Ólafur Arnalds
Found Songs

NB: Listen to the album reviewed + PRESS PLAY ON TAPE + Read review

Who are you? …maybe I'm the Six Million Dollar Man?

The social status fair is open, and what do you do for a living? Who are you… what's your worth!? Your duties, whom do you command, how much do you organize, how much do you earn …my husband is a doctor! A husband for a merit…

Chased by these senseless fancies who knows for how long and for how much longer, and then, excuse me, but how much should we be worth? who knows how many ambitions we should have and how many to conquer, who knows how many things…

Pursued by the duties and failed obsessions and psychoses of Saturn who wanted me eremite like him, defeated like him, I sit on a throne that resembles more a toilet or a wine barrel.

From the audience, she watches and silently judges my failures.

Victories, defeats! Getting drunk on hypocrisies without understanding that even in one's own small way, everyone can win their own battles, just don't give up, just fight and move forward without respite, in the search, in the attempt to purify one's karma of past lives, barred by the venal and hypocritical constraints that are so convenient in this world made of only plastic.

But then what's the point of it all? Does it really matter? Just don't be a coward, just try not to be afraid, just be honest and try to do what's right as much as possible.

But do you know what's right?

Moving away from the grayness of one's life in pursuit of the happiness of an existence made of weak bourgeoisie, latent fears, and inner voids.

But do you still read the things I write? Or have you forgotten about me …as I did with you?  
It's raining, it keeps raining on the glass of this damn iron coffin while the wipers seem to want to erase the drops of loneliness that fall empirically like fingers playing a piano, like steps alternating harmoniously on the keys and everything seems to follow the course of a life whose only soundtrack seems to be played by a Sword of Damocles that scrapes the strings of a violin and then interrupts and darts onto our throats, while from this damn glass I see people leading their children to school.

Stopped at the traffic light.
I still stare fixedly at that red while people run chased by the rain.

The cars next door, automatons carrying on their lives with all their beautiful insecurities that we so suffocate, and whose only inner path seems to arise from those vicissitudes whose task is to improve and to face trials, won, lost or …survive, survive oneself, one's own psychoses and endless cries.

It seems thus that those drops that fall inexorably become enchantingly, a reason for cathartic rebirth in the attempt that something is born, hoping that something becomes.

I don't even know how I ended up in this car or maybe I don't even know how I started thinking about all this maybe I've been wondering for a long time about how much work I should do on myself but it's so difficult, maybe I should ask God and life for help, in its damn trials of pain and slaps to the face to awaken to strike the warmth of an unawareness, cognitive dissonance in the fear of peering below.

We must grow! we must be proud of our children and how good they are at school and of the newly purchased wardrobe and the damn latest generation kitchen that hunts down and finds the best fish in the ocean.

But then really, what does it concern us? I don't talk to anyone anymore, I don't feel like it, and maybe tomorrow I'll wander around drunk with a bottle full of crocodile tears in my arms.

Damn piano play, rhythm, walk through our lives and distance us; but then, do you think it's normal if the souls wandering for eternity once united were given the chance to create something new and indissoluble, are they able to carry it forward, and if instead, it all ends?  

I'll be at home, finally, I'll be at home, more than ten years around searching for my soul and its essence, I've been out of my mind, I've been ten years in the desert of solitude, in a corner yelling and cursing waiting for time to pass…

Children run, backpacks, briefcases and the smells of a school that smells of pastel and yellow, stationery and soccer sticker albums; everyone runs, crosses the street chased by rain, few will arrive, many will die, defeated by a life too big, only the strong will reach the top, they'll unsheathe their lies and they'll scream to the sun, while I take pleasure and delight in my failures.

I could go on talking endlessly but I know that in the end, I'll remain alone, while reason wants me free, uncouth and rebellious, the other calls me, I repudiate it and it repudiates me, I move away and it moves away from me, it might be that God has taken books out of our hands that are no use at all and has thrown us down the road to pick the fruits of our essence which I still don't even know how to eat.