My core goal in making music is to reflect emotions and to capture those short intensive moments when life seems to be compressing and stopping it’s flow. Those moments can change lives and leave ever-burning marks of joy and significance, but also at their worst, desperation and fear.
Life’s much more than an endless chain of days and nights, words, people and events, dreams, all leaving us with a sense of something, sometimes even a sense of nothingness. It has a unique ability to almost go through us, come painfully close, and when it does, that’s when I need to write a song.
These intensive moments lie in the darkness and light of Garden of Love. This album waited for it’s turn for quite a while. I’d been wanting to write an album in english for years, but the time just never seemed to be right, until september 2008.
I had just started a long vacation and had no plans of doing anything but live some quiet life. Playing my piano almost everyday, I eventually wrote a song (Garden of Love), and as I had written two more, I realized I was composing my next album.
I’ve spent half of my adolescent years abroad because of my fathers work, so english comes naturally to me. But as I wrote this music, something else appeared from the darkness. another life. Feelings and ”flashes” I had deliberately forgotten, suppressed and buried.
When I was a child and we returned to Finland from our journeys, all I wanted was to belong and be apart of the life here. I never really shared my experiences and after a while they became another world. A world full of intense emotion and longing, excitement and fantasy, at the same time real and unreal. For years I have heard echoes from this life, these places, voices of the Anna I once was, never really reaching them. As I was writing these songs, they started coming closer, and I realized how much I had lost along the way, always looking at the negative side of being a suitcase child. All the incredible richness was suddenly laying under the trees of Garden of Love, and I could, for the first time in my life, touch it, pick it, enjoy it. The fruits of true inspiration and passion for music!
Maybe the most important thing I found walking through Garden of Love, was liberty. I got rid of all restrictions. Control kills inspiration, destroys emotion and cuts the thin thread between the two worlds an artist has to equally keep alive. The reality and imagination. Changing language actually helped me in this and I became as brave as I really am, writing stories that were different from my previous ones. Despite the fact I was mostly writing about other people, I felt strongly ”inside” everything I was doing. Maybe it’s because I forgot myself, and just concentrated in making the words and music come alive.
As a strong and emotional person, finnish language suites me very well, because it has a certain edge and aggressiveness to it. If you say something harsh and unpleasant in finnish, it almost doubles the effect, and if you are being soft, you’re never too sweet. It’s perfect! English on the other hand has a soothing property, it’s flexible and round, easy to sing. It caresses music rather than commands it. I never felt unfaithful to my first love, finnish language, while making these songs.
The fact that I’m a true finn is present in everything I do, but the years we spent traveling aren’t at all less important. Now these two worlds deep within me finally meet in this music, becoming a language of it’s own.
Sincerely, Anna
