“I honestly didn’t think that one would be in the top twelve,” says Brun. “Sometimes it’s the cheapest recordings, the ones I did on the fly, that are the ones that end up being the most successful, while others that have strings and a big production are like album tracks.”Īnother living room recording here is Brun’s sunny version of The Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’, which first appeared on Rarities. “That’s the irony of the music business,” she says. Of the songs on Portrayals, Brun’s version of ‘All My Tears’ was a test recording for an Emmylou Harris tribute show in Gothenburg, and ‘Feeling Good’ was something she made just for fun at home, sitting on her sofa. It’s strange, too, how often Brun’s rough sketches have ended up being among her most popular covers. Like, suddenly a song is #1 in Kazakhstan and we can only wonder why.” “Maybe because it’s so different from the original, almost a whole other song completely. “It’s funny how that song continues to spread,” she says.
Big in japan ane brun tv#
Originally recorded for a Swedish reality TV show of the same name, ‘Big in Japan’ became Brun’s signature cover for many years and is still finding new ears 15 years later. “When it starts you think it’s a typical romantic wedding between a man and a woman, but then it’s revealed that it’s actually two gay priests getting married, and the woman is the one marrying them.” ‘True Colors’ was a request for a global campaign for Swedish fashion retailer Björn Borg, who wanted an Eva Cassidy-style song for their wedding themed advert. Brun’s enduring versions of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors’ and Alphaville’s ‘Big in Japan’, first released as bonus tracks to her 2008 album Changing of the Seasons, continue to have legs way beyond what Brun could have imagined when asked to record them.
Big in japan ane brun series#
In total, the twelve previously released songs on Portrayals have been streamed over 250 million times, boosted by appearances on film soundtracks, adverts, and landmark TV series such as ‘Normal People’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’. “We might have forgotten about it completely if it wasn’t for putting together the Rarities collection in 2013.” “It was something that Linnea Olsson and I did for fun, in just a couple of takes,” she recalls. Whether daring to reinvent a borderline untouchable hit like Beyoncé’s ‘Halo’ or digging for gold beneath the bluster of an ‘80s power ballad like Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’, Brun dives in undaunted, revealing each song in a new and intimate light.Īs her most streamed cover, with almost 65 million listens on Spotify alone, it’s funny to think that Brun’s version of ‘Halo’ was sitting around on a hard drive, overlooked, for years. It’s certainly a bold move to take on some of the songs that have found their way onto Portrayals. I’m so much braver and more playful than I used to be.” “But somehow I came to a point where I let go of a lot of shit. “I had so many conflicting feelings about my career and fame and what it meant to be an artist,” she says. At least for serious singer-songwriters, and Brun took her music very seriously at the time. A way of honing one’s craft, at first through mimicking and then gently reshaping. At best they were a phase to grow out of. I paint what I feel and move into it that way.”īrun’s music came of age at a time when cover versions didn’t have the same cultural cache that they do now.
“I don’t paint what I see in front of me. When it comes to covers, Brun sees some similarities with painting.
The title Portrayals implies a more holistic process of artistic representation, as opposed to portraits, which are often only head-and-shoulders deep. Anything to be able to sing it in a way that I feel is right for me.” Sometimes I totally strip it down and change it into a waltz. “Sometimes it’s a riff that becomes the main bassline.
“That way, parts of the song tend to stick out my mind,” she says. Rather than let the original lead her, she’ll find the chords and lyrics online and feel her way into the music without listening back. Inspired by artists like Cat Power and especially Nina Simone, who had an almost supernatural ability to wear any song as if it was her own, Brun fashions her covers at first through intuition. “The whole concept of doing a cover that’s just like the original is not interesting to me.” “It’s still a creative process, to record a version of someone else’s song,” she says. Just as her own songwriting has grown more ambitious, so has her approach to taking on a cover. Over the past two decades, Brun has quietly established herself as one of the great northern interpreters of song.
Conceived as a way of honouring her most loved versions of other people’s songs, Portrayals is a new compilation from Norwegian–Swedish singer-songwriter Ane Brun featuring thirteen classic covers, each remade in her own distinctive emotional language.
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