Terje Gravdal has paid us a visit several times, most recently in April with an EP, ‘The Hostage’, an erudite collection of stories, recounted in his inimitable fashion and ranging over the many ways in which any person can be ‘held hostage.’
Prior to that he’s touched on subjects as diverse as the New World Order and the Great Reset; an ode to an American trade union movement; and stock shorting by Norwegian politicians.
Traditionally these songs have required an appropriate response from me because they make you think, as they should do; hence reviews have been long.
This time, and I love how skilled artists can do this, he’s stripped a song right back to basics and fooled me completely. My first impression was that ‘The Climber’ would be about a social climber, or perhaps a business executive, one of those insufferable types who work their way up from the shop floor to be the corporate CEO, attract psychopathic tendencies along the way, and expect everyone to fall grovelling at their feet.
In fact it couldn’t be more different. He sings about real physical climbers with what is a paean to his cousin and a friend who died in a mountaineering accident in 2012.
It’s a simple, uncomplicated song, in which Terje identifies the relative’s strengths early on – a ‘castle’ as well as a soul mate.
The potential difficulty with songs like this is that they can become a little cloying and he cleverly deflects any such possibility here by shifting the emphasis slightly to the guilty party, the mountain itself:
“Mighty Mountain showed no mercy/took out one of the best…/laid his pure soul to rest”.
There’s a clever ending lyrically too, with the lines, “We searched high/we searched low/everywhere his soul could go/just to find his soul is in our hearts”.
That epitaph could be used in so many instances. Readers might remember the British teenager who went missing in the mountains in Tenerife in the summer for a month before his body was found in a ravine. I’m sure his family would have appreciated hearing those words at his memorial service.
I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world apart from Scandinavia which has adopted the folk-Americana melancholic song tradition better. And Terje Gravdal is at the very least a leading light in that highly specialised genre.
‘The Climber’ will also be on the album ‘The Wild Child’.
Find him on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terjegravdalmusic
