Velvet Viking

They say opposites attract, and that’s definitely true in the case of Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche. Lerche comes from Bergen, Norway, a city on the North Sea where it rains about 300 days a year and is dark about 20 hours a day through the long winters. Bergen is a full 62 latitudinal degrees north of one of Lerche’s primary musical inspirations: the sweltering equatorial country of Brazil, perhaps the exact opposite of Norway as countries go.

Don’t peg him as some kind of Brazilian revivalist, however. His songs “Dead Passengers” and “Virtue and Wine” are certainly sambalike, but elsewhere on his excellent year-old debut Faces Down, the twenty-year-old pop prodigy shows affinities for such creative fonts as Burt Bacharach, Jeff Buckley and Summer of Love-era Beatles.

Though at times the album can feel quite melancholy, it’s really a sunny-day classic, an album to take to the park in your picnic basket. Lerche’s voice sounds a lot like Donovan’s — the Sunshine Superman himself — and the highly melodic melange of tinny guitars, warm piano and classical stringed instruments gives the album a predominantly mellow-yellow feel.

But back to Brazil for a moment. “Os Mutantes and Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil have all done some fantastic music,” Lerche says over the phone from a basement rehearsal studio in Bergen. His accent is more English than Norse, though at times he reverses his v‘s and w‘s. “That’s a huge inspiration — a lot of the psychedelic pop-folk music from Brazil in the ’60s and ’70s is really awesome. It’s far more creative than the more daft pop from Western countries.”

Most of us stateside would consider another of his guiding lights — this one a northern light — pretty daft, too, but not Lerche. To him, A-ha, the Norwegian act of “Take On Me” fame, was one of the great misunderstood bands of the ’80s. Lerche owns more than 200 A-ha records.

“It’s kinda sad,” he says with a sigh. “They became too big too fast. With that video and the image they were communicating with ‘Take On Me’ — that did not at all represent what they were up to.”

Lerche has duly noted the phenomenon and applied the knowledge to his own career. “It happens a lot,” he says. “Becoming popular for something that isn’t really you…. It’s probably hard to follow that. How can you make your next move if your first move wasn’t natural?”

Hence there’s no artifice, no irony, no cynicism in his game. As a matter of fact, you could look up cynicism in a thesaurus and find a picture of Sondre Lerche under the word’s antonyms. Lerche is all nice, all the time. When he writes that he is madly in love with Scooby-Doo and Muppet movies in his online diary, he means just that. And then there’s the family fruit parties.

Lerche explains that he was a little lost after completing the songs for his upcoming, still-untitled second CD. For the first time since the Faces Down sessions three years ago (remarkably, Lerche wrote most of the tunes when he was all of seventeen), Lerche had an abundance of time on his hands. Ergo, the family fruit party, a tale a little on the sickly side of sweet. “Yeah! I was so sick and tired of all these gatherings where you have to eat cakes — I like cakes, it’s not that, but you always have to make the same things. So I thought why not decide on the scheme yourself? So I invited my family over, and I made fruit salads and all kinds of things with fruit. And it was quite a successful party. People were quite happy.”

As can be seen by his choice of words — he probably meant to say theme — Lerche has that Abbaesque Scandinavian knack for choosing almost but not quite the right word. (See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen.)

“Or like A-ha — ‘Take On Me,'” adds Lerche, ever the advocate.

Lerche is well aware of his imperfect English. In fact, he sometimes messes up on purpose. “I know I have a totally different approach than people who speak it fluently and who live in that language. I think sometimes that can lead to putting things in a slightly different way. I try to take advantage of that when I write — sometimes I make deliberate mistakes, grammatical mistakes. I know they are slightly wrong, but I think it’s nice anyway.”

Lerche has never written a song in his native language and doesn’t like to sing in it. He finds Norwegian a little lacking in natural hooks. (And as anyone who has heard traditional Norse folk songs can tell you, it is definitely an acquired taste.) “I don’t enjoy writing in Norwegian at all,” he says. “It’s strange to say, but it doesn’t come naturally. When I started writing in English, it just came naturally. I was always interested in the language, and most of the music I was interested in had English lyrics. I don’t enjoy singing in Norwegian, either. It sounds clumsy, and, um, itchy.”

He heard a lot of it at his spate of appearances this spring at South by Southwest. His showcase had a Danish and Norwegian scheme. “There was a lot of Norwegian press there,” Lerche says. “The Norwegian media is really supportive of any artists that do stuff outside of Norway, so at times at the show it felt like there was more Norwegians there than Americans.”

So far, that imbalance is pretty descriptive of his fanbase. But one more album as good as the last one, and it won’t be long before that’s no longer the case.