a blog by Peter Leonard
Went out to a friend's birthday party last night at a bar owned by Sebastian Junger, he of The Perfect Storm fame. Before that I was at a singalong (allsång) at the Swedish Church - lots of Vreeswijk, Taube, Bellman, etc. Katja did an amazing solo from Kristina från Duvemala, the rock opera composed by ABBA members from the novels of Vilhelm Moberg.
It was pretty funny hearing Bellman sung in a church - we sang one of my favorites, Bort allt vad oro gör, the first stanza of which translates roughly into "Away with our troubles, away with our worries, let's choose our liquor from among all these bottles." I'll never forget singing this one on Tjörn, over the summer, alongside a girl from Hungary who had learned it in her Swedish class in Budapest. Separated by five thousand miles, we had each learned a part to an 18th-century song, and came together on a small island in the Baltic to put them into harmony.