sommarprat
Recording a Sommarprat
This summer I was asked to record a sommarprat, for anyone outside Scandinavia, a sommarprat is a radio tradition where you are given an hour or so of airtime and asked to tell your own life story, in your own voice, between songs you have chosen. No interviewer, no questions, no parameter. Just you, talking, and the music you picked to carry the parts in between.
I have spent my whole career behind the scenes. So this was the opposite of everything I know how to do, and that is more or less why I agreed!
which version to tell
I turn 50 this year, which is its own kind of doorway, at a turning point and lost, and I found that sitting down to assemble the story, to fall into nostalgia was difficult.
The problem is not that there is too little. It is that there is far too much, and none of it arrives in order. You have a childhood, a career, a collapse, a rescue, a move across an ocean - and you have to decide which threads are load-bearing and which ones, however much you love them, have to come out. I wrote and cut and rewrote for weeks. Entire years of my life went into the discard pile. Some very good stories about some very strange film jobs did not make it.
What surprised me was how much the shape of the telling changed the meaning of the thing being told. Put the hard year in the middle and it becomes the turning point. Put it at the end and it becomes the ending. I did not want an ending. So I had to find out, quite late in the process, what I actually thought my own life and directions lead to.
The music
The songs are not background, they are a narrator.
I chose music - that wouldn’t push people away and says the thing the paragraph before it could not. Some of it comes from the deserts I grew up in, memory or feeling. A song I have dressed up and danced around too since I was small, that maybe makes other dance too. A few Chicago artists, and one track was recorded here, on this island, at the bottom of our empty swimming pool, by friends who had come to help us build a hotel and started making an album. You can hear our voices on it. You can hear the island too.
Building a sequence felt like the work I have always done, only with time instead of objects. Which room does the listener walk into first. What do they see when they turn around.
The story
The broadcast is in Swedish, so many of the people I most want to hear it can’t. Here is the idea of it, in English.
I grew up in northern New Mexico in the 1980s, among adobe houses and old gas stations, lowriders and drive-thru liquor stores, bikers and hippies and Navajo silversmiths, under a sky that shifts through a thousand colours. It is an ancient place, and a place that has always drawn craftspeople, dreamers and people who wanted to live outside the usual rules. My mother taught me that cost and value are not the same thing - that wealth can be the light at dusk, a wild orchid, a perfect plum.
At nineteen I packed two bags and flew to Chicago, and by twenty-one I was working at a theatre, having never studied any of it. I learned to weld, to build, to make crowns and hats and four-metre skirts and a body cast in ballistic gelatin with a cauliflower for a brain. Then television, film, photography, installations. Twenty-five years of saying yes to things that frightened me, and growing to fit them.
Then came a year in which nearly everything went at once - my body, my mother's health, my home, my dear friend, my work, my savings, and in the sea tragedy I lost the sense of myself. I was broken, and scared of how I was going to get through. .
And then, improbably, a group of people I had known for five days told me they were coming to help. Over the following years, forty-five Americans crossed an ocean at their own expense to work on a small hotel on a small island in the Åland archipelago. Half of them we had never met. The building is standing today because of them.
We called it Svala - swallow. The bird sailors watched for, because it meant land was close. It arrives after the darkest time, It builds its nest piece by piece and it always comes back. It’s a bearer of good luck.
Thank you
To everyone who is in this story: you know who you are, and you are the reason there is a story. To the friends who flew here with tools and faith and love in their luggage, who made the impossible parts possible. To the islanders. And to my mother, who saw this house and refused to let it go.
Making this was harder than I expected and I am glad I did it. Somewhere in the reordering and at the last moment I found the end I had been circling, which is this: you can find home in a direction, not only in a place.
Song list
American dreaming - Sierra Ferrell
Sleeping on the blacktop - Colter Wall
Soulful Dress - Sugar Pie desanto
I heard it on the grapevine- The Slits
The passenger - Iggy Pop
Point and Kill - Little Simz
Working Woman Blues - Valerie June
The thing I done- CW stoneking
Rising- Lhasa de Sela
Count your blessings - Mattiel
By foot, by sea- Jeremiah Chiu Marta Sofia Honer
Eartha- Jamila Woods
Big Dreams- Amyl and the sniffers
I wish I was the moon - Andrew Sa