A musical hame
Lene Storhaug is a singer,
pianist and mainly a songwriter with a very special sensitivity. Her lyrics are
full of strange characters through which she wonders about the social roles and
how the cultural burden makes us become prisoners of a too simple view of
existence in which we are not able to enjoy differences. Lene Storhaug’s music
goes beyond all that, and takes all of us by the hand to a new place to be
where poetry is a door always open to live new experiences. Her personal
universe is full of sadness and joy, knowing that all of them are expressions
of existence and without them happiness isn’t possible. With Lene your time
will have a more intense dimension, so sit down, please, and listen to what
Lene Storhaug sings. I’m now waiting for the new songs.
Why do you Live inside a letter?
That’s
a very interesting question. The lyrics for I Live Inside a Letter is the only
lyric that I haven’t written myself. It's written by Mirinda Fleenary, a very
talented poet from Michigan. She sent me a booklet of her poems, and that one
kind of stuck with me and she was nice enough to permit me to write a melody to
it. I found it so beautiful, so heartbreaking and so inspiring, because it
really captures how painful the process of writing down the contents of your
heart can be. One is imprisoned by words, syllables, grammar, adjectives, and
sometimes what you have in your heart can be so difficult to translate into the
written word. When you write song lyrics you expose yourself, your inner
emotions, secrets and opinions, and the process to translate this into lines
and verses can be very frustrating and scary. I often feel lost in a forest of
words and grammar rules, and it can be hard to find a way out. It's a
soul-wrenching and terrifying experience, and when you take the final step and
perform it in front of a lot of people, you have given them your heart and soul
on a silver plate. I think Mirinda’s poem, even though it’s about a love
letter, captures the very essence of the inner world of a songwriter.
Who is Adam Ribbs?
Adams Ribbs is amongst other
things about gender roles, and the need for some people to categorize. Either
you're a man or you're a woman. Either you're a good person or you're a bad
person. What is a right set of belief and what is not? Adam and Eve are the two
people mentioned in the song, and they are both born in the wrong body. Eve was
born as a man, and Adam was born as a woman. Who is to say that if you're born
as a man, you automatically have to be one. Maybe you're a woman trapped in a
man’s body, or maybe you are both? The subject of gender still meets a lot of
old-fashioned traditional attitudes, and “abnormalities” is still met with a
lot of stigma and distaste. For me they are two strong individuals who have
struggled to come to terms with their identity in a world where they are
expected to act accordingly to their appearance rather than their inner selves.
I used the Biblical names Adam and Eve deliberately, since the concept of
gender-roles and the elementary family in the Christian tradition has found its
foundations in the Genesis. To use those names was a way to challenge not only
the overall cultural view of gender roles, but also the fact that it is an
inheritance from religion. Since I come from Norway where Lutheran Christianity
has been the state religion for a few hundred years, I found it natural to use
that reference to get my point across.
Could you tell us the story
of the Paperman?
Paperman is the story about
a man who has constructed what seems to be the perfect suburban life, with a
nice house and a loving wife. But in the process he has forgotten to focus on
the content of his life rather than the facade, which turns out to be thin as
paper. It doesn’t take much before the paper is ripped to pieces. His wife is
depressed and tries to kill him in a final attempt to start some communication.
She explains to him that their life is just an act, and that she has a big
black hole in her soul. Eventually she leaves him to go search for her purpose
in life, and the man is left behind with his paper-shredded life. I used the
word “paper” a lot in the song, to emphasize the sheerness of their constructed
life.
If I gave you a paper, what
would you do with it?
Depends on the mood of the
day and the contents of my mind. I would probably write something, draw
something or make an origami-swan.
White dress has the sound of an old
Latin song. What was the inspiration for the arrangements?
The inspiration was absolutely
old Latin songs, Mariachi orchestras and the movie Kill Bill. I wanted the song
to be dusty, sexy and scary at the same time, kinda like those old movies the Mexican
gangsters meet the cowboys, and things get bloody, dust whirls up from the
horses hooves and everybody has got dirty secrets. We threw in a bit of
O'Brother Where Art Though style men’s choir as well, and I was very pleased
with the result.
White dress is the expression of a life
attitude?
That would have been
interesting and quite disturbing if that song was a reflection of my life
attitude: “Don't propose to me or I'll kill you!” It was really a reaction to a
big wave of marriages going on amongst some of my friends for a while,
everybody seemed to be getting married at the same time, and I felt way too
young to have friends in that stage of life. So I wrote the song as a protest.
Maybe that’s my life attitude – to question the collective choices of those
around me? But I'm not violently opposing marriage, don't worry. I'm in no
hurry, that’s all.
Lovesong for Toby is very sweet. Where do you
think love comes from?
Love is a very mysterious
feeling, and I think love comes in many shapes and colours. The love between
friends and family, the love between lovers. There's the good kind, the bad
kind, the destructive kind of love and the foolish kind. There's never easy to
determinate which one you're fallen under, and it can be the seed of a lot of
problems, or happiness, of course. I might have a melancholy view of love,
which might be the reason why I have so few happy love songs, but I believe in
it, in all its shapes. I believe it comes from a place inside you, that feels
warmth and compassion for another person. That wants to believe in the person,
and see the goodness in them. I also believe loves grows stronger in time, and
it grows into something steadier, deeper, and for some maybe less exciting than
the first infatuation. But whatever it’s between family members, friends or
sweethearts, I believe the love that have had time to evolve and grow, are the
one that really makes a difference.
In a waltz rhythm you sing Class of 97. Do you think more in the
past or in the future?
