- Wouldn't it be fantastic to be a sheep? Marit Larsen asks us.
Recently she was at the Faroe Islands, at the island Sandur, where she was invited to play a concert with her band at the Mjs festival, according to mention 'the most beautiful festival in the land'. Marit Larsen's music can't be bought at the Faroe Islands, but the people at the festival booking had seen her on Scandinavian MTV. It was obvious that more people had seen her too, because the 6-700 who attended the show gave her a unison sing-along. The best thing about it was that Marit Larsen almost understood her audience just as well as they understood her, since she learnt Norse language while on tour with Marion Ravn in M2M.
After she finished her performance, she was followed by Bonnie Tyler on stage (They had printed posters with a split picture of us. That one made me laugh for maybe three hours). Marit missed that show, instead she chose to opt for an early night so that she could get up early the next morning and go for a walk in the Faroe landscape.
- I really managed to relax, she says.
- It was so incredibly quiet. No internet. Not even possible to send an MMS. And all around me, only grazing sheep. I am a vegetarian, but right there and then I thought that it couldn't possibly make a difference if some of them ended up as food, because they have been so happy right up until that happens, kind of... So, I really think that being a sheep on the Faroe Islands would be a great life.
There probably won't be time for that in a while. Marit Larsen from Lorenskog is in the middle of her best summer ever, but also the most hectic. When it is over, she will have played 50 concerts. At the moment, one could say that it almost takes skill to be able to avoid a stage where a 23 year old girl from Lorenskog with a cunning mix of shyness and self-confidence is performing her personal love-songs on the border between country and pop.
- It's a process, this thing. I have started from the bottom, and then I just have to get out and play. It's live, you get the truth, she says.
- In M2M we never really played full shows. We did TV-performances or were the support act for other artists. And then we had to be convincing from the start. I have never had my own audience, and it's hard to fathom that it's actually possible to have that.
And that really is noticeable. At her concerts, Marit Larsen comes across as deeply grateful, almost coquette, moved by such things as people recognizing her songs, that they clap their hands and sing along, that they show up.
This was evident a couple of hours later after our meeting at the dock in Kristiansand, when she played inside the Hall at the Quart-festival. She became so overwhelmed by the response from the audience that in the end she burst into tears.
- After M2M I have visited festivals for three years and seen other artists perform. Not one second passed that I was not envious of them, and wished that it was me up there on the stage. Now it feels like all my dreams are coming true, she says.
- But it seems as if the decision to go on as a solo artist was a tough one?
- No, no. I needed time, but I never doubted. Remember, if you take the music away from Marit, there is not much Marit left.
You don't notice it continuously, but Marit Larsen is a little odd. It shows in the words she uses when she expresses herself. She opens the interview by saying, "So, now we're about to get to KA-know! each other?". When she is thirsty and buys a bottle of water with lime she talks of it as "silly water", and that one shows itself in a habit she has, speaking of herself in the third person. That habit has had something of the same effect on young Norwegian artists as Kurt Cobain's flannel shirt had on fashion back in 1994.
In many peoples eyes, her eccentric side really came to the surface when she was a guest at Fredrik Skavlanos' TV-show "Forst og siste". Few "Forst og siste" shows have caused as many next-day-lunch-break-talks as when Marit admitted she couldn't handle the thought of her boyfriend, the musician Egil Hagen Clausen, having girls before her, and that she hides herself if they run into an ex-girlfriend. After that therapists started calling her, offering their help in curing her jealousy.
- For each therapist that has called me, I have received 20 messages from real people that thank me for saying what they have tried to say. I am really jealous, I am, but a lot of people are.
- So you don't regret it?
No, it is reasonable that I talk of the things I sing about. I choose myself in which areas I want to dip my toe, which sides of Marit that I want to keep for myself and which sides I will comment on. In this case, I just summed up the lyric, thinking of the second single "Under the Surface".
- Do you want the person you are with to have a completely clean slate?
- You know, I am a girl, and I sometimes exaggerate, sometimes it's the other way around. It's what we do. If I feel very strongly about an emotion, and I often do, I write a song sketch to get it out of my head. It may not disappear at once, and I have to write more. Eventually I end up using the first one, where the feeling is the most extreme, because it has to be passionate. That's the kind of life I want to live.
- What does your boyfriend think about your jealousy?
- What should he think? He is my boyfriend. He has been in the room next door when I wrote the song. He has no reason to be surprised.
Maybe it would have happened no matter what, maybe it is because she brings them out in TV prime time, her lyrics nevertheless have been heavily scrutinized, only surpassed by ge Aleksandersen's lyrics in the song Sug m myggen, sug m (Norwegian male songwriter, with a song featuring ambiguous sexual content/explicit lyrics). At the Forum on her website fans go to great lengths in interpreting her lyrics. One line that describes mud-throwing in the song "The Sinking Game" is suggested to mean that she met her boyfriend in a mud bath at the Roskilde festival.
- I can't read everything they write, even if I'm flattered that they engage in my lyrics. I can say that this lyric is not about him, but about a girlfriend I have, that I can sink into a completely different world with. I may write a lot about love, but it can also be about the love of friends too.
How does that feel, having the feeling that that you have to write songs?
- If I'm not able to lock myself in my room once a week with my piano, I can't be myself. Then I end up as a mishmash of feelings. It's like a knot in your stomach. I have to untie the knot, write it out of my system, and put it on the shelf.
- When it is resting on the shelf, what do you do then?
- Then I make buns for my band. I make the best cinnamon buns in the whole world. Or I become irritated by wrong hyphenation. Cinnamon buns are the best thing in the world. Hyphenation mistakes are the worst. It's so bad that it actually is a valid reason to divorce me, that's how much that bugs me.
- But that's normal, isn't it?
- But you see, I'm such a nerd. Throughout. I think the music business is the revenge of the nerds, Marit Larsen says, and it's not clear whether she says this about the whole business, or if she has just switched from the third person to first person plural.
-We were not the coolest ones in school, but victory is ours in the end.
Translation thanks to Halvard