Tag: Veronica Maggio

Veronica Maggio – Den första är alltid gratis

“It just pushes so many wonderful buttons for me.”

Tim: Cat Stevens reckoned the first cut is the deepest; Veronica here thinks in Swedish that ‘The First Is Always Free’.

Tom: That is an incredibly tenuous link, well done.

Tim: Well, I try my best.

Tim: And with ‘first’ here she’s referring to basically everything – first time, first kiss, first dream, even the first betrayal. Over time, though, it becomes expensive, apparently. But that’s all beside the point, because for me here’s it’s all about the music, and that track just pushes so many wonderful buttons for me.

Tom: I wasn’t expecting it to kick in the way it did: mid-first-verse is an odd place to suddenly add percussion. It does work, it just surprised me.

Tim: It doesn’t even bother me that the video’s largely nonsensical – that good vocal, that nice melody, the second half of the middle eight, that string section that builds into him getting slammed into the boot of the car–

Tom: Not technically part of the music there, but I’ll allow it because, hey, string section. It’s a good string section.

Tim: More than anything else at all, though: those backing synths are just utterly glorious. This is plain wonderful, and I won’t have it said any other way.

Veronica Maggio – Sergels Torg

“So this is a Swedish version of Duffy’s ‘Warwick Avenue’, then?”

Tim: Tom! Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t speak any Swedish and you’ve never heard of Sergels torg. So tell me what you think of this.

Tom: Ooh, I quite like that.

Tim: Nice, isn’t it? Happy, and pleasant sounding, though a bit of melancholic tinge. Lovely vocals, and you’re probably imagining something along the lines of a “sorry but we have to break up” message to it.

Tom: I was thinking more “I’ll get on fine without you”, but yes, something along those lines.

Tim: Well, actually, no. See, Sergels torg (Sergel’s Square) is a bit of a horrible place in Stockholm – it looks quite nice at night, because there’s a big lit-up monument there, but otherwise it’s a bit dreary, is a big traffic roundabout masquerading as a public square, and doesn’t really live up to its original imaginings as a piece of art.

Tom: So this is a Swedish version of Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue”, then?

Tim: Oh, and then some. The lyrics, you see, are also a bit awful – chorus includes lines like “when everything is over, what does it matter”, “what does it fucking matter”, “what is there to care about”; the middle eight brings us up to heights of “there’s nothing to see…there’s nothing you can do about it”.

So, hmm. Lovely music, really lovely. Just, um, don’t listen to the lyrics, or you’ll want to kill yourself.