February 2nd: Rear Window

I've been working like a dawg this week, making movies, speaking pompously about myself, playing them new songs and posing that new style in my swell new suits. Work and work, frau Bloom. It's all fun when you're as comfy as me with the piece of plastic you are pushing. Not to be self-praising, but this disc means so much to me that preaching its gospel is like telling a fairytale in the form of an article. And how thrilled am I if people wanna hear that gossip, ehm, sorry: gospel?

Very.

So this last week has been all Norway. I stayed in Oslo and recorded the video for Two Way Monologue on Wednesday. Magnus Martens (who also made No One's Gonna Come and Sleep On Needles look good on film) had a great idea. I liked it better than a lot of other ideas, because it was funny and unpretentious. The filming was crazy, as the footage we will be sharing on this site will prove. I play three parts. It all happens in a 60s pop club where two singers are battling 8 Mile-style for the Best Entertainer title. I play slick-popular-Sondre and natural-unknown-Sondre. The third persona you’ll have to wait to discover when you see the flick.

On the set were loads of great and - may I add - good looking gals acting as dancers and audiences at the club. There were boys there as well, most notably, my stand-in, Anders, who even I could see resembled myself to the dot. Only he was a real pleasant guy. Ha. Of course we got behind schedule and things got out of hand, but I think the video will turn out jolly, ambitious and stylish once it's done in a couple of weeks.

Playing songs from Two Way Monologue for the Norwegian press (a hundred of them!) was a treat. I did some of the songs I am most comfortable with doing solo (It’s Our Job, Days That Are Over, On The Tower, It’s Over, Two Way Monologue and Maybe You’re Gone) and the hard to please audience seemed, ehm, pleased. Pleasing.

Meanwhile, my head is full of images from “North By Northwest”, one of the many masterpieces in film by the great Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve been seeing a lot of his stuff this last year. Over and over again. I saw “Rear Window” a few months ago. Now, what I want to say may sound awkward because I would not normally say this kind of thing, for fear of sounding like a piece of cheese. But let loose: Rear Window must be the sexiest film I ever saw. That is, until I saw North By Northwest, which Hitchcock made half a decade later.

In my mind the word “sexy” has been given a bad name through extensive use by the wrong people, under terribly un-sexy circumstances. How often have I not seen a piece of music described on paper as sexy, only to find the turn-on was a total turn-off? And from reading the writing, I should have gotten the picture immediately.

Not so with these films. And they’re quite funny as well. Packed with wit and wonder. And Rear Window has got Grace Kelly playing James Stewart’s gal. Although reluctant to answer her invitations at first, come the end of the mystery, he gives in to her. The whole film is viewed through the perspective of one man in a wheelchair in his apartment, looking over a backyard, spying on a bunch of his across-the-yard neighbours. And I haven’t even told you about the suspense. Or Kim Novak in “Vertigo.

These are quite hectic days, and new plans pop up every hour. Tours are being planned, and I am happy to see that I will be visiting a lot of European countries for promotion this month already. I’ve been rehearsing with The Faces Down and we are swinging ready to play. It’s so much fun to just play the songs relying only on our basic instruments, having ditched a lot of the colours and kept the shape. Our first set is performed in Bergen at Kvarteret, February 12th. Just half an hour, playing for Radio P3 (who broadcast it directly), right after dr. Julian Berntzen. The two of us might even do a swinging suite together.

Playing with the boys in the band again is such a privilege. They are so essential to how the new record turned out, and they have kept the songs alive while I’ve been away doing my solo stand up show across North America.

This year, hopefully everybody will get a share.

Happy times,
SL