The Maelstrom off Norway, illustration by Olaus Magnus on the Carta Marina, 1539
One of the hardest parts of making music is letting go. Not like love though, or wait… maybe it is like love. You have to trust in what you meant to do, what your best intentions were. So it was hard to post the song ‘The Lofoten Vortex’ yesterday. I didn’t think it was finished, I couldn’t walk away from the canvas, but I could invite people in to look at the canvas. This is where it is. This is what I've been working on. So here is more than you need to know about it.
The process of writing this one felt very new to me because it was very lyric driven. I’ve always been concerned with music first. The chords and melodies pop into my head. This one started the same way but I veered off, decided that it had to tell a very specific story. The beginning of a very long story. Had to constantly remind myself that communicating the story was the important part. Not the hook, not the perfection of the arrangement. That felt new for me.
The chords were interesting to me, that was the start, once again. The D chord to a Ab minor. That’s where I started. What is that interval, an augmented 4th? I don't know. 6 semitones. I wanted to expand on that. Started on the Dmaj7 instead of a straight D, went to the Ab minor, then to Ab minor 7th(?) and then ended on the D. That gives it a feeling of asymmetry. D to Dmaj7 feels like it should be the beginning of the progression, the first 2 chords, but it’s not, it’s the 4th chord going back to the 1st. This kind of shit has always confused my bandmates through the years. Arguments about where the bar begins. Where is the first beat? Trying to knock the form off its axis, just a little bit. Not always good business, I know.
More chords after that, etc… and so forth…. so I had these slightly off-kilter chord changes and then the game was to find the most straight ahead melody. I wanted to convince the listener that it was a simple 1-4-5 song. A melodic sleight of hand. That’s the easy part, moving notes around. The fun part?
Then the lyrics. Where to start? Well, here they are….
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Where a boy sits on a seashore, where a woman comes to sit beside him,
looking straight into the waters that careen off of the islands Lofoten.
Says to his mother:
Why not raise me? When you had children with those different men
you made me famous in the red houses, left a shame inside my heart and kept walkin’
Then came the answer:
“My love, be careful, you get sentimental at your peril.
Oh my child, I wanted to be there, but for now I am a student of the sea air.
Another student of the sea air.
There’s a vortex in the distance. Love, it’s so big even Heaven hears its roar.
Rarest in these open waters, where the tides are breaking off of the sea floor.
Here where Poe went on the descent,
here where Verne and all the monsters made their rounds.
For when you want different heroes,
want the strength to swallow ships, to drag them down.
Amplified by secret ridges,
stronger when the moon is out, like all us witches.
Sung of in the northern sagas,
by the north wind, when it’s rattling off its ragas.
Another student of the sea air…
Again the answer:
“My love be careful, you get sentimental at your peril.
Oh my child, I wanted to be there, but for now I am a student of the sea air
I am a student of the sea air.
Another student of the sea air.
But the sea air…. doesn’t care.”
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The backstory:
My mother’s side of the family originated in the Lofoten Islands, the other side of the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. My great grandmother Johanna had a baby at the age of 17, the father a married man in his 30s. We will never know but it seems suspiciously like rape, like what we now call rape. Around the turn of the century there weren’t many safeguards in place for a teenage girl that wanted to say no to an older man. We will never know. She had a few different children with a few different men through the years . The scarlet letter of being the teenage mother probably always stayed with her, made her a target of scorn and probably a target of predatory men. What we do know is that she didn’t enjoy that life. When she died she didn’t want a headstone on her grave, she didn’t think she deserved it.
The son she had when she was a teenager was my grandfather Imenholt Johansen. He lived and grew up with another family that fostered him, adopted him. For all we don’t know, we know that the shame of having Johanna for a mother stayed with him. When my mother was pregnant out of wedlock at 18 with Lynn, Kathryn Calder’s mother, Imenholt sent her away to have the baby secretly. She was not going to end up like his mother, a fallen woman. For him, that was important above everything else. He was very clear about that.
In this song, I decided to imagine a meeting between Imenholt and his mother Johanna, when he is still a boy. A boy with a few questions for the woman that gave him up. Most of the song is her answer.
I did some research for this song, trying to get a sense of the place. That’s when I learned about the mighty Lofoten Vortex. You see, a combination of the topography and the strong tidal currents between islands in the Lofoten archipelago causes a giant whirlpool that is also known as the Lofoten Maelstrom. It is actually the place of origin of the word ‘maelstrom’. It captured the imagination of many people including Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote the story ‘Descent Into The Maelstrom’ (which brought the word into popular usage), and Jules Verne who worked it into his story ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’.
(1919 illustration for E. A. Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” by Harry Clarke)
It’s all very interesting and beyond that it struck me that the metaphor of the maelstrom dovetailed nicely with my great grandmother’s life. I imagined her looking out into the distance and feeling a kinship with the vortex. Admiring its ability to wreak havoc, its elemental power, from the POV of her powerless life. A student of the sea air. The idea was that she would bring her estranged son to the seashore to look out toward the vortex, because that was the closest she could come to explaining why things happened the way they did. Caught in the maelstrom like any number of unlucky ships.
Yeah, it’s a lot to try to fit into a song. If you know this context, you can see that the lyrics are pretty straight forward.
So here we are, the song is now out in the world, in its little way. It can still change, or maybe it’s done. Maybe I’ll toss it out and start again. Maybe I’ll turn it into a spoken word piece. I learned a lot from writing it, it was a great creative exercise. It stretched my brain a little bit, made me go to places I don’t normally go with a song. Feels like a little stop on a larger journey. Traveling hopefully, as they say.
A few other factoids:
-The line “left a shame inside my heart” is a direct reference to the song ‘Mary’ by Dutchess And The Duke, a heartbreaking song about his own distant mother. I always assumed it was very autobiographical. It fit the feeling of this song.
-The piano was an attempt to go for a Frank Mills thing. I’ve always loved ‘Music Box Dancer’ and plan to use that as a musical reference point going forward. I really think his brand of easy listening piano is the wave of the future.
I loved this song before I knew any of that backstory, but now I love it even more. Thank you for being so open about all those details. I feel like with music there's always the fun of trying to "solve the mystery" of a song's lyrics, slowly piecing together over time the different meanings to a song. But at the same time this proves that sometimes knowing a lot of details about a song's background can make it even more enjoyable. Thank you for posting this. It's a beautiful song.
That's a lot of depth within various realms, and a whole lot of beautiful-- in my opinion, all conjoining nicely. I've just recently read about the whirlpool/vortex symbolism in Gnostic creation myths, which is interesting.