that have my back.”
Johanne recorded and produced the track in collaboration with the multi-musician and producer Vakle, aka Pia Christensen.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092618155648
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johanne_musik/?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D
Gienlyd – Murky Morning (sample track from the EP Nightlight)
One thing you can always be sure of from Gienlyd is that you’ll find comfort in times of adversity in his songs. And boy is there plenty of adversity right now.
They are like a pair of slippers warming by the fire, a cup of hot chocolate before you turn in for the night, the soothing words you hear on the midnight Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, safe in the knowledge that Hurricane Force 12 in Dogger and German Bight isn’t going to waken you from your slumbers, as you turn off the Nightlight.
If that all sounds a little exaggerated check out this track, the first one on his new EP, and which it will quickly occur to you that I partly selected on the basis of its title, ‘Murky Morning’. I can’t remember the last time I threw those curtains wide to find a morning that wasn’t murky.
Without a single word being sung or spoken it conveys – well, to me at least – pulling back those curtains (you can imagine the sound when you hear it) and then closing them again and repeating those actions several times as you try to decide whether to go into work or to throw a sickie and go back to bed.
There’s something final about that last, strummed chord. Bed.
They ought to make him available on the National Health Service.
Find him on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gienlyd/
