If you make music, if you put pen to paper and voice to tape (well… the electronic equivalent these days, but I’m being nostalgic), does the time of day or day of the week affect what comes out?
Tuesday is the day of the week for music producer and singer songwriter Jörgen Kjellgren’s latest song, and he has chosen a distinct way of approaching the writing of it.
He says that he was trying not to overthink the meaning of the song or how much sense it made. He would write rough drafts in the morning, then rearrange lyrics after that. So “On a Tuesday” sounds dreamy and intimate, a simple strum and a voice with words that tell you something but don’t clearly define what it is.
There seems to be an existential anxiety to the words:
With a strong head and no spine
I was destined for hard times
Was I sent here?
Was I born?
A gentle sustained synth line drifts along in the background and then, at just under the two minute mark, it gently and subtly builds.
I can imagine the sun sifting through the just opened curtains, the coffee bubbling on the stove, and someone still asleep in the other room as the singer soundtracks the start of the Tuesday he’s documenting in his half-awake state, letting the evaporating dreams of the previous night mingle with the lyrics he’s writing.
He further doubts himself later in the song:
I was heedless to the signs
And the voices in my mind
But after that he drifts so much that he doesn’t even finish the line:
Can you hear it?
It’s the sound
Of the things I
At the end of the song he mentions someone else for the first time but not so that you can grasp much context as to who they are, what they’re doing, or where they are slipping to:
It’s so easy to let go
Now she’s slipping so
Now she’s slipping
It has the potential to be maddening if you’re trying to work out what’s going on. But in the hazy, early morning, early week of Jörgen’s sweet little daydream, it’s kind of comforting to drift along with “On a Tuesday,” letting your mind relax into a place that doesn’t have to be definite just yet.
There’s the whole rest of the week for that.
(Photo by Annevi Petersson)
