Leave Me Breathless

It might seem peculiar to suggest LEAVE ME BREATHLESS, Norwegian born, Stockholm based ANE BRUN’s seventh studio release, is her most personal yet, given that it consists of fourteen cover versions. After all, love and romance have never been themes the multiple Norwegian Grammy Award winning artist has shied away from, her songs frequently overflowing with candid, confessional insights. Nonetheless, BRUN confides, “the whole project started with me falling head over heels with someone new. I recorded cover songs for this person because, quite simply, I was overwhelmed by emotions. The love story was short, but, when it ended, I continued the project, since I felt there was a quality to the versions that I´d already finished. The original idea had been to interpret love songs, romantic songs – it didn’t have to be a specifically sad or happy love – but, in the end, there are a few songs with other themes as well. It became a concept of simplifying or interpreting emotional songs in my own way.” BRUN, of course, is no stranger to reinterpreting other people’s work. Earlier this year, at Sweden’s Polar Music Prize – alongside Olsson, Jennie Abrahamson and Josefin Runsteen – she even performed a dramatically orchestrated adaptation of Sting’s Why Should I Cry For You? in front of The Police’s frontman himself. Fans have long been familiar with her habit of slipping other people’s music into her live sets, and her own releases are sprinkled with cover versions, from Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours to Arcade Fire’s Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels), from Beyoncé’s Halo (recorded with regular collaborator Linnea Olsson) to Built To Spill’s I Would Hurt A Fly. “If I randomly pick a song to cover myself, and it´s not for a specific purpose,” BRUN says, “it´s usually because I love the melody. Maybe I´m reminded of a song while in a taxi where they have a radio station on with classic 80s and 90s hits, or it´s played at a restaurant and I´ve forgotten about it. Then I check if the lyrics are inspiring or not. If they’re terrible and completely impossible to relate to, or sexist, or ignorant, I won´t do the song. I have to feel that I can sing the words with my head high and some kind of authenticity.” Each time, though, she makes a song her own, and that’s a habit she sustains throughout the memorable LEAVE ME BREATHLESS. Whether tackling Sade or Radiohead, Shakespear’s Sister or Nick Cave, BRUN’s remarkable voice and delicate arrangements reveal new angles and hidden depths in songs with which one might be familiar – even overfamiliar – rendering them as good as new, and, sometimes, even better. Initially, it was BRUN’s short-lived romance that influenced the songs she picked. Lucinda Williams’ Right In Time, for instance, was chosen because it was “one of the person I was in love with’s favourite songs. The lyrics are so fantastic, and describe perfectly that state of mind of missing someone.” Her elegant, string-adorned Make You Feel My Love was selected for similar reasons: “I wanted to find a Dylan song to fit the state of mind I was in, and these lyrics were so fitting, with so much passion and complexity. And I just adore this melody so much!” Her extraordinarily tender rendition of Nick Cave’s Into My Arms was also one of what she refers to as these “home love song recordings”, though this time she was perhaps better prepared, having played it at a wedding years earlier. After the relationship came to an end, BRUN began to broaden her horizons, even if, as she admits, some tunes were, in a sense, chosen for her. She was, for example, asked to perform Always On My Mind for a charity TV gala on behalf of Children In Need. “I didn’t listen to any of the ‘original’ versions while planning my own interpretation,” she says. “I just Googled the lyrics and chords, and found a way to sing it from within myself. This is usually the way I start when I do a cover: I try to recreate the song with my own voice, and with how I feel or hear the song in my head.” Her immaculate rendition of Girl From The North Country, meanwhile, came about after she was invited to perform three of Bob Dylan’s songs at a tribute show at Stockholm’s National Theatre to celebrate his Nobel Prize for Literature. “It was the favourite song one of my closest friends, the photographer Tirilleia, who took the pictures for this album,” she notes. (She also performed Make You Feel My Love at the same event.) Tracks by Sade and Radiohead were chosen for a rather more sombre reason. “I was asked to play at the funeral for Crispin Bevington, one of the five people who were killed in the Stockholm terrorist attack of April 7, 2017,” BRUN explains. “Crispin and his wife, Annika, loved these two songs, and she specifically asked me to perform them at the ceremony.” Later that same day, BRUN visited Atlantis Studios with Klas-Henrik Hörngren, leader of jazz/electronica project Klabbes Bank. They recorded the songs as they had performed them earlier, stripping By Your Side right back to its bare bones, with just BRUN’s honeyed voice alongside Hörngren’s piano, and transforming How To Disappear Completely, its delicious melancholy heightened by BRUN’s vocal fragility, which in turn is framed by haunting ambient noises and the simplest of piano melodies, again performed by Hörngren. BRUN felt that the songs had turned out so well that she wanted to include them in honour of Bevington’s memory. Then there’s BRUN’s revelatory, a cappella version of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, the result of a request from an Oslo theatre. “I