Today our musical journey takes us to Denmark. Agnes Obel is a Danish singer, songwriter, and musician. She was born in Copenhagen and learned to play the piano at a very young age. About her learning, she said: “I had a classical piano teacher who told me that I shouldn’t play what I didn’t like. So I just played what I liked. I was never forced to play anything else.” Obel debuted as a solo singer with her first album Philharmonics (2010). She wrote, played, sang, recorded, and produced all the material herself. “The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me. I always was attracted by simple melodies, almost childish. I put a long time before writing texts because the music seems to tell already a story, to project images.” According to Obel, her piano is much more than an instrument: “The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.” She has said that, “The music is the most obvious means to express what I am, where I am.
Philharmonics has garnered generally positive reviews with, for example, James Skinner from the BBC saying that “the compositions… are slow, sombre, sepulchral even, but not without a sense of occasionally singular beauty”. In the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Johanna Seban spoke about a “disarming purity” and stated, “There is, in these deeply melancholic ballads, the clearness and reassuring nobility of bedside discs. In November 2011, she won five prizes at the Danish Music Awards for Philharmonics. She won Best Album of the Year, Best Pop Release of the Year, Best Debut Artist of the Year, Best Female Artist of the Year, and Best Songwriter of the Year.
Obel began working on her second album in 2011. About her new album, she said, “I started to write new pieces, but all were instrumental ones, with the piano alone… In this moment, I feel more inclined to compose instrumental pieces. I already started to write some texts, but for me, it’s more difficult to compose melodies.” In January 2013, Obel started mixing her new album. In June, she revealed that the new album, Aventine, would be released in September.
During her 2014 tour, Obel began work on her third album: “I’m planning to work less with piano, and more with other kinds of old keyboards (…) I’m trying to find new instruments to work with, so it’s sort of on the research phase and starting to write things.” She also said: “I have some clear ideas but I’m not sure it is a good idea to go into specifics on such an early stage. I mainly plan to work with old keyboards like spinet and harpsichord and then see where they take me.” In July 2016, Obel announced her third studio album, Citizen of Glass, to be released on 21 October 2016. Regarding the mysterious title, Obel explained: “The title comes from the German concept of the gläserner bürger, the human or glass citizen. It’s actually a legal term about the level of privacy the individual has in a state, and in health it’s become a term about how much we know about a person’s body or biology or history – if they’re completely made of glass we know everything.”
In September 2016, Obel released a new single, “Golden Green”. In Dansende Beren, Niels Bruwier wrote: “The sound of glass is never far away. The song is about the way we always find other better lives than ours…she brings out her dreamy voice, it’s actually just the perfect classic pop song without embellishment. Enchanting, elysisch and paradise-like.” In October 2016, a new song from Citizen of Glass was released: “Stretch Your Eyes”. This song is a new version of an older one (“Spinet Song”) which was played during her tour in 2014.
May 2018, she contributed to Late Night Tales with a series of tracks selected by the artist herself, released as Late Night Tales: Agnes Obel. She combined new works with the original song “Bee Dance”, a haunting reading of the Danish song “Glemmer Du”, and a new version (the third one) of “Stretch Your Eyes” called “Ambient Acapella”. The first single, Inger Christensen’s “Poem About Death”, is set to original music by Obel.
In October 2019, Obel announced the title of her upcoming album, Myopia, on social media, and released the new single “Island of Doom”. The album was released on 21 February 2020. Journalist Tim Peacock wrote: “Obel has been under self-imposed creative isolation with the removal of all outside influences and distraction in the writing, recording and mixing process for ‘Myopia’.” About “Island of Doom”, the artist said: “The song is made up of pitched-down piano and cello pizzicato and vocals, all choirs are pitched down and up… In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again.”
On 7 January 2020, Obel released the single “Broken Sleep.” Journalist Drew Feinerman said: “The video (created by Obel’s longterm collaborator and partner Alex Brüel Flagstad) pairs perfectly with the style of the composition; Obel sings with such beauty and ease, as the vocals complement the effortless, flowing pace of the visuals.” About Myopia, journalist Tina Benitez-Eves stated: “Myopia is an abstract anatomization of the human psyche, transcending through ambient instrumentals, and an intoxicating blend of vocals, hovering on Jarboe-bred voice manipulation on atmospheric “Broken Sleep” and “Island of Doom.
