So our friend, film photographer Lisabi Fridell, held a workshop where all participants each made a video for The Lakes We Skate On. The videos were completed in one week - script, filming, editing, everything. I loved one of the videos so much I had to steal it and make it official. Here it is. By Ellen Fiske. Please watch in HD.
November.
Releases and more
Things are going well!
List of success:
1. Säkert! på engelska is released today in Finland, on Friday in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg, and in the US and in Canada on September 20.
2. Almost no one in Sweden hates us for doing this. Contrary to my many nightmares
3. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews. I’ll post them and some reviews when I get some time.
Thank you for listening. Over and out. /Yours, A
Can I. Photos by Julia Nygren, and contributors from all around the world. Made by Julia Nygren and Tommy Boije at Råfilm. Please view in high quality!
Go here for more information about the blog that made the video.
This is what’s happening
1. In a week or so, the video for Can I - made from the photos posted to the Can I project - will be up on this site
2. På engelska will be released:
August 29 - in Norway
August 31 - in Sweden
September 5 - in Denmark
September 14 - in Finland
September 16 - in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
September 16 - in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg
September 20 - in the US, and in Canada
3. Hopefully, you’ll like it.
4. In a near future, I’ll change the font on this website so I can actually use the letters Ä, Å and Ö, and a mixture of different exciting punctuation marks
Photo by Pär Olofsson.
It’s not even out yet!
The album isn’t even released yet, but the first review is already out! It’s in Dutch, so I don’t understand a word
In English.
Säkert!
på engelska
In 2010, we released Facit, our second album with my band Säkert! (Säkert! is a band where I’ve sung in Swedish. I also have a band where I sing in English - Hello Saferide.) We are lucky enough to have super sweet listeners in different countries and some of them wrote me, saying they were google translating Facit and babelfishing it and asking their grandfather with Norwegian ancestors for translation, and it all turned out very weird.
“How sad”, I thought, “that I can’t just translate the songs.”
Which is when I thought: “Um, why don’t I just translate the songs.”
“What if”, I thought, “I translate them almost word by word, and it nearly turns into a third language, English words used in a Swedish way?”*
So I did, and we decided to record the songs and turn them into an album. During the process, the translated songs pretty much felt like new to us. Everything seemed different when sung in another language, and producer/guitar player Henrik Oja found some new sounds for them.
About the album, then. Well, på engelska mostly contains songs from Facit, but it also features two tunes from our first album, Säkert!. The songs are about working too hard, loving too much, talking too little, growing up too slow in the northern parts of Sweden, and about fearing your country’s politics is going somewhere where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They’re about crying at a wedding. They feature a lot of sad guitars and folk-ish violins. Every time I go abroad I meet someone who asks me about the famous Scandinavian melancholia and I guess this album pretty much embraces that. The songs are simple and sad. In a fun way, hopefully.
Säkert! is a project based in Umeå, Sweden. On tour and on album, we have been: Annika Norlin, Henrik Oja, Daniel Berglund, Mats Hammarström, Jakob Nyström, Lovisa Nyström, Frida Johansson, and some other people who occasionally help out.
We’ve been nominated to a lot of awards, like the Swedish Grammys, and won a few. We sold a lot of albums and we always try to make people cry when we play. Um, that’s about it.
Pitchfork wrote about Facit:
So sooner or later you’re going to have to try to understand what she’s singing about, whether a holy misfit with the same first name as the prime minister, a young rebel who reminds the narrator of her own faded idealism, or an insecure woman who can’t help but go back to a former lover, like Liz Lemon returning to loser boyfriend Dennis Duffy in old episodes of “30 Rock”.
And:
Although obviously crafted with great care, the songs here feel tremendously naked and transparent, even to someone who doesn’t speak the language.
Yours,
Annika Norlin
PS. Om du är svensk och läser det här: gör det inte. Du ska lyssna på den svenska skivan
*The rhythm and feel of different languages: I could ramble on about this for hours. It won’t make for a good biography though, so I’ll spare you
“På engelska” will be released by Razzia Records on Aug 31. North American release by Minty Fresh. Benelux release by Dying Giraffe. Soulfood distributes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
