INTERVIEW: Sver bring Scandinavian folk to American audiences
Photo: Sver are a Scandinavian folk band who are expanding into the United States. Photo courtesy of Ingval Skeie Ljones / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Sver, the Scandinavian folk band from Norway and Sweden, recently kicked off a tour of the United States, where they will bring their unique sound across the country to fans looking for something a little bit different in their musical preferences.
Sver features Olav Luksengård Mjelva on fiddle and harbinger fiddle, Leif Ingvar Ranøien on accordion, Anders Hall on fiddle, Adam Johanss on guitar, and Jens Linell on drums and percussion. Mjelva and Ranøien are from Norway, and the other three members are from Sweden. For this special U.S. tour, the band will be a quartet, but they will be joined by American singer Moira Smiley on select dates in the Northeast.
For Linell, the trip to the United States has been one of extremes: Before the tour started, he was able to relax with some friends, and once the tour began, he has been all energy all the time.
“I’ve been here almost one week and a half, meeting up with friends and hiking and having a week of vacation and get to be relaxed before we go on tour,” he said while taking a break from the sun of Big Sur, California.
Sver’s upcoming tour takes them to the Sisters Folk Festival in Sisters, Oregon (Sept. 6-8); Traditions Café in Olympia, Washington (Sept. 9); Wild Buffalo in Bellingham, Washington (Sept. 10); Triple Door in Seattle (Sept. 11); and gigs in Canada, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania and Connecticut for the remainder of the month.
“We’ve been playing together as a quintet for more than 10 years, so we’re playing very, very tight together,” Linell said. “We go on stage, and we explode basically. That’s the best energy, what we enjoy the most, when we can go on stage and enjoy ourselves with the music.”
Linell has been playing since he was 7 or 8 years old, thanks to the influence of his father, who was a music teacher. He had his pick of any instrument when he was a child growing up in Sweden, and he quickly gravitated to the drum kit. He loved that there were no chords, and he could simply pound out the beats.
“You just hit things,” he said with a laugh.
As he matured musically, Linell became interested in Norwegian folk music. He had already been exposed to Swedish folk, but now he wanted to explore all that Scandinavia had to offer.
In 2002, Mjelva and Ranøien formed a folk band in Norway (they were childhood friends from the same village), and eventually the other members joined up. Linell’s invitation came when the guys were looking for a drummer for a gig. They had so much fun that he stuck around.
“We’re definitely well rooted in that kind of scene [of Scandinavian folk],” he said. “We are quite dynamic. We can use a lot of energy. The drums and the guitar gives us a sound more like folk rock.”
A press release announcing Sver’s tour offers a bit of the dichotomous nature of the band: Their music “can make you get up and dance one moment and then, with casual virtuosity, evoke images of open spaces and delicate beauty the next.”
That unique sound is evident on their recording efforts over the years, including their most recent album, 2018’s Reverie. The band members worked for two years on that project, and right now they are deep into work on their next album.
Interestingly, the band members don’t live in the same city or town, so when the muse hits, they need to shack up in someone’s house for a week.
“We stay there for three, four, five days, and we rehearse all day, make food together and basically live together for a couple of days,” Linell said. “And that’s how we’ve always been doing stuff — very intense rehearsing. The way we rehearse or make these arrangements, it’s a little bit like damming. We learn the melody really, really well, and then we build upon that. What can bring the melody out? How can we make it more powerful and exciting and intricate?”
Linell believes Reverie is evidence of the band’s fine-tuning. He likes the early albums, such as Fruen and their self-titled debut, but there’s a better handling of their unique contributions on the most recent effort.
“We’re very much better now in the studio, I think, then we were at the start,” he said. “We were pretty good in the start, too, but now we can get a lot of the energy into a recording. … When we recorded [Reverie], everybody was playing in the same room. There’s not many things added afterward — some songs, of course, but most of them not. We recorded in a lot of different studios, some in the States and all over Scandinavia.”
Now they are prepared to take their songs to a global audience, especially in the United States. This move toward expansion is both natural for the burgeoning band and also one of necessity.
“We have to do that because the scene is not big enough back in Scandinavia,” Linell admitted. “You have to reach out and play abroad basically. We’ve been doing pretty well here in the U.S. We want to come back and play more, of course. We really like it here. The scene is pretty small back home. You can’t really live on only that. You have to branch out.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Sver is currently touring the United States. Click here for more information and tickets.
