'- The best thing about the songwriting profession is the experience of creating something unique. Something that didn't exist before you came up with it,' says Finn Kalvik in this blog post about songwriting, written especially for TONO-Magasinet.
/ 27/06/2014 / codex– The best thing about the songwriting profession is the experience of creating something unique. Something that didn't exist before you came up with it, says Finn Kalvik in this blog post about songwriting, written especially for TONO-Magasinet.
Finn Kalvik has long been a part of the primary school curriculum. The 67-year-old's songs have been important contributions to Norwegian pop music and singing since his debut single "Finne meg sjæl" in 1969. He has more than 250 songs registered with TONO, and he has released 28 albums that have sold around a million times. He has written songs alone, he has rewritten English songs into Norwegian, and he has worked with many other talented creators, including Inger Hagerup and Benny Andersson. This summer he is writing again with Øystein Sunde, who also comes from the same environment: the Dolphin singing club at Club 7 in the 1970s, where Lillebjørn Nilsen, Ole Paus, Lars Klevstrand, Kari Svendsen and many other masters of Norwegian singing also frequented. When we asked Kalvik for an interview about songwriting, he suggested that he could write a blog post about the topic instead. We thought that sounded like a "scoop". So we did it that way. Here it is – in Finn's own words.
I still remember the very first song I wrote. I only knew two frets on the guitar and none of the songs I liked on Radio Lux were so simple that they could be performed with two chords, so I was “forced” to write one myself, to have something to sing. It was called; “I´m in love”. And it alternated between D major and A major. I was 16 years old.
I've always had a great need for expression. You can't become a writer or songwriter if you don't have anything to say. You also have to be a little daring, otherwise it's hard to get anywhere.
I never set out to be a songwriter. It was just something I did in between all the Peter, Paul & Mary, Donovan and Dylan and Bert Jansch shows. I was just looking to learn as much as possible, and to get applause and excitement. If I ever had any ambition, it would have been to become a guitarist as good as Bert Jansch and Paul Simon.
But with all the practice and striving to learn other people's songs, sounds and chord combinations that were my own kept appearing, and which stuck in my consciousness. There were little melodies and riffs that I wrote English, banal lyrics to over time. I remember writing a super sad song with the "optimistic" title "After the A-bomb". Not so strange perhaps - when I think back to the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. We who were teenagers at the time lived in the middle of the anxious political situation.
I became a bluesman on my own. "Cocaine blues" was my signature song. I often tackled songs that were about people who were struggling in their lives. And who perhaps also lived on the dark side of life.
(Text continues below the image)
But it was only when I started going to Dolphins Viseklubb and heard young people singing in Norwegian there that I dared to start singing in Norwegian myself. I had written a song that I was a little embarrassed about, because it was in a really broad eastern dialect. It was "Finne meg sjæl". I performed it for the first time at Dolphins Viseklubb in Pilestredet in Oslo. It was while I was going there that my songwriting began to flourish.
At the "private" I lived almost like a mole in a hole in the ground in Grorud. Dolphins became a liberating and long-awaited "breathing hole". There I bonded with like-minded music-loving teenagers and made friends for life. Some wrote their own songs in English, others sang Taube and Bellmann in Swedish, while Øystein (Sunde) performed his virtuoso and surreal Lamberseter madness at breakneck speed, wearing a checkered shirt with his guitar strapped over his shoulder.
Lillebjørn had not yet taken the step into the world of solo artists, but stood straight and eloquent and fronted "The Young Norwegians" with banjo, Hardanger fiddle and with his steel-stringed Levin. I, however, sat on a chair with the guitar in my lap while I talked and sang down to the floor. Lillebjørn told me many years later that he thought "Finne meg sjæl" was so well put together. That it could be compared to driving a nail into the wall with one blow of a hammer. Thanks for the compliment, Mr. Nilsen.
It was only after "Finne meg sjæl" became a success that I started to take songwriting seriously. The main reason was that I glimpsed a "long playing" record far out in the distance. "Finne meg sjæl" entered the top 10 on VG's singles list in the summer of 1969. I had written some instrumentals and also had a couple of songs with my own Norwegian lyrics finished. What turned everything upside down was Ralph McTell's Streets of London. I heard him perform it on Vise7 (Club7) in 1970. I was completely captivated. When I walked home I remember thinking that it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard!
Getting down to it and translating it into Norwegian was a turning point for me. The rewriting itself wasn't that difficult, but finding the rhythm in the Norwegian language was very tricky, so to speak.
In the last verse I had painted myself in a corner with the phrase “there stands a man waiting”…. There is almost nothing that rhymes with “waiting”. I took a rough jingle and made up my own rhyme straight from my imagination; “war sailors’ center”. It was only many years later that I found out that there was a place called… “war sailors’ center”. I was completely speechless. I almost felt like I had been “clairvoyant”
This is kind of the core of being a songwriter. You have to have intuition, and then you have to dare to take risks, and last but not least: You always have to listen to your gut feeling. "En tur rundt i byen" became one of the "dragons" on my first album "Tusenfryd og grå hverdag".
I have always had a much easier time creating good melodies than writing lyrics, I think now. I went to the language course at Sofienberg Gymnasium, and had "a dozen" hours of Norwegian lessons a week. Both Inger Hagerup and Andrè Bjerke were on the curriculum. I loved sitting with their brilliant rhythmic lyrics in front of me and improvising melodies in my free time at home in Grorud. "To tunger" by Inger Hagerup and "Måken" by Andrè Bjerke are by far the best I have managed to compose as a composer from this period. Both were included on the debut album "Tusenfryd og grå hverdag".
After the "Tusenfryd" LP became a bestseller, I was suddenly under pressure from my record company to come up with a follow-up. I was deep into Bert Jansch and the realm of folk music at the time. I was also on tour with Lillebjørn and Øystein, so I had to write songs in hotels and hospices all over Norway. Polygram also wanted to do a live album with all three of us together, but it never came to fruition. Instead, both Øystein and Lillebjørn play various instruments on my second LP, "Finn." At this point, I had really started to feel like a professional songwriter.
I know that there are many songwriters who listen to other people's music and get ideas for their own songs that way. Only a few times during all these years have I used a chord progression I liked from a song I heard on record or on the radio, and written my own melody on the same "chords". On the other hand, I have been inspired to write my own lyrics based on other people's English lyrics.
Since I write in Norwegian, it is entirely possible to use an English songwriter's idea and write a Norwegian song based on the same idea with your own words and rhymes. But I see it as only a last resort. That is if I am completely out of ideas and don't know what the song should be about.
"The hardest thing is not writing a song, but finding an original idea for its content."
Unfortunately, after 40-50 songs you often reach a point where you start repeating yourself. All songwriters who have been around for a long time hit this wall. Sooner or later… Some cope with it and move on, while many stop writing for years because of this stagnation.
When I worked with Benny Andersson, I was completely overtaken by hooklines for a while. Benny has always had a Midas touch as a songwriter because of his amazing intuition and talent. He has a feeling for what is good and what is bad, and what should be included on a record and what should be left out.
You could say that he “knows what sells and what doesn’t,” even though he stubbornly denies it. I think it’s perfectly okay that he does, because it shows his humility towards what is his job, namely writing songs. “Do you think this will be a hit?” I would ask him every now and then after a good recording in the studio. He always answered the same way: “You never know,” he said, with a sly smile on his face.
The best thing about songwriting is the experience of creating something unique. Something that didn't exist before you came up with it and wrote it down. When you're in the middle of the creative process, time and space cease. It's like a kind of "trance". Everything around you disappears, sounds and negative thoughts disappear. And you're 100% in the present. I would never have been without that feeling.
It would have been fun to drop by this planet in a couple hundred years and hear what songs have survived from the period when I and a million other songwriters delivered songs to the population. Back when we worked here and received royalties from amazing companies like TONO and STIM and ASCAP. In a way, it's also a bit sad not to know what was handed down to future generations, but oh well. I had a blast, and was very happy with my career choice.