I would say both. I look at
the past to understand the present, and I look at the future with a combination
of optimism and fear of non change. Class of 97 is about a set of characters
that have evolved since their graduation into very different individuals. Some
for the worse and some for the better. If you look at your own classmates from
high school, there's bound to be some kind of evolvement, and the persons they
are now compared to who they were is very interesting. If they haven’t changed
at all that is equally as interesting, maybe even more.
How would you like your last
waltz in life?
If
I could have my last waltz in life to be an up-beat one, with a lot of rusty,
jazzy elements, some French accordions, a banjo out of element, and Tom Waits
by my side to sing a duet, I will die a very happy woman.
Ophelia opens with the double bass
marking a jazz atmosphere. In what way does the character of Ophelia inspire
you?
The
character Ophelia was based loosely on the Ophelia from Hamlet. I took a
lecture in English literature and had to read Shakespeare, but I didn't really like
it as much as I would have thought. I dropped out, which is the only time I've
done that by the way, but I decided to take the inspiration with me, and one
line from Hamlet stick with me: “He spoke
such fine words, my love, he swore with almost all the holy words of heaven.”
The lyrics kinda just sprung out from that quote that I use at the end of the
song. The character in itself, if she's an inspiration for anything, it would
be to guard your heart from men who's up to no good. It's a very painful
situation to have fallen head over heels with a man who is full of sweet
promises, and to find out it's all a lie.
So Ophelia is in a way a warning. It's told from the friend’s point of view,
telling her to pick up her heart again. I think we've all been in that
situation where we have either had a friend picking us up from the floor after
a bad breakup, or had a friend needing to be picked up again.
Could you tell us about the
creation and recording process of the songs?
The creation of the songs is
a very organic process. The songs turn up spontaneously, at least bits and
pieces of them, then the rest falls into place relatively quickly. I spent
seven years trying to learn about sheet music, the circle of the fifth, the
fundamentals of chord structures, but it turns out I'm kind of a musical
dyslectic. I would memorize the songs I had to learn, or play whatever I
thought sounded pretty, and for seven years I actually fooled most people into
thinking I was a fairly competent classical pianist, but I had no idea what I
was doing. But I loved playing, so when I quit the music-school, I started
writing my own melodies. There was no one telling me what was right or wrong, I
could make my own rules, and the only rule I found to be useful was that it had
to sound beautiful. So when I write my songs now, it’s from an intuitive and
emotional point of view. What sounds good together? What kind of mood does it
reflect? – these are the things I relate to when I play around on the piano.
It's when I take these songs
to my producer and co-musician Øyvind Ekse that the structure, chords and
instrumentation is put into a system. It's in this collaboration that the magic
happens. I'm so lucky to have him as a producer, because he really gets me. Not
all of my songs have a piano arrangement, often I just have a set of chords, or
a theme, and the lyrics of course, but I always have a certain idea of how the
song should sound. I will explain it in my abstract and emotional way – it
should sound transparent, or like ice, or whatever – and he will translate it
into musical arrangements and technical structure, and it always end up the way
I had imagined. I think its a good combination, to have one part that just
creates with no boundaries, and one part that can translate it into a more
commonly known musical language.
The lyrics are the mould of
the song, no matter if the melody comes before or after the lyric is written,
the melody and arrangement has to reflect the lyrics. That is why the songs are
so different, because each song tells a different story. I write my lyrics
kinda like short-stories and I have built up a set of characters that I use to
address certain topics that I care about. I find it easier to do this because
you can say a lot more when you're constructing a story, than if you're just
outing your opinions. A lot of my songs are about people who often have to live
with a lot of prejudice and harassment, people living on the “wrong” side of
morality. I don't like it when people judge and attack those that might be
different from themselves, and I find that through my songs I can counterattack
their objectors by addressing the issue through the eyes of one of my
characters. I won’t claim to have the answers to these questions, that would be
very arrogant of me, but I feel that I can be a little voice, speaking my mind
about these situations that I feel are unfair and inhumane. Many of my songs
are about religion, and this is a subject I have struggled with all my life.
I'm a student of Comparative Religion at the University of Oslo, and whilst as
a scientist I cannot really speak my opinions on the subjects that bother me,
as an artist I do not have those boundaries, and I can say whatever I want. It’s
very deliberating.
When we recorded the
upcoming album, it took us a while. Me, Øyvind, Thomas Gallatin (drums) and
Håkon Eivind Larsen (bass) recorded all the songs in an old church up in the
mountains in Ål. That was done during a weekend, but its the colouring that has
taken time. Each song has been cared for, giving it the sound it needed. We
have had quite a few guest musicians coming in, and Øyvind has worked a lot on
the soundscape, and we worked a bit on the backing vocals. There’s been a lot
of room for creativity, and we have taken the time to let each song get its own
distinctive sound. It has in turn evolved into an album that I am very very
proud of.
If you suddenly woke up in an
old, abandoned, isolated and completely naked factory, with nothing more than
its structure, what would you do in it?
I would probably panic for a
few seconds, thinking something really bad had happened. I have a vivid
imagination, so I guess my thought would lead to chemical disaster or a
zombie-apocalypse or something. If it turned out to be safe, which I hope it'd
be, I'd make it my nest, put a grand-piano in the middle of the room and would make
a wine cellar, and make it into my musical haven. Don't know where I'd find a
grand piano and lots of wine though, but I guess since it’s an imaginary
situation, I can go a little overboard.
LENE STORHAUG VIDEOS here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Lene Storhaug website www.nrk.no/urort/Artist/laen
Photo by Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard
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