Unmistakably Nordic in flavor, Sofia Talvik somehow still conforms to American interpretations of her own original music, a North Sea siren blending sparkle and melancholy, creating a special niche of folk music.
Category: News
News, videos and music from Swedish Singer/Songwriter Sofia Talvik.
For my crowd funding for “Big Sky Country” I offered a cover song reward. You could choose any song you liked and I would then record a cover of it. One of my backers chose the song “Die Gedanken sind Frei” which is a German song about the freedom of thought. The text and the melody can be found in Lieder der Brienzer Mädchen (songs of the girls from Brienz), printed in Bern, Switzerland, between 1810 and 1820. The original lyricist and the composer are unknown, though the most popular version “Aus Neukirch bei Schönau”.
I re-worked the melody for the song to give it a more modern feel, and just added a little drive in the country side in Germany to give it some visuals. I hope you enjoy it!
I don’t want to spam my own page and maybe lose your precious attention with posting all the reviews and mentions that pop up around “Big Sky Country”, but I can’t help but share this amazing review from Pennyblackmusic. Reading it I didn’t know which quote to go with, because they’re all so great, but I’m going to go with the last sentence of the review …
Vad är bättre än att få en bra recension? Jo, att få en hel krönika tillägnad sig. Aftonbladets Per Bjurman uppmärksammar min nya skiva Big Sky Country i sin krönika och skriver:
Can you believe it??? It’s 10 years this month since I released my debut album Blue Moon! I want to celebrate this with you, so I put it up for FREE (or pay what you want). Head over to my shop and get your FREE download today! http://music.sofiatalvik.com/album/blue-moon
So as you might have seen I released a video for the title track of my new album, and I thought it was time to share it with you guys and share my thoughts on the song and the video.
My donation posts have been on hold, since you all have been so kind to support my crowd funding for the new album, but I will start posting more new fun stuff soon, and thought this would be a good start. If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, just click the banner at the top of this post.
So the back story to the song and the video is that I did a tour in the U.S in an old RV, a tour that lasted for 16 months and took me through 37 states. I got to see a lot more of the U.S than the average tourist and my favourite places were always the small towns and the countryside.
We played an average of 4-5 shows a week, so even though people always would alert me on scenic detours and stuff, I rarely had time to take them. So when we had planned for a whole week off in Idaho, that was just so amazing … until we got invaded by mice and one of our back tires blew up, but that’s another story. Idaho ended up being one of the places in the USA that I really fell in love with, and keep thinking of, even though it’s now been some time since I was there.
Many reasons played in to the fact that I decided to cut the tour, which was originally planned to go on for about 2 years, short. The main reason was that my mother fell ill, and I wanted to be closer to home, another reason was that I was also getting a bit tired and needed more than a week’s break. Things change once you have made a decision, whether that decision is leaving everything and going on the road for two years, or deciding to wrap stuff up and go home. I think for a long time on the tour, I just kept going no matter what. It was always a roller coaster of emotions, there were periods which were so great and so much fun, and then there were periods when everything seemed to go wrong and I doubted myself every day. But when I had made the decision to wrap up the tour I could suddenly allow myself to feel homesick. I could also allow myself to look back at the tour with a great feeling of accomplishment. That’s how the song Big Sky Country was born. From all those feelings, from my tired mind and my home sick heart. From the love that had grown for this vast country and the people I met.
I never had any doubt that this album would be called “Big Sky Country” (even though Jonas for a brief while argued that people would think it was a country album, which you know it’s not). And when I started editing the video I knew I had to try to capture the tour in pictures, the same way I had done in words, so I went back to all my videos from the tour to see what I could use.
/If you didn’t know this I did sort of a video diary for a while on the tour. I would film our everyday life, shows, mishaps and just about anything. I made ten episodes which was each about 20 minutes long, but eventually I stopped because it was so much work to film and edit. You can still watch all the Drivin’ & Dreaming episodes on youtube though./
Going through the footage from the tour was re-living it a little bit and I really enjoyed selecting the clips. It reminded me of all that beauty I got to experience. One of my favourite pictures is the one of Mt Shasta, just seemingly hanging in the air next to the road for miles and miles. Driving through Oregon and down to California was such a beautiful drive, even though I was scared to death half of the time watching the drop off next to the narrow road from the RV passenger seat window. I think the video sums up the tour pretty well, even though I wish I had had more footage from Florida and Alabama. Pictures that stick in your mind are rarely the same that you manage to capture with a camera.
I hope you enjoy the video, and the album which you can get here:
