Isn’t pop music such a fickle beast? It seems, one moment anyone could hold the world’s glimmer…only to be shuttled off when the next “objet d’affection” takes their place. It’s its built-in double-edge cut that gives pop music its ever-evolving staying power, fueled by its voracious appetite for whatever’s fresh to burn through. Sometimes, it’s only in hindsight that we can properly sift through all those diamonds hidden in the embers left in its afterglow. And right now, with 20/20 vision, my mind is in sight of one of them: Silje Nergaard’s Tell Me Where You’re Going.
Before Silje would briefly hit the English Top 40 in the ‘90s, before she transitioned into becoming one of Scandinavia’s leading jazz vocalists in the 2000’s, somewhere in the ‘70s, there was a different time when Silje could be found walking the forests and streets of her home in Hamar, Norway, singing to an audience of one: herself. It was that formative period, where she would scurry home – sometimes in sub-zero temperatures – eager to play whatever new song she’d fallen in love with, to remember whatever new lyric she sang over and over, on her dad’s Schimmel piano, that would help orient her to what would become her north star.
It was in Silje’s younger years, when she was precocious and curious, that an early love of ABBA and other mainstream pop music, shifted under the influence of the music her mother and sister would play. In her teens, this urge to sing more music that took risks took Silje to take jazz classes and fall for the music of Al Jarreau. Unaware of what genre was, it was his inventive singing which crossed and fused genres that would then introduce her to the music of other greats, greats like Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, that expressed a different kind of singing and songwriting.
By the time she graduated from high school, in the mid ‘80s, Silje quietly made her entry into the professional world of music by singing backup vocals on sessions for pop acts like Karoline Krüger or jazz heavies like Jaco Pastorius. Yet, somewhere, in the back of her mind, Silje knew that crafting her own music and putting her name on a record was what she wanted to pursue.
In the late ‘80s, Silja would say goodbye to Norway and make her move by moving to Oslo. Perhaps, working within Sweden’s music industry she’d get greater access to a much larger audience and possibly tap into a more international world of music-making. It was that youthful brashness and risk that would pay off. That short stint trying to find a voice for herself in Sweden would eventually lead her to explore America and London.
Before Silja was signed to any record label as a solo artist, she had created a cassette demo full of a few songs she was working on. One of them, one that would become “Tell Me Where You’re Going”, was speaking to her. Inspired by her love of Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan, something in its melody line seemed like something another inspiration, Pat Metheny, would have written. At that moment, she had a vision of one day Pat playing on the track.
What seemed like a pipe dream then, as fortune would have it, would become reality. After attending a Metheny concert in New York, Silje handed him her demo and told him he’d like for him to play on that track. Metheny politely tried to decline. Time would pass. Pat would go on, politely listen to it and fall in love with the track. When Silje would meet him again in another concert, he’d agree to play on it once she got signed.
It would be Hollywood composer and producer, Richard Niles, who would on the strength of that demo get Silje signed to Scandinavian heavy, Sonet Records based in Denmark, a label that granted her access to the English-speaking market. Richard had already worked on forward-thinking pop records by new “sophisti-pop” groups like Workshy, Swing Out Sister, and totemic works like Grace Jones’s Slave To The Rhythm. In the work of Silje, he heard someone could navigate the heady waters of jazz, pop, and urban soul music, and fuse them to some deep musicality.
What’s really special about Silje’s 1990 debut, Tell Me Where You’re Going, is how it seems to be a product of her story. Recorded in London, Oslo, and Rio De Janeiro, every bit of the then contemporary pop scene of her day makes an appearance in some way in Silje’s music. Listening back, it’s no wonder her first single would make its ascend on various European adult contemporary and pop charts, and put her name under the spotlight (however brief that may have been).
Tell Me Where You’re Going’s titular track makes the perfect case for where Silje’s musical heart lay. In it’s single version, the one that opens the album, a fascinating country-lilting turn presents her Americana pop-via-London ideas, one similar to Paddy McAloon’s guiding light, where the open-road spirit of American music can imbibe an open-hearted, aspirational feeling open to anyone. On the “Rio” version, recorded in Pat Metheny’s Rio De Janeiro, Som Livre studio, that one finds later on the record, you hear Pat Metheny’s contributions turn this distant vision of America into a looser, dreamier, Americana, one inspired by the influence found outside, with its ties to the latin hemisphere and by the jazz birthed in America. It’s no wonder Silje would cite Joni’s Hejira as one of her north stars then; you hear its mapping plainly here.
Wherever Silje seemed to go with her music, it seemed that Richard aspired to compliment her vision with music that purposely filled the canvas or left it breathing to Silje’s wonderful phrasing. Songs like “Fall” benefit from the gentle nouveau swing that was a hair’s length away from the stylings of UK Soul and New Jack Swing. And Tell Me Where You’re Going’s final single, “For Tomorrow”, made it perfectly slot into that graceful tone explored by groups like Sade and singers like Anita Baker.
Of course, the songs I go back to are those like, “Roundabout”. Universal personal songs that take a perfect simple melody and lays on it some truly impressive visual lyricism, matching it with gorgeous phrasing that sticks in your craw. Like Joni, circa Court And The Spark or her criminally underrated ‘80s, Dog Eat Dog era, it’s of this special musical mysticism that can only be conjured by a young-ish woman trying to explain: “going through some things”. Rickie Lee Jones captured some of this magic on her Flying Cowboys and Emmylou would eventually land on it, on her, Wrecking Ball, but Silje (much like the masterful Tracy Chapman) was finding how to rejigger the folk tradition with all these powerful tools present in the pop idiom.
Songs like “Move Along, Ruby” are dramatic tour de forces of impressive balladry, while others like “The Middle Of Love” are catchy middle-of-the-open road songs that have gorgeous touches…on close inspection. What’s there to say of songs like “The Meter’s Running”, a song that finds itself in the hyper-literate pop world favored by the likes of Scritti Politti and (once again) Prefab Sprout. Here, its sprite-jump quality makes it perfect for a radio station that needs more oxygen like it to exist. Ditto for songs like “Faces” matching their accessible face in multi-layered meanings – for all those still in love with lovingly-crafted pop music.
Extended cuts of this album, released in Japan, end on two magical songs, “Marlena” and “Waltz for You” that add even more tonal colors to the record that go elsewhere pointed in other directions Silje would explore. One more album, Silje, would follow, adding just an equal amount charming presence to her music (and well worth your time, too), but as fellow Norwegian pop star, Morten Harket of a-ha (who’d perform a smashing duet with her, “We’ll Be Friends Tomorrow”) can attest to…English-speaking audiences can be fickle and all sorts of good pop music gets played to smaller and smaller audiences, even if it burns just as brightly, until one day, that wind blows no more and they move on, as did she.
However, looking back, as with all diamonds in the rough, something in them lasts forever, something we can still hear and feel in presence of (if one shines a light on them).
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