Houses Silje Nergaard

• 1His House03:01
• 2Window Bird03:24
• 3A Crying Shame04:53
• 4Rain Roofs02:00
• 5The Ballet Boy05:46
• 6I Knew That I Loved You03:17
• 7Night Street03:29
• 8Candle in the Window04:37
• 9Velvet Curtains06:11
• 10Balcony Ladies01:19
• 11My Neighbour's Cat02:36
• 12My Crowded House03:58
• 13A Long Winter03:43
• 14One Year05:32
• Total Runtime53:46

Info for Houses

"Houses", which will be released by Masterworks/Sony Music on 1 October, is Norwegian singer Silje Nergaard’s latest album, a release as personal as it is varied and richly resonant. Among her guests are Kurt Elling, Vince Mendoza, Bugge Wesseltoft, Toninho Horta and Adam Baldych.

For more than twenty-five years Silje Nergaard has not just been a star in her native Norway, her fifteen albums have cemented her international reputation as one of the world’s most celebrated singer-songwriters. Houses is a genuine high-carat release filled with music and lyrics that are deeply affecting: it stirs the emotions, while invariably communicating a note of real optimism.

Houses is a concept album exploring the ideas of hopes, dreams, love and a longing for the future. In it Silje Nergaard uses music to process her personal impressions, experiences and thoughts during the first year of the coronavirus epidemic. “At a time when the world broke down and we were all cut off from our normal everyday lives, I saw how most other people spent too long stagnating at home. It was a time that was intense and as a result completely different – a surreal situation.” As a result she went on long walks in the streets around her home, getting to know her own neighbourhood. Everything was so unusually quiet and breathed a very strange atmosphere. She looked through people’s windows and began to think more deeply about their lives and about their various stories, which finally inspired her to write some new song texts. These may often be coloured by her own personal experiences but ultimately the singer uses them to look beyond her own immediate world with the result that these fourteen songs reflect the lives of all of us during the past year or so.

“When I realized that life outside had come to a standstill, I knew that I needed to find the magic within me. To put myself in a situation where I could work creatively was not only meaningful but in my own case it was also necessary. I felt a powerful urge to express myself at this wholly exceptional time, without interruptions but with a chance to pursue my ideas at length and spend entire months writing songs – and to allow them to inhabit me even when I was out walking. (I did indeed compose on my walks.) As an artist, I found it absolutely necessary to express these stories and the resultant moods in my music.”

Changes open people’s eyes, and we can also learn from these new situations. Most of us live in countries where we are free and can do whatever we want. Since the start of the coronavirus epidemic we have been forced to realize that there may be limits on what we can do and that even our freedoms may be curtailed. But this is only because we want to protect ourselves and others. “To be a musician is to be a part of human existence. We grow, we change and we continue to evolve, and of course the coronavirus pandemic has affected us all in different ways. The stories of some people have been harrowing and have left deep wounds. But I think that in the process we’ve all learnt something about ourselves: for a long time we were forced to observe ourselves and the world from a different angle.”

Among the very specific insights into the life around her that Silje Nergaard has to offer us in Houses is The Candle in the Window, a poetic evocation of what she sees when she looks through a window and observes a couple every evening dining at their kitchen table by candlelight and engaged in lengthy conversations. They are at one with each other and feel comfortable in their togetherness. In My Crowded House she sees the opposite, families remaining cooped up for twenty-four hours a day, people everywhere. Unable to breathe, she is forced to leave the house in order to clarify her ideas. In this way one’s own house, normally a safe haven, becomes a prison. Much has changed over the last year, giving us a new perspective on life and forcing us to see it in a new light. What, for example, is a house? And what goes on around us? Even if every quarter is different, it still provides a framework for life and for all its greater and lesser concerns – the everyday aspects of life but also its existential side. Each quarter has everything. The houses both inside and outside, at night, in the rain, the endless stories.

These have inspired Silje Nergaard to write about loneliness and about the way in which the hours inside a house appear to drag on endlessly (A Crying Shame); in another song she sings about a bird that flutters past a window one morning, reminding us that a new day is beginning (Window Bird); or she tells of the feelings of melancholy that overcome us when we walk past the house where someone we once loved used to live (His House); and she describes all the wet roofs that protect us at night (Rain Roofs). “My hope is that we can learn and be thankful for what we’ve got and learn to be more aware of one another. Our time on earth is so precious.”

In this way each song that makes up the present album is always like another house – musically too. Silje Nergaard didn’t want to fixate on one particular idea but to show the greatest possible variety. Most of the songs are based on her own recordings from her demo tapes, so their sound is genuine and they can lay claim to a certain authenticity. Accompanying her on her musical journey is her producer and technician Mike Hartung, who was especially keen to preserve the original energy from her demo recordings. Together with a whole series of world-class musicians from Brazil, the United States, Poland, Nepal and Scandinavia, including Toninho Horta, Carlos Ríos, Adam Baldych, Sanskriti Shresta, Helge Lien, Trygve Seim, Håkon Kornstad, Bugge Wesseltoft and Arve Henriksen, the team of Silje Nergaard and Mike Hartung has produced an album as filled with tunes as it is emotionally charged. Some of these pieces are jazz-like and playful, while others vaguely recall the world of pop music and others again are austere and unadulterated in their emotional impact. But in every case they inspire their listeners with the enormous range of their sonorities. “I was fortunate that all of these fantastic musicians wanted to get involved. With their magic and their abilities, they have contributed to the fact that each ‘house’ has been stirred into life. And I believe they all enjoyed the opportunity to make a recording during this quiet period, when everything came to a standstill. All the Norwegian musicians came into the studio, but the international ones naturally had to record their contributions back home.”

But as a project Houses then became bigger and bigger, not least because Silje Nergaard had the idea of including a number of orchestrations. And so the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Budapest Art Orchestra were invited to perform arrangements by Vince Mendoza and Gaute Storaas under their respective arrangers. “This turned out to be my most expensive album at a time when we had less income than ever, so I rounded up all my money for this release. But it felt so right to think big at a time when everything else was getting smaller. The first thing I did when the world as we knew it was ending was to contact Vince Mendoza, one of the world’s best arrangers and the winner of no fewer than six Grammy Awards. The first song that I wrote for this album was A Crying Shame with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. I knew that in an arrangement by Vince Mendoza this song would storm the gates of Heaven.”

Silje Nergaard can be heard here with Kurt Elling, one of the most outstanding male singers of our age. In many ways this particular song was a challenge because “technically speaking it demands a wide-ranging vocal tessitura and requires both depth and maturity in terms of its expression. Kurt, with whom I once performed a duet, has a unique combination of the gifts that are needed here – he’s an exceptional singer and artist who over a period of many years has demonstrated his preeminent position in this field. And it was fantastic that at this very time he was also receiving another Grammy in the United States.” Silje Nergaard still has fond memories of her duet with Kurt Elling.

Now we too can accompany Silje Nergaard on her exploration of these Houses. We can hear her true stories, stories in which she takes the most varied interest in houses, in their surroundings and in the relationships that unfold within them. But Silje Nergaard is a creative artist and so these true stories have naturally continued to fascinate her, allowing her to invest them with novel and subtle colours. Have fun discovering and exploring Silje Nergaard’s Houses.

Silje Nergaard, vocals

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Booklet for Houses