Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Ane Brun, Balloon Ranger Recordings 2023.
Norwegian/Swedish songstress Ane Brun returns with a delightful album of covers performed in a minimalist way with backing often only by her finger picked acoustic guitar.
Ane is an accomplished guitarist and her beautiful, intimate, versions of these carefully chosen songs offer different possibilities and increased understanding of songs that we think we know well.
She makes them her own, as all good interpreters of other people’s songs do.
In this way she is emulating her hero Nina Simone. An amazing exponent of this art form.
Nina Simone’s catalogue of songs, including classics Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and Strange Fruit, were written by other people but they are indelibly linked to her because her versions are the gold standard.
Ane has an interesting approach to the songs she’s chosen to cover.
She downloads the music charts from the internet and sets about learning them without firstly listening to the originals.
In this way she finds her own patterns, melodies and countermelodies, as well as recuring musical motifs.
She comments “that way, parts of the song tend to stick out in my mind. Sometimes it’s a riff that becomes the main bassline.
“Sometimes I totally strip it down and change it into a waltz. Anything to be able to sing it in a way that feels right for me.
“The whole concept of doing a cover that’s just like the original is not interesting to me.”
It’s an approach that I applaud because it allows the artist a creative input and often allows the listener to hear the song anew.
The songs that she covers are: Halo (Beyonce), All My Tears (Emmylou Harris), True Colours (Cindi Lauper), Make You Feel My Love (Bob Dylan), Big in Japan (Alphaville), By Your Side (Sade),I Want To Know What Love Is (Foreigner),Always On My Mind (Carson, Christopher, James), How To Disappear Completely (Radiohead), From Me To You (The Beatles), Feeling Good (Newley, Bricusse), Into My Arms (Nick Cave), and Blue Moon (Rogers and Hart)
Ane is a member of the Sami cultural group, the native people of the northern polar regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
This album is the first of four planned retrospective albums, each offering a different aspect of her career, that she plans on releasing this year.
I love her work and I will review the other albums when they are released.
