She says it is the track she loves the most and it is called ‘Eugen’.
Every track on the album refers to a different character and each has their own story to tell.
Some of them have regular names such as Kjell, Eugen, Jasmine, Solvej, and Mats while others carry a more familiar moniker, like Brigitte Bardot and Don Quijote.
Trying to figure out the meaning of a Solblomma song is like challenging Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In fact I’m surprised Einstein isn’t one of the characters, he would have blended in perfectly.
Solblomma also describes it as “very mainstream”, which means she’s stepping well outside her comfort zone, which is anything but.
Here is a sample snippet of the lyrics:
“It’s been a long time/the wine fell from the clouds
You turned on the music/and asked me to come in”
Hm.
And then, later, some lines that have significance for me in an obscure way.
“It’s been a long time/we rode our bikes on the highway
and swam in the bay/where’s the blue scarf?”
The cognoscenti will know that Oldham Athletic, a founder member of the Premier League in 1992 and who play in blue, was promoted back into the Football League’s fourth tier last Sunday after too long away from it and 35 years since they last won a promotion.
And you see that’s what I’ve said before about Solblomma; she doesn’t write nonsense lyrics any more than Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) or Voltaire (Candide) or Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) or Alexei Sayle (Barcelona Plates) wrote nonsense prose.
She writes stuff that you can easily fit to your psyche, your history and your view of the world.
But then the final lines,
“I have pigs in my stomach/they moved in/one morning in July
That’s when/they came”
do test me, I admit! Were they in blankets?
Musically, having deserted her trademark electronic sound last time she’s very much back there on this occasion with a constant repeating riff (this time a synthesised bass note gnawing its way into your subconscious), following an intro that sounds as if it is played on a toy single octave piano and a tune that might accompany a merry-go-round funfair ride.
How to sum it up? The best I can offer is Pink Floyd meets Judy Garland, somewhere over a rainbow.
It isn’t psychy but it isn’t that far off it and could easily gravitate that way.
There are many avenues left for her to navigate yet.
/David Bentley
Photo by: Henrik P Lundqvist
Photo by: Henrik P Lundqvist
