Now, we don’t admit our faults and shortcomings all too often in here, but here’s an exception: We just don’t know how to praise the Swedish entries. We lack experience in that field altogether. But we’ll try anyway. For the sake of Frans:
“It’s me and Carola”, Frans said when he won Melodifestivalen. Being 17, he is the youngest Swedish winner since Carola and her Främling. Yet, he seems shamelessly confident and didn’t even bat an eyelash at winning one of Eurovision’s most prestigous national finals. He walked up to that stage again, grabbed the award, did a little scream for good measure and delievered yet another flawless performance, as if he hadn’t done anything else for his whole life. Guess he hasn’t either. He first appeared on the hitlists at the age of 8.
Pairing confidence with a low key song is a brilliant idea that we haven’t seen from Sweden for a long time. Usually they tune everything from rythm and beats to performance and vocal strength up to a maximum and then some, which has proven to work, but still is really exhausting and not very charming. Kind of like five New Year’s Eves in just over 3 miutes. You’re bound to get hangovers quickly.
Frans is different, though. “I’m Not Sorry” bobs along in its own pace, and Frans is certainly not apologizing for that. It is sweet and catchy at the same time. Almost a little arrogant, even, with him just standing there and almost not singing. But make no mistake. He seems like a fantastic live artist and has tons of charisma. Also, we’ve heard the Swedes have quite some plans for revamping the performance and we can’t wait to see what they come up with. Let’s just hope they still remember that less is more in this case.
Both the artist, the video and the message of it all is bound to be a huge hit in the neighbouring country of Norway, by the way. In this strange piece of land everyone between 12 and 60 are completely hooked on the tv series Skam about teenage love – originally meant as a treat for people under 18, but now running on repeat in all Norwegian homes, with women drooling over teenage boys like they were all Johnny Depp. Introduce Frans to Norway and he will totally drown in deperate cougars like ourselves, that poor thing. But at least the 12 points should be settled from our people.
And who knows from how many others. We can’t really see anyone being sorry about this.
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