About voices then. There are singers you admire and who impress you by their sheer power and/or range, and/or technique – the vibrato, that awesome wailing…but whom you never quite manage to embrace because they lack something else, something less easy to define, if it’s not simply enough the feeling I’m fumbling for, it’s as if they know better than most how to do it but never really grasped the why, so to speak (Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Carola, Tommy Körberg, although these examples are only generally valid and are of course based entirely on my own personal listening; the listener not being altogether unimportant in the field of song and music, after all it’s in hers or his ears and head it’s all happening, or not happening if you will…)

Anyway, on the other side we find those singers most voice coaches would regard hopeless, or “storytellers” rather than singers, but who according to their fans are the really stylish ones, because they sing with so much more than diaphragm and lungs and vocal chords, artists that in an instant can lose themselves in the words and almost mystically make them live. No matter where they went the night before they always instinctively know why they’re singing and therefore can’t ever fail (Dylan, Björk, Lundell, Hellström; well yes I know they too stumble every now and then but allow me some generalization, footnotes are so dull).

Then a few rare voices just are all nice and natural, voices to somehow lean back and heal in, more about hunches and identification than power or impression; it’s not as if you know them – you are idiotically sure that you do.

There it is, I believe I’ve managed to nail some small part of the fascination I’ve felt ever since I first heard Miss Allena a few years back. We’ve never met but she’s my best friend and my sister. Welcome to the family!

Here are two of my favourites, one in that inimitable missallenish swenglish, and one with lyrics by Nobel Prize winner Pärre Lagerkvist, who in my mind finds his final interpreter here. And don’t forget now to enjoy those ingenious minimalistic arrangements as well!

Var är den djupa glädje som jag söker?
By the Water

Visit Miss Allena and listen some more:

Miss Allena on Myspace

“Nu vaggas tång av gammal dyning” (“Now seaweed is rocked by old swell”, or something to that effect)… Equality from Linköping is generally curious and boundless as they say, with a catalogue playing rather furiously with the “genres” but right here&now I`m really just hungup on this little one. Perfect swedish kind of jazzy ballad like a brittler and more intimate and also funkier Staffan Percy…I thought at first, before realizing that despite of all the well administered and managed heritage he’s of course completely his own. Summer contemplation de luxe! “Rain rain washing the salt from my wound…”

Kobben

Equality on Myspace

Because of the southern dialect, and maybe to some extent the voice too, he often brings the great late rocker/protest singer Björn Afzelius to mind but is really something quite different, one of the closer voices on the web actually, a kind of quiet flasher without grand airs nor poses but with a tone apparently so sincere and honest it makes it’s way straight through the waxplugs, he’s about words poking among themselves looking for one or the other context or connection, and words finding quite a lot. He’s the definition of nice in my dictionary, and behold then that we didn’t even ever meet.

These songs are from the new Peter Estberg album “Då faller bitarna isär” (“Then the pieces fall apart”):

Då faller bitarna isär
Alltid på dig
Natten är hos mig snart
Var finns ni nu
En stilla förhoppning

You can get the whole album, as well as the albums “En indian i Småland” (“An indian in Småland” 2007) and “Eftertankens kranka blekhet” (“The sickly paleness of second thoughts”, or something like that… 2007) from peterestberg.com