You know you are always going to get a thoughtful, cleverly penned song from Terje Gravdal.
Previous ones have included observations on the New World Order and the Great Reset; an ode to an American trade union movement; stock shorting by Norwegian politicians; and most recently, in a complete change of direction, a paean to ‘The Climber’, a friend who perished in the mountains.
This time he zeroes in on a colour, namely yellow, which to him stands not as a metaphor for cowardice as it often does. Rather, he contrasts the image it generates of hope, life, warmth and security with the alternative ones of hopelessness, death and disasters.
Colours and the way they are treated in song interest me. Only the other day we wrote about an artist with colour synesthesia, meaning they can hear and picture their music in colour and I was reminded of several others with that gift.
Meanwhile, one of my favourite songs, Fiona Apple’s ‘Red, Red, Red’, contrasts how complementary colours together become grey (in human relationships) with the vividness of the colours of individual human emotions:
“But he’s been pretty much yellow/And I’ve been kind of blue/But all I can see is red, red, red, red, red/Now, what am I gonna do?”
In Terje’s representation yellow could be the wheat and sunflower fields of Ukraine, that colour forming half of the country’s flag. But now they are a theatre of war in which “skin and bone turns back to something beautiful and shines for you.”
Ditto the blue, the other half of the flag, representing the sky and evoking images of death coming out of those skies in the form of bombs and missiles.
But despite the despair hope will prevail, as signified by the fact that the sky and the fields have always been there, replenished by the blood of the fallen and so they shall be in the future.
“From earth you came, to earth you shall remain, from earth you shall rise again.”
The more I listen to Terje the more I picture him as a latter day Nordic Bob Dylan. The song is presented as an acoustic guitar led, strings backed, ballad apart from two short and elegant little guitar breaks and I could imagine Mr Zimmerman performing it, while the lyricism could have been borrowed from the poetry of Wilfred Owen.
And the vocal could be that of the masters of doom, Zager & Evans.
All in all a powerful package.
And of course you can extrapolate the meaning of those lyrics to any conflict you want to.
If I was Volodymyr Zelenskyy I’d be inclined to bestow upon him The Freedom of Kyiv.
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