In the early days of the semi-final era in the Eurovision Song Contest Macedonia used to be a dead certain qualifier. Placing 9 or 10 they had a remarkable ability to scrape through by the skin of their teeth, and ended up finishing mid-table. Perhaps not much to write home about, but they were in, playing in the big league, and for a small and young nation that meant a lot. It must have been a hard blow when finishing 10th twice in the televote all of a sudden wasn’t enough to qualify as a jury gave away the final tickets to Sweden and Finland. We suppose the EBU panicked after the Eastern bloc’s domination in Helsinki and had a few Scandinavians on their neck with big wallets and sinking TV ratings to attend to.
Since then the Macedonians seem to have lost their way, being a bit all over the place with their entries, but most of the time nowhere near the big Saturday show. That’s probably why they have decided to play it safe this year, which in this case means to hire a Swede, do a revamp of the original Skopje Fest winner and switch the language into English.
The result is not bad, but it’s not great either. And even though Daniel Kajmakoski is probably not heading towards a train wreck performance similar to the past couple of years’ disasters, he and his team have stretched it too far in the opposite direction, ironing out all the quirks and wrinkles, making it too anonymous and boring to qualify.
Daniel comes across as a likeable guy, and apparently he’s named after Daniel Popovic, who represented Yugoslavia it the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest, which only can prove he must have pretty awesome parents. Another interesting fun fact is that he has lived in Vienna since he was 6 years old, which means he will be performing literally on home turf. At least he will have a great experience and we hope he’ll make the most of it.
We’re desperately trying to come up with something more interesting to say about this entry, but this is as much enthusiasm as we can manage to muster up. Not a good omen for Daniel and the Macedonians.
This is so average. I thought the Macedonian better was so much better.
We’re not sure if we liked the original version better. The revamp seems to cater to our Nordic taste buds, which is not so strange knowing there is a Swede heavily involved here. However, we don’t want something “Nordic sounding”, we want it to sound like an entry from Macedonia. Oh well, maybe next year.