Short stories

Jessica Popper calls Hello Saferide's Annika Norlin her 'favourite lyricist in the world'. After a week and a bit of getting to know More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide, I think she may have a point.

Musically, the second album by the self-proclaimed country singer reminds me repeatedly of Travis' The Invisible Band. Simple, inobstrusive arrangements, guitar sounds produced to sound big and warm (in a really good way) and sporadic inspired touches, especially the big number with strings at the end. The real difference, and why the not completely flattering comparison point is unimportant, is that everything else in her songs just there to support the words within.

I can even prove it pseudo-scientifically, since unusually there's actually a control sample to test against. Säkert! features all of the above but, since I don't speak Swedish, effectively no lyrical goodness. And as a result I've barely listened to the thing since getting it in a desire to seek out everything she'd recorded.

"I Wonder Who is Like This One" sets the stall, spinning the observation that 'people are like songs' into an incredibly sweet and witty story of how love doesn't quite live up to The Beach Boys. The same intelligence and emotional honesty shines through every song alongside an amazing observational eye for how and why people act how they do. "Overall"'s skewering of the sensibilities of over-anxious middle class parents and "Travelling With HS"' admission of inability to relate to other people are both perfect, among many others. There's not many single lines of amazing poetry to quote, but the combined effect is brilliant.

"Parenting Never Ends" catches that nagging feeling on becoming an adult that you aren't quite ready yet and are stringing everyone along - 'People give me work and money/They depend on me now/If they only knew how thin the ice they walk on is'. As it takes its wish to return to simpler times to an illogical and culminates in requesting to rerurn to her mother's uterus, it also sets up one of the a
smartest bits of sequencing in ages. As its reverie gets cut off by the opening chords of "Anna", one of the more straightforward songs, whose child never born ending is obvious from the start, is lent a big dose of added poignancy by the contrast.

The fact that so much of her work is grounded in the ordinary means there's a contrast to be made with the increasingly popular Kate Nash 'I use mouthwash/Sometimes I floss/I’ve got a family/And I drink cups of tea' school of lyrical banality. The idea somehow gaining in popularity that songs referencing everyday things for the sake of everyday things is inherently a good thing. The idea that millions of people out there who also drink cups of tea will be deeply touched by the fact that someone is just the same as them, and has said so, in song!

When Annika gets to specifics of the mundane, on "X Telling Me About the Loss of Something Dear, at Age 16", when the song's character is at work at a shoe shop after her regretted first experience of sex and she sings 'Do you want those in red, I said/Two fifty with laces, I said' it's to hammer home that she vividly remembers every moment of the unfairness of normal life having to carry on. It doesn't matter that I've never been in remotely the same situation because the ability to relate to eloquently expressed emotions completely transcends where those emotions come from. Sort of an obvious lesson but it would still be great if it was more widely realised.