Press Release
By ?
Published: East West 'People Are Strange.' press release biography
One of the most original voices in european music, Stina Nordenstam was
born in Stockholm in 1969. A precocious musician, she was fascinated at
an early age with the music of John Coltrane and began transcribing some
of his solos. She also developed a love for the work of the master classical
pianists Artur Schnabel and Glenn Gould and started writing music for the
piano. She was an accomplished singer of contermporary classical music by
the time she was 15, and later in her teens she formed a jazz group, 'The
Flippermen'. It was working with such musicians, at music school and after,
that gave her ideas about experimenting with the use of vocals.
Her first recordings after music school were made at a small studio outside
Stockholm, completing and subsequently abandoning countless numbers of tracks,
always looking to move forward into the next piece. Her debut album 'Memories
Of Colour' was released in 1991, an extraordinary sequence of songs set
off with a sparse almost iuminous instrumentation, her own child like vocals
at the centre of each piece. Released on the Telegram label in Sweden, it
was immediately picked up by East West for wider release.
In 1994, she followed it with 'And She Closed Her Eyes' which broadened
both her musical and lyrical palette further. As the jazz feel of the earlier
disc faded into the background, elements of folk and country mingled with
movements of what might even be called dance music: one track 'Little Star'
was remixed by Stieve B-Zet and Recycle Or Die
In the interim between this release and her third album, she released a
one-off collaboration with Vangelis, the eerily beautiful 'Ask the Mountains'.
At the end of 1996 she delivered her third collection, 'Dynamite', another
set of unclassifiable songs with Stina's voice their unifying element: complex,
experimental, it was acclaimed as one of the most original albums of its
year.
Although she hardly ever does any live work - her sole UK gig to date was
a one-off show at London's Jazz Cafe, spoken of with awe by the lucky few
who attended it - and is perennially reluctant to do any interviews. Stina's
reputation has steadily grown since her first recordings appeared. And with
the release of her fourth album, a dramatic departure from her previous
work, she wili surely be adding further to her considerable band of admirers.
The new record is a collection of cover versions of an astonishing variety
of songs, both famous and virtualiy unknown alike. Called simply 'People
Are Strange' after the Jim Morrison/Doors song which is one of the highlights
of the record, it features the singer experimenting with an even more dramatic
and dangerously exciting set of musical structures than she has dared attempt
before.
"The original intention was to start out from bad songs; songs of the
most trivial kind." she says, with typical iconoclasm. "The year
before, a friend of mine had asked me to do a version of an old Elvis tune,
"Treat Me Nice". First I got puzzled. Elvis doesn't mean anything
to me - what could I do with a song like that? But tile work intrigued me.
I felt a lot of freedom inside the format and it felt natural to explore
more material of the same kind.''
So she started searching for songs - in libraries, going through songbooks
and collections of all kinds. "The lyrics had to correspond in one
way or another and give some sort of surprise, glimpse, insight. The music,
in comparison, was a minor problem - I knew I would remake it anyhow. A
more radical solution would have been to choose just one song and then let
it go through twelve completely different rewritings."
Many of the songs Stina chose to cover will be known to anyone with even
a slightest interest in popular music - and many of those choices will perplex
those who have a previous acquaintanceship of her work. They include "Sailing",
once a huge hit for Rod Stewart. Prince's famous anthem "Purple Rain";
Tim Hardin's fragile little love song "Reason To Believe"; the
often covered country tune by Boudleaux Bryant, "Love Hurts",
and two songs from the grandmaster of singer-songwriting, Leonard Cohen
- "Bird On A Wire" and "You Came So Far For Beauty".
In addition, there are almost unknown folk tunes such as "Like A Swallow"
and the nineteenth century ballad by Stephen Foster, "J"eannie
With The Light Brown Hair".
Every track is a surprise, and not only for the choice of song but for the
way it is performed in each case. Several are barely recognisable in terms
of their melody. Often they have been entirely rebuilt from the inside,
with only the ghost of the original tune surviving. Many are stripped down
to the bone, the original breath of the music surviving in only a few words
or phrases. "Love Hurts", for example, exists as a mere fragment
of music, bewitchingly performed.
"The whole point for me has been in finding the material and then trying
to live with it, getting under the surface, freeing the forces. After reading
the scores and sheets in libraries, skimming through enormous amounts of
anthologies and best-ofs, I took the interesting ones back home and tried
them out on guitar or piano, singing them again and again. We got the number
of songs down to about 20, and then we started the recordings in Copenhagen."
"These cover songs could easily have been sung by somebody else, or
by a bunch of different people. There Is no central character interpreting
their meanings. Something is played out, but who is the player?"
"I use the title in a confirmative sense, as a proof of the social
act; the will and courage to walk into rooms where people meet and confront
each other, to be where others have been, feeling the faint touch of earlier
lives, experiences, memories. That's one clue to this album. There's something
mocking about the whole project, though, that I can't explain, not even
to myself. It's a bit like meeting the ghosts of the songs, the ghosts of
pop culture."
People are
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