December 2011
Castellano
A holiday treat for you and yours - a free download of my version of George Michael's "Praying for Time". Enjoy and Happy Holidays! Click here to download.
Scenes from an Icelandic Novel, Amelia Ray's eighth album - coming soon!
Listen to a demo version of "Orderville," the seventh song on Scenes from an Icelandic Novel. Click here to read the story behind the song and the lyrics.
1. Jon Evens the Score
2. The Thing
3. Sweet Release
4. Ordinary Crime
5. For the Birds
6. Real Estate
7. Orderville
8. Eleven Hours
9. Black Cliffs Notes
In the Winter of 2008 I traded my galoshes for snow boots, my overcoat for a ski jacket, and the hustle and bustle of the holiday season in Madrid for the serene solitude of the Fljotsdalur valley in East Iceland. I was preparing to spend a month at an artists' residency in Skriðuklaustur, a farmhouse-turned-museum, which is dedicated to the work of the famous Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson.
I had been admitted on a proposal to compose a four- or five-song EP about the Gunnarsson novel, Ships in the Sky - a somewhat autobiographical re-creation of the author's childhood. The book was 387 pages long, and I spent the first week of isolation hold up inside, safe from the wind and snow, devouring the novel, and taking occasional notes on recurring themes and possible song ideas. I spent the second week glancing at my notes and conducting concentrated re-reads on sections of the book I thought could provide the most musical inspiration. Meanwhile, outside, the wind continued to howl, the snow continued to fall, and every 16 hours, or so, something resembling daylight would alert me to the fact that the planet had completed yet another rotation around its axis.
Work wasn't going well.
To distract myself I picked up another, shorter (220 pages), Gunnarsson novel I found in the farmhouse. The Black Cliffs is a story about a crime of passion based on the true story of the farm Sjoundá, "where, in the year 1802, one of the most sensational murders in Icelandic history was perpetrated."¹ Bjarni and his neighbour Jon began quarreling, and before long, Bjarni had killed Jon, and with the assistance of his lover, Steinun (Jon's wife), killed his own wife, too. It was a quick read, and I finished it in one day.
Perhaps I was drawn to the story because it was much more scandalous than an innocent yarn about a childhood boy; perhaps the bleak Icelandic winter made me more receptive to a story of crime; or maybe it was because the day before I'd left for Iceland, my bike had been stolen from outside a stationery store, and my house had been broken into, and my computer stolen. Whatever the case, I awoke the following morning with the music for "Jon Evens the Score" in my head.
I spent my remaining time at the farmhouse sketching the ideas for the other eight songs on this album, the following 14 months finding proper lyrical and musical environments for the characters, and in April 2010 was relieved to join Mari-José Estivariz (bass) and Jake Wood (drums) in Paco Loco's (Nacho Vegas, Tim Armstrong) studio to finally commit those ideas to tape. I'm quite pleased with the result and hope Scenes from an Icelandic Novel (which also features Icelandic poet Berglind Gunnarsdóttir) will give you an entertaining, provocative and melodic résumé of Gunnarsson's, The Black Cliffs.
Thanks so much for your support, and enjoy the music,
Amelia Ray