Siri Nilsen (born 1985 Oslo, Norway) is a Norwegian singer, songwriter, musician, and voice actress. She is the daughter of Norwegian folk singer Lillebjørn Nilsen and an American mother. She has released two albums: Vi som ser i mørket (We Who See in the Dark) in 2009, and Alle snakker sant (They All Speak the Truth) in November 2011. Music critics have expressed similar appraisal of her music, noting the sincerity of her songwriting and the clarity and range of her voice, characterized as "unique" and "beautiful". Nilsen often accompanies her singing with a ukulele, which she plays in a fingerpicking style. Nilsen made her debut as a stage artist in 2007 and has since performed in venues ranging from small clubs to larger concert halls and festivals. In December 2011, she was nominated for a Norwegian Grammy in the category of Best Female Artist for her latest album. Nilsen has had a career for several years as a voice actress, dubbing character roles into Norwegian for several feature films and television, mostly animation.I do understand Norwegian up to a point having lived there for a few years, but that was almost 30 years ago, so the words don't come through so easily. But Siri Nilsen is one of the more unusual Scandinavian singers who continues to sing in her native language rather than switching to English.
But it really doesn't matter since her voice is so good and the songs sound so great that anybody can enjoy the sheer beauty of them.
Alle Snakker SantEnglish translation "They all speak the truth".
Also from the same album.
Ta Meg Medav APPARATET. se i full HD! så blir det så fint.
A truly beautiful song, even if you understand not even one word of Norwegian.
Stille Vann
And just in case you really want to hear her sing in English, check out this Tracy Chapman cover.
Fast CarSiri Nilsen singing Tracy Chapman´s "Fast Car" at radiOrakelet
It’s strange trying to pen thoughts on music written in an unknown language. Unlike a great deal of her fellow Scandinavians – and there are many around in the British music consciousness at the moment – Siri Nilsen, Norwegian singer/songwriter on the cusp of bringing her second album Alle Snakker Sant to this country, has not bent to the will of the British record buying public in terms of our language preferences. Instead she sings everything (on this album at least) in her native Norwegian. Listening to ‘Stille Vann’, it is temping to scribble “reflective” and “mournful”, but it’s perfectly possible that Nilsen is actually singing about how luxurious the cornflakes she had that morning are: I have no idea. Of course, a quick click onto Google Translate and we can dispel the cornflakes theory, but an electronically calculated translation is never going to allow us to grasp the full extent of what she’s singing about, so there’s little point typing out whole songs, even if we could work out how the words are spelt. It’s somehow refreshing, though, not knowing what it is Nilsen is literally singing about. It’s possible, for one thing, to project onto the songs whatever you want to, if you’re inclined that way. But these songs can also be enjoyed simply as something beautiful on the ear – the intended meaning unimportant. The familiar inflections of the Nordic language, similar to Swedish, seem to fit perfectly with the shape of the songs too, in a way I’m not sure would work were she singing in the ubiquitous English. Whatever she is singing about, Nilsen’s voice is clear and pure, and mainly serves as the focus of the songs. Layers on layers of harmonies float around ‘Alle Snakker Sant’, the album’s title track, and ‘Hodet, Hjertet Eller Magen’, where her voice is at its darkest: menacing-sounding compared to the sweetness of the opening song ‘Brev’, where she’s bordering on saccharine. The voice is certainly a versatile one though. In the album’s darker moments, Nilsen sounds something like a rather more cheerful Regina Spektor, but with those language inflections which make it feel as if we might have fallen unwittingly into an Ingmar Bergman film where things will, at any second, descend into Scandinavian bizarreness. ..........continued
