Howling Around My Happy Home— Daniel Norgren
#365Songs: March 24th
I don’t remember when I found Daniel Norgren, or if he found me as so many artists do, but it’s been several years now that he’s been on a steady rotation. His excellent 2021 Live album powered several long drives. He’s another of those artists who drops me down into another world, where hours pass before I realize hours have passed. Perhaps it’s an ADHD thing, this way I fall so hard into obsessive cycles with artists. But it’s the ones who bring me into myself, or into a world far away from mine. Though so much of his sound is Americana-influenced, Norgren is a man of solitude who resides somewhere in Sweden’s remote woods. His is the sort of life this city boy wouldn’t survive for a moment, and yet he makes it feel like a dream: living off the land, encounters with nature, the yearning through days of endless sun and those when the sun never seems to rise.
I get these desires to leave the city, to spend time in off-the-grid places. The quiet appeals to me, the way every sound is magnified — a bird chirping a million miles away, the wind sweeping through a tree, a wave crashing hard against a cliffside. But the quiet doesn’t comfort for long, the dark is too dark. I need sirens, chaos, that feeling that something interesting lurks in every shadow, that art happens because cultures blur and blend and clash.
Time in nature is a reset, silent moments that prompt reflection, and what I’ve come to realize is it’s not always comfortable because silence isn’t comfortable for me. It’s a rare moment when there’s no noise in my life. Every waking moment — some sleeping moments, too — are soundtracked by music, by voices, a passing bus, a train echoing off the hillside. Too much silence terrifies me because it forces me inward, without distraction, and I don’t often recognize what I hear on the inside. It’s a landscape as foreign as Sweden’s forests, as unknown as losing the path on a long hike. A city’s chaos distracts me from myself; in nature, I’m alone with too much time for myself.
I fear nature too much to understand it, even though I’m drawn to understanding. I feel the same way about getting to know myself: every layer reveals something foreign. This is the music that reminds me to sit in the discomfort, to wait.
Daniel Norgren has a lot of sounds, as does the world in which he resides. Like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, he’s a soft emo soul buried in a burly bar fighter’s body. The kind of man you expect to smash a beer bottle over your head, but instead recites a Coleridge poem after too many whiskeys. Like many of his songs, Howling Around My Home pays homage to America’s Deep South, a Hill country blues tune that, like a late night around a fire in the deep woods, surprises you with how it moves around and within you, the way it hypnotizes and makes you feel at home even when you’re so far from there.
I love this music, deeply. I feel it in my soul, as if somewhere in my ancient lineage resides the sort of guy who filleted fish with bare hands, axed wood for heat, skinned hunted boar for dinner. A nomad, a softie masked as a brute, the sort of man who could survive an apocalypse. And yet, the only thing we have in common is a love for poetry, nature, and the healing sounds of music.
Longest night I ever saw
Longest night I ever saw
Howlin’ round my happy home
Howlin’ round my happy home
I’ve been pushin’ on my luck
I’ve been pushin’ on my luck
Longest night I ever saw
Longest night I ever saw
