Music review: Anders Jörnesten, ‘Man on the Run’
The Swedish singer-songwriter’s love of country—along with some other unusual influences—shines through on his spare, haunting debut EP.
Anders Jörnesten Man on the Run album artwork, 2021.
During pandemic lockdown, Stockholm, Sweden-based Anders Jörnesten decided to dial up the creativity of a lifelong hobby. He’d played guitar for many years, but in January 2021, he wrote his first original songs. Nine months later, he released five of them on an EP, Man on the Run. His goal, he says, was to produce them as simply as possible.
The result is a sparse, lovely collection of songs that have whispers of his influences—which range from 70s outlaw country and Bruce Springsteen to flamenco and baroque music—but a cohesive sound all their own—classic country music stripped down to the barest essentials of melody and lyrics—and an overarching theme of love interrupted. Every song is grounded by Jörnesten’s clear, ringing acoustic guitar and sung in his strikingly deep, soft rasp of a voice.
Anders Jörnesten. Photo courtesy of the artist.
In the title track the narrator has “fled from everyone and everything that used to be.” The only reason given is that he “didn’t look for trouble; trouble came to me.” Life on the run is hard, and hardest of all is being apart from the love he’s singing to, asking them to wait for him while he’s “sleeping with an open mind to catch a dream of us.” A yearning pedal steel accompanies Jörnesten on this track and one other; the only instrument that appears on the EP besides his guitar. (He also cites his past experience practicing flamenco guitar as a feature on this track, but to my untrained ear that influence isn’t obvious.)
I love a song that defies the obvious. I expected the next song, “The Drifter,” to be about another rambling man who can’t settle down. Instead, it’s about a jilted lover whose drifting consists of moving “around this town, seeing places we could live.” Dreaming of a home and family with a lover who’s moved on, he pleads for them to reconsider, but mentions that he’s made new friends called “Jack Daniels and rye” and admits “I guess you’re better off livin without me.” Jörnesten says this song was influenced by Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, a collection of narrative songs about down-on-their-luck characters.
Jörnesten describes the next track as his attempt to write a classic 70s outlaw-era ballad. Although the instrumentation is gentler than any outlaw country song I’ve heard, that pedal steel comes back subtly to bolster the country feel of it. One of the most hopeful songs on the EP, “Can I Call You My Friend?” is about the promise of a new relationship for a damaged man, who plaintively explains: “I been trying so hard just to belong to anyone / That I lost myself on my way.” There’s hope in his eyes now, though: “now that I’ve told you who I am / And now that you know who you are / We can be ourselves together again.”
Anders Jörnesten. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The next song, “Dreaming of Waves,” has a simple melody and strumming rhythm but contains intriguing lyrics that seem to point to a narrator whose true love has died: “How was I supposed to know that everything can be washed away?” he laments. A dazed mental state and feverish imagery of coastlines and waves create a hallucinatory effect: “Waking up from dreams sometimes confused about if you’re here and what I’m supposed to do.” The narrator seems to be waiting for the time he can reunite with his love: “Endless roads and struggles just to get away / From the land of the living to the dead.”
The EP ends on “Sound of Time,” a contemplative song about looking back at the path the narrator’s life has taken and a reminder not to waste the remaining years: “all that I could hear was the sound of time running through my ears / Telling me that I should slow down and spend my time with you.” Interestingly, Jörnesten says he listened mainly to baroque music for about 10 years, and for this track, he restrung a guitar with thin strings to make it sound like a clavichord. It’s an unusual choice for a record with such strong Americana influences, but it works, finding a halfway point between baroque and country that I didn’t know existed!
Man on the Run is a strong beginning for someone who’s just embarked on a singer-songwriter path. Jörnesten says he’s already working on songs for another record, and I’m excited to see where he goes next.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
