April 11 - Carry Me Away

When I was 17 and working in Radio Ung, we received a record from a band none of us had heard of.  This wasn't anything new - we got all kinds of strange music. Since we were a rather small station, record companies weren't shipping us all the best stuff, but we had someone working for us who listened to the music coming in, and he handed me the album and said they sounded like Guns'n'Roses. After listening to it for myself, the only similarity I heard was that they used distorted guitars. This band's singer was also higher pitched, but she was a woman, so that is understandable...

The band was Concrete Blonde and the album was Free. The singer was Johnette Napolitano, and I immediately fell in love with her voice. The album is still great - from the opening chords of God Is A Bullet to the closing song, which is today's song: Carry Me Away. The reason we got the album was that Concrete Blonde found their way to Trondheim, and I was given an interview opportunity with the band. Here is where it all went slightly wrong. I had not yet listened to the album. I had tossed it onto the turntable and listened to it in the background, but I hadn't really heard it yet. 

When I arrived at Royal Garden Hotel, which back then was considered a pretty upscale hotel - at least to me, who barely had been in a hotel of any sort - the interviews were set up in such a way that one of the bigger radio stations got to meet with Johnette Napolitano, while I was sitting with another radio station and the three guys. The good thing for me was that the other radio station's interviewer was the older brother of a very good friend of mine from elementary and middle school - and he had good questions for them that I also recorded. However, I made a rookie mistake when I admitted that I wasn't going to their concert that night. My second mistake was that I told them I was going to a party instead - and when they asked to come as well I told them no. Knowing my friend Sissel, whose house was the place for the evenings festivities, an American rock band would have been awesome... And, of course, the real mistake was not going to see them, as they are a great band. So today I bring you one of the truly great album closers: Carry Me Away