first thought it impossible,” she laughs. “How can I do this and feel it’s become my own? But then I came up with the idea of trying a vocal version, almost like a psalm, and the lyrics became much clearer to me this way.” A Tom Petty cover was also expressly solicited by another friend. “I hadn't listened much to him, except of course the hits,” BRUN acknowledges, “but I looked through his catalogue and found this beautiful love song from 2010’s Mojo.” The friend must surely have been overwhelmed upon hearing the graceful version offered here, its Robert Kirby-esque strings accentuating the song’s deeply reassuring sentiments. Mariah Carey’s Hero, in contrast, was first singled out for a performance at a popular power ballad night held by Stockholm’s Natten nightclub. “You can’t deny she´s one of the best singers we´ve heard,” BRUN asserts, but the greatest pleasure in this stripped back, surprisingly intimate version arises from the light she sheds on the song’s lyrics, in which she discovered a special personal resonance. “I thought it was one of those ‘boy meets girl, boy saves girl’ songs, but I realised it was more about self-help, a bit like Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love Of All. And this was in an interesting period of my life: I’d become very aware of a few things to make myself happier and stronger, and one was to not let circumstances decide my mood or my self-worth, and to try to step out of any sense of playing victim to life or what had happened to me. This particular song is about that, and even though it´s full of clichés, it’s true. I guess as I grow older I realise most clichés are real.” There were others that were born of a different kind of love, this time for the songs themselves. Maria McKee’s Show Me Heaven was one she felt an overwhelming urge to reinterpret, while Unchained Melody has always been something she’s adored singing. “Why keep that to myself?” she grins. Shakespears Sister’s Stay, meanwhile, is a remnant of her childhood passion for the band. “I thought they were so cool,” she enthuses, “and the singer was together with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, which made them even cooler. This song, and the video, made a big impression on me back then. I guess I’ve chosen these songs for the same reason as when I DJ, or when I curate a radio show: I want to remind people of songs they love, or introduce them to something that they’ll like. I want to try to revive the songs somehow, like a remake of an old movie.” Never was this truer than of the album’s opening track. “It´s just such a great song!” she raves of Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is, which she completely remoulds, her tremulous voice, accompanied only by guitar and a rare hint of keyboards, exposing the “heartache and pain” at the song’s core. “The honesty and suffering of the lyrics felt real to me. As a romantic, I can so relate to the essence of these lyrics!” The album was recorded in various locations, with the earliest songs taped alone at home with just a guitar and a single microphone. Once it became clear she was making an album, she brought in Anton Sundell (an up and coming producer/technician and long-time road crew member) and Johan Lindström (of regular collaborators and bandmates Tonbruket), to join forces with her in helping develop the record’s sound, and a further handful of musicians – including Martin Hederos (Tonbrucket, Soundtrack Of Our Lives) – to add to the arrangements. “We still kept it minimalist,” she points out, “limited to different keyboards, pianos and synths, guitars and strings, and no drums, except one lonely bass drum on Stay.” Some work was done at Bruket, Tonbruket’s studio, and at Gig Studio, where she recorded 2011’s It All Starts With One, and two more tracks, as well as strings, were recorded at Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios, where she made much of 2008’s Changing Of The Seasons. (The new album was mixed there too.) Further recordings took place at Riksmixningsverket, a studio in Stockholm owned by ABBA’s Benny Andersson. Intriguingly, it’s his old Yamaha GX-1 – the legendary “dream machine” heard, for instance, on the introduction to Does Your Mother Know – that appears on BRUN’s interpretation of Hero. Asked if she took any special pleasure in reclaiming what, to some, might be ‘guilty pleasures’, BRUN’s answer is straightforward. “I think that as I get older there are no longer guilty pleasures, just pleasurable songs. Anything that makes you feel something is great and not shameful, at least for me. But, with such songs, I wanted to see if I could make myself feel something deeper, something new and more substantial, by removing their famous big production, keeping just the skeleton of the song and finishing it off with a little touch of beauty and honesty. It’s like if you were sitting with me late at night and I picked up the guitar to sing a few famous songs. Just because I feel like it, and because it makes you happy.” It’s BRUN’s ability to find meaning and sentiment in her chosen songs that ensures LEAVE ME BREATHLESS is never less than exquisite. “There’s a long tradition through the history of popular music for artists to perform other people’s music,” she concludes.” So many great singers have done this: Sinatra, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Jeff Buckley, Billie Holliday, Elvis… I just feel that when a singer I love sings songs I love, it can be a gift, and I guess that´s what I believe this album can be. For the people who enjoy my voice to hear me sing songs they love… It´s as simple as that.”