Siv Jakobsen is continuing her march into unsettling memories, following up recent single “Most Of The Time” with a new one called “Birthday”. She says:
“I imagine a vast pool of ended relationships where both parties sit at their own gloomy ends, greatly disliking or even hating the other. I wanted to write a song with this in mind, that there are often two deflated and angry hearts involved, both feeling the same anger, the same sadness.
“The song is also a retrospective look at a hard time in my life – my 25th birthday -, with a strong realisation that I would never want to go back, no matter the circumstances. To me it encapsulates a mutual feeling of wasted effort and time toward something that was doomed to fail from the beginning.”
Far from celebratory, “Birthday” finds the Norwegian songwriter glimpsing at her past self and giving that period in her life a massive thumbs down. Of course, she doesn’t do it as crudely as that, instead singing over a hovering acoustic melody she sketches pictures of the past; getting drunk on her birthday while a former partner sulks in a corner, taking “a swim in the marrow of my bones” and more. It rises into the chorus “I’ve wasted all my time / My god it’s such a crime / And if I could go back now / I’d never go back in time,” delivered with a lilt that’s sure to hook itself inside your brain meat. Despite the obvious disappointment in those words, there’s something uplifting in the way that Jakobsen sings them, it’s as if she knows she’s in a much better place now, her life is on an upward trajectory, and she’s feels lighter knowing she’ll never have to go back to being 25.
Listen to “Birthday” below or find it on streaming platforms.
You can find Siv Jakobsen on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. She’s also got these intimate dates ahead:
26th September – Brussels, Witlof Bar
27th September – Utrecht, Tivolivredenburg – Cloud 9
29th September – London, The Slaughtered Lamb
