Sofia Talvik is of the latter brand of troubadour, personal, ruminative, and pensive. She attracts the part of me that says “life is hard, but maybe not hard enough.” But she also carries herself and invests her craft with a beguiling and inviting simplicity. Meditations on loss, distance and hope are connected not by daring or invention but by a persistent ethereal beauty. Her voice occupies a space tender and detached. I see it making a slow, close-eyed walk around a circuitous sun-blasted path on some desolate steppe.
If that sounds like a challenging (or at least incongruous) sell to a sports bar, then you hear what I hear. But that's the feat that was bravely attempted at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square on a quiet Tuesday night, and the previous night at the Burren. When you live show to show on foreign shores, you can't pick all your gigs. Before running self-delusion ballad “Beautiful Naked”, Sofia talks about the battle to be worthy of attention.
“Sometimes when I get to a venue where people are just talking, talking, watching the game, not really listening to the music, I will try to barter with them to make them shut up for a song or two. I'll tell them, 'Hey guys, if you manage to be quiet for a whole song, I promise I will do the rest of the set naked.' So far I haven't done any sets naked.”
The audience that night in the loft is attentive to the point of solemnity, the dangerous inverse of the spectrum where the singer may not be able to prompt speech even when they ask for it. It at least made for an adequate environment to experience (read: actually be able to hear) music better appreciated in a national park, though one can't help but wonder why there ever needs to be a college basketball game on in a room where musicians are entertaining (read: fingerpicking and cooing mournfully).
The set is heavy on songs from her first record Blue Moon (“Beautiful Naked”, “She's Leaving”, “Blue Highway”, “When Winter Comes”). The latter evokes images of a manic lover, ruined by shifting mood: “You can live with the draught of a broken window as long as summer keeps you warm/ but when winter comes...” Later, she treats us to a bonafide Swedish folk tune which, as she reminds us, is “older than the United States, which isn't saying much.” (I helpfully suggest she could pass it off as Elvish instead of Swedish so as to play at LotR conventions.) Despite being the professed autodidact and incompetent cover artist, she also attempts a soft-spoken take on Josh Tillman's “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”. Given a helpful lift from an outboard harmonizer, she borrows the Fleet Foxes' washed out chorale, a good look for her, even if her voice is too measured to reach the narcoticblasted desert-dry character of Tillman's.
Her principle weapon is a muted despair for the transience in all things, and she wields it with stoic grace. “Hold on, for the night will not stay,” she sings in “7 Miles Wide”, partially appropriating the crux of fellow Swede Eagle-Eye Cherry's “Save Tonight”, only with awe-inspiring delicacy. “It's a d uet, but unless you guys know the lyrics … I didn't think so,” she introduces the song flippantly. Well, perhaps some day. Meanwhile, we of the sparse crowd, underneath the barlight, sit in a hush to witness this whimsical travail: she trying to convert art back into the music of the people.
-Clinton Degan
Photos are from Sofia's show on Monday night (6/18).
Photo Credit: Christine Varriale
