Norwegian singer Ida Maria has a way with a winning metaphor. Maybe it’s because she’s a synaesthesiac, i.e. music makes her see colours.
“I’m actually very lucky,” she smiles. “I see the colours I want in my music and wash out everything that doesn’t fit that colour palate so that I can think. It’s not just music – when I hear people talk, when I feel pain, I get certain patterns and certain colours. And I take food really seriously. I’m very provoked by food and get very distinct colours from it. It would take a hundred years to describe every taste and paint it. My mum’s got synaesthesia as well. We don’t see the same colours so we argue a lot about what colour different music is. Maybe if you took LSD you’d know what I mean. I’ve never taken it myself because I think my world would go grey.”
For Ida Maria it all began with a sedate, unhallucinogenic existence in an arty little Norwegian town called Nesna, which she escaped by going to a Christian music school (“I just wanted to get out of Nesna, but I didn’t write a song when I was there, everyone was writing about Jesus.”), followed by an inauspicious college career (“I didn’t study very hard”) and a stint in the Norwegian Youth Choir (“It was really interesting to be singing with so many other people. It’s something very special”).
The music was always there.
“I started performing when I was fourteen really,” she says. “My dad had a jazz band and I wrote some tunes and they played them and I thought it was really, really cool to be playing guitar with them in the local pub. When I went to school I started doing gigs by myself and then when I went to Sweden I got a band and it all happened. Sweden’s scene is no bigger than Norway’s, they’ve just got a longer tradition of exalting music since Abba opened the channels. But music in Sweden is a bit more square, a bit more easy listening. It’s probably the same difference between Ireland and England. Norway experiments with more genres, especially Bergen – the black metal scene, the death scene, the bluegrass scene, the electronic scene and they go to the same pubs and everybody helps everyone else. One day you might need a drummer so you go and ask the guy from Mayhem.”
She misses Bergen and is not so sure what she thinks of the ‘official’ music industry.
“My dad tried to talk me out of doing it professionally,” she reveals. “I think you really need a solid bone structure to survive it. It’s a lot of pressure and there are always days when you feel like shit and whatever you say ends up in the papers and people judge you. And it’s hard physical work. In fact, the better it goes the more work there is.”
She references Charlie Watts’ joke about being in a band mainly involving waiting around, but says she loves the live experience and that’s what keeps fully fledged Marxist alienation at bay.
“Being at a show is a kind of anarchy,” she proffers, “the sweat, the crowd, the claustrophobia, the annoying guy who drenches you in beer. You can kind of get lost in that world. You can have an experience on your own in your room listening to music, but you miss the beer, the sweat, the annoying guy. And you miss all the mistakes. In the studio they take away all the mistakes.”
She sighs and employs a nicely judged metaphor.
“Playing live is like jumping on a train. First you just run and run and then you come up to the same speed as the train, and then you jump on it and it goes until you reach the station. You’re a bit sad the journey’s over, but you’re happy that you’re home.”