Some good Norwegian music!

[Gahr]

I thought I'd share this here. This is a tune from a new album by a friend of mine, Erlend Ropstad. We used to hang out and play together in our student days here in Bergen back in the '90s. He went on to become a well known artist in Norway. This is his latest single "Natta som er over nå" ("The Night that Is Over Now"). He sings in Norwegian (with a strong southern accent, something which is uncommon in Norwegian popular music). One of his main influences is Bruce Springsteen, which I guess comes through in this song. He's really good at making great melodies, and his lyrics are really meaningful; he's been called "the silent man's spokesman", often writing lyrics about people struggling to express their feelings. Although you won't get the words, I think this is worth a listen.

 

[DonP]

Natta - is that a southern thing? I would have said natten. But then my Norsk is pretty rusty.

 

[Gahr]

Natta - is that a southern thing? I would have said natten. But then my Norsk is pretty rusty.

In his (and my) dialect, it would normally be "natta". Both "natten" and "natta" are correct, however. The -en ending is masculine and the -a ending is feminine. A lot of nouns can be both feminine and masculine in Norwegian. As you might know we have two written languages in Norway. "Bokmål" ("book language") and "nynorsk" ("new Norwegian"). Bokmål is based on the Danish written language, and is the most commonly used version, nynorsk is based on various Norwegian dialects. In bokmål you can chose wether you want to write "natten" or "natta", in fact you can skip the feminine form of nouns entirely and use the masculine instead. We also have noun that are neuter, and those will always be neuter. In nynorsk you would have to write "natta", by the way.

 

[Gahr]

Here's one of is older songs, in English this time.

 

[Gahr]

Natta - is that a southern thing? I would have said natten. But then my Norsk is pretty rusty.

I have a feeling your Norwegian is better than my Faroese, by the way...

 

[DonP]

Nice - there's a sixties vibe going on there. Maybe a bit of "knocking on heaven's door".
And of course Sigrid is huge over here right now - she won the BBC award for "The sound of 2018", which is a pretty big deal. And it's great to see a young girl not having to resort to skanky dancing in her underwear.