Today I would like to share a song with you that I wrote for a painting some years ago.
The artwork portrays Jane Austen as she appears in the film Becoming Jane, and it was painted by Marie Fredborg Jungersen.

Writers have always held a certain fascination for me. And I have often wondered where all their stories come from - their knowledge, their understanding of people, their gift for pulling us into a new world, a new story, and hold us spellbound for a while. How they manage to portray fictional characters in such a way that they become living people to us, so real that we genuinely care about their (fictional) fate.

While contemplating this beautiful visualization of Jane Austen, I was reminded of an expression from a Salman Rushdie story: a “palace of memory.” In the story, a palace of memory is a person in whom countless memories and pieces of information are stored, without the person being consciously aware of it. They simply contain them — store them away — until the moment someone needs what they carry. I think writers are much the same. They carry within them a wealth of knowledge, memories, and stories. Some of it surely unconscious, yet ready to be drawn forth the moment they begin to write.

I hope you like the song. One day I may arrange it for a fuller ensemble, so it might suddenly appear in a completely different version.

Today I would like to revisit the film Cloud Atlas, which I spoke about two weeks ago. There is yet another intriguing theme in the film. It concerns the ways in which people govern one another through conventions, norms, and what society deems acceptable. A line I find particularly meaningful appears when a young man — a composer and central figure in the story — writes to his beloved, another young man.

“I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.”

Within the world of music, this sentence makes perfect sense, because many of the distinctions we instinctively make between good music and less good music — what we find beautiful or unpleasant — are shaped by what our ears have grown used to. With the musical conventions we were raised with. And with the context in which we listen: what we have just heard beforehand… and so on.

Naturally, the quotation must also be understood in a wider perspective, for it is conventions that determine what kinds of behaviour, ways of living, and so forth we are able to accept. People’s values — and thus their moral outlook — inevitably come into play. This is why norms and conventions are so difficult to discuss: they spring from deeply personal, subjective values each of us carries. And who, then, holds the “right” values? Should one cross boundaries at all? And if so, should one do it simply because one can? To provoke? What compels someone to break a convention? And what compels someone else to insist that a convention must remain intact?

Whatever the case, it is a valuable conversation to have. I believe it is good for us, now and then, to challenge our own beliefs and reflect on why we carry them. What is their origin? Have we adopted them from others without truly asking why? Or do we hold them merely because the community we move in happens to think the same way?

Returning to the music: As we’re discussing musical conventions, I should mention that last week I attended a theatre‑concert with Björk in Copenhagen. It was more of a full performance than a concert in the traditional sense, where all the musicians were actors in a carefully choreographed production, timed and shaped from beginning to end. All of it wrapped in the most stunning visuals. It was deeply captivating — an experience of totality, so beautiful, and something I will carry with me for a long time.

Björk has long been an artist to whom our ears must gradually adapt. She has crossed a great number of musical conventions and, in doing so, created something entirely new. Years ago, I could hardly bear listening to her. That remained the case until I wrote an academic paper about her at university, where I began to study her work closely and discovered the structure within the madness. It went from aversion to affection. Her music suddenly opened itself to me, and ever since, I’ve been utterly drawn into her world.

If you’re up for it, I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on Björk. What is it in her music that resonates with you — or what is it that you find impossible to endure?

Next time, I will share more music with you, including a bit of my own. Thank you for now.

In my last post, I reflected on the nature of choice — the profound, existential ones as well as the quiet, everyday decisions. All of it was inspired by themes from Cloud Atlas. If you missed it, you can still watch last week’s video.

I would like to begin with a song I wrote for a collaborative project with two visual artists. During the planning process, I visited one of them, and she showed me these painted figures. I have a linocut of them here. On my way home — it was a summer evening — a white mist lay across the landscape around Gravlev Lake, and the hills were wrapped in a magical glow. My mind was filled with the dancing figures; I could see them moving in the mist, carrying something otherworldly, eternal, transcendent. By the time I reached home, the song “Vaporizing in the Sun” had already begun to take shape.

I would like to play the song for you first, and talk about it afterwards.

I imagine the introduction as a framing of the entire scene — the magic, the twilight. For the verse, I wanted to shape bell‑like motifs: strict, simple, like the steady ticking of a clock, time moving on and on, even as the song itself speaks of eternity, where time no longer exists. But the bells move toward something; the melody was meant to grow, to rise, to find its culmination in a chorus.

That chorus was remarkably hard to find. In the end, it became a bossa. And why did it become that? I certainly hadn’t expected it when I began writing the song. But sometimes you allow a song to follow a certain direction, and once you step onto that path, that is where it settles. There is no turning back.

That is exactly how this song unfolded for me.

Looking back, I can’t help thinking there may be something symbolic in that particular choice. I wanted to express something about eternity — about what might exist beyond this life — yet how does one do that? It remains a matter of faith. So perhaps I wished, in a light and unforced way, to invite the listener to wander into that territory, to be curious, to ponder what lies beyond death, to consider the possibility that human beings may be eternal creatures. I believe that myself. But when speaking of such matters with others, one must move gently.

Still, I wonder how the song might have sounded had I taken another road, chosen another chorus. The bossa remains bound to time. But what if I had allowed the bells to rise into a world without time — a reflection of eternity?

We might still have arrived here, at the place where the original chorus comes to rest. And the opening theme returns, now in a lower key. Something familiar, a beginning, yet transformed in character. The next step moves in a completely different direction, and why is that? Last year, I watched a concert recording in which I performed this song, and I thought, no, that simply doesn’t work. It is far too bombastic; the melody doesn’t fit the accompaniment. Yet returning to the bells was impossible — not after the chorus. So what then? Perhaps an instrumental passage could have lived here — the deep rhythm supporting a few drifting harmonies. We could have continued weaving the dream of eternity. But where, then, would the words have found their place?

One of the central lines is this: “As if the sorrows of the world had vanished like waterdrops vaporizing in the sun.” That is why I have chosen to pause the song right there, to linger for a moment on the words. From there, it rises toward the chorus, though I wonder whether that ascent should take a different form. And whether the song can, or even should, return to its original chorus. What do you think? I feel ready to let the piece grow in a new direction. So let’s see whether a re‑recording might appear at some point.

That’s all for now. Next time, I’ll return to Cloud Atlas, exploring another theme — and no doubt a bit of music as well.