I get to spend so little time with Spring here in Wisconsin. The smell of earth in the air, moist with snow-melt. Lakes ringed with fragile remnants of the thick ice that only recently covering their chilly expanses. Rivers swell. Blossoms bloom. Everything is new. Everything is clean. Nature is waking up.
Norwegian singer/songwriter Jenny Hval clearly has a special connection to the season of spring. Her imagery in “Mephisto in the Water” (off of her third album, Innocence is Kinky) is lush and feminine. The spring “comes up with the river that climbs the mountainside… with a swing in her hips.” The music is determinedly airy and uncomplicated, with a soft-focused guitar skirting gently over faint whisps of steady percussion.
One of the reasons so many Scandinavians opted to plant roots in this part of America is that the Midwest felt like home to them. There’s something intangible (yet no one wold disagree that it’s there) connecting the lakes of our Wisconsin to the fjords of Jenny Hval’s Norway. If seashells can carry the spirit of the ocean around within them, then this song more than delivers on communicating the experience of a Wisconsin winter receeding into the past.
We hold on much better to things that we learn directly before we fall asleep, which makes now, the first few weeks of autumn, a perfect time to meditate on this track before the long sleep of winter is upon us.