Danish
Singer-Songwriter Maria Montell From Bossa For My Baby to Now
Danish
Singer-Songwriter Maria Montell From Bossa For My Baby to Now
Danish
singer, songwriter and children’s author Maria Montell has been a star in
Denmark, she had an international hit with her song, “Di Da Di,” and toured in
more than twenty countries in support of the song and the album
Svært At Være Gudinde released in
1996. She also hosted a show that was broadcast on television in Argentina.
Maria Montell has recorded in Danish and in English and her music has swept
across the musical landscape from Pop to Bossa Nova. Montell sat down with us to
discuss her current album Nu (In
English Now), released in 2014, and
to reflect upon her career, her three children and her husband, filmmaker Thomas
Villum Jensen.
Nu
is the first album that Maria Montell has released since her 2005 record
Bossa For My Baby.
She explains why, “I needed to do projects that did not
involve me going out so much on stage.
I did some music for movies and I did some projects
for other artists. I felt like I could be creative at home, make music at
home and let others go out. I could be more mom.”
“I made a whole album
(in 2013) for a very famous Danish singer called
Dorthe Kollo who was a very big artist in Germany. She sold
a lot of albums and she was having kind of a comeback album. I was assigned to
listen to all of the stories from her life and then to write songs for her. We
then recorded with a band and later we had a symphony orchestra on the album as
well. It was like old time Jazz and a little Bossa. It was an old school sound
that I like myself. She (Kollo) is sixty-six (years old).
It was a fun project and I was writing songs for a woman
who is nearly my mother’s age. She had a long career and she had several men.
She had a very adventuresome life. She can fly a little plane. She had a very
exciting life and these talk sessions with her and writing songs for her, it was
meaningful for her to sing the songs. It was a nice project. It was recorded in
Danish and then a German lyricist has been translating it.
I have also been writing some songs for movies and my
husband is a film director, so I have been working with him. I made some
soundtracks and some music for his movies. It has been very comfortable for both
of us working together. My husband is Thomas Villum Jensen,” says Montell.
As for what Maria Montell likes best about her album
Nu (Now) she says, “I think that it
is very Now (she
laughs). I wrote the songs and then I recorded them, but it is really about
my life as it is now. I have worked
with Douglas Carr (producer / composer, Ace of Base, Acqua) who also wrote some
songs with Tamara Champlin, but this album I did with a Swedish producer named
Gunnar Norden who has worked with Lisa Ekdahl who is very big in Sweden.
He can play all sorts of instruments. When I came with the songs, it was
the songs that I wrote that decided where (we would) go (on the album). There
are different ways of working and you can also sit by the computer, like I did a
lot with Douglas with bits and pieces that make it very tight and over produced.
This way it was just like the songs and the feelings. It flowed more and it just
felt natural and very good,” she says.
Gunnar Norden also played guitar and arranged the horns
and the violin for the record. Montell employed the services of both Swedish and
Danish musicians, the latter being instrumentalists who have performed with
Montell during her concerts.
Montell makes the point that for as much as is possible
she tries to make her albums personal. “I did an English album called
Think Positive (2002). There was a
lot of thought about making it a hit. If you go to Sweden and you contact some
of those guys they want to make hits of course. It is a very big industry in
Sweden and they are very successful. They succeeded with a lot with Pop hits, so
if you want to do that, sometimes it is nice, just to say we have to make a hit
album, so let’s do that. When you
co-write with others, it is not totally personal, you have to compromise of
course when you write with others. Most of the
Think Positive album was not totally
mine, there were other souls in it. This album is totally personal, because it
is totally me. The first three
albums that I did are very me.
When I had the hit
“Di Da Di, (And So the Story Goes),” suddenly people were
Wow! We want to do some more hits with her.
Suddenly there were a lot of chefs and cooks coming in. Actually, I was
okay, well, let’s try that. Sometimes the personality gets a little bit lost in
it I think.”
Maria Montell giggles at my attempt to correctly
pronounce in Danish the name of one of her singles from her current album. The
song title is “Trykker På Stop.”
“Trykker På Stop,” is one of the first songs that I
wrote on this album. It is about pushing the stop button in life, because life
is going so quick and so fast. You
can see it when you have kids, you can see how fast life goes. My husband and I
were going through a financial crisis here in Denmark.
The whole world had a financial crisis and suddenly on the way up, we
bought a lot of shit. We bought a lot of materialistic things. We had a lot of
things. When you get all of these things you have to run very fast. You have
kids and suddenly you have to pay for schools and things and suddenly you don’t
sleep at night and you wake up. You have responsibility for other people and you
aren’t alone anymore. This song is about make it stop now, because I just want
to go back to basic. It is, let’s get rid of all of this shit that we have.
Let’s pause and breathe again. It is like the wheel that keeps going
around. It is about losing yourself
and also there is a verse in the song that says, let’s invite some people in,
let’s open up our doors and let’s celebrate a little more,” she says.
Maria Montell also recorded the music video
“Jeg Løber Hjemmefra (I Am Running Away From Home),” with
her husband Thomas directing it.
She talks about what inspired the song, “I am running
away from home, because being a mom with small kids, you don’t really know
yourself anymore. You feel like you lost
yourself in being a mom, in being practical and in being the one who is the
chauffeur or the captain on board on the ship, while being a mom. Sometimes you
just want to throw everything away and you just want to run away from home.
Sometimes you do that and you don’t know where to go. It is about being a mom
and you don’t know yourself anymore, because you came a little away from
yourself.”
“Jeg Løber Hjemmefra (I Am Running Away From Home),” was
not the first time that Maria Montell’s husband Thomas directed one of her music
videos. In 2009, she wrote the song
“Bang Bang Boogie,” for his film
At World’s End and they decided to
shoot a separate and fun music video to promote the film.
“It was a teaser and the soundtrack for the movie. The
guy in the music video is the guy who has the head role in the movie. It was
(filmed) in the south of France and at a very legendary hotel in Cannes. It was
a lot of fun and we recorded it one day very early. We just recorded and
recorded and it was nice,” she says.
As for whether or not being a mom provides her with a
different perspective concerning her music career, Montell says, “I think so.
First of all I feel that I am closer to what it is worth. I don’t think so much
about how people see me. I am really into everything has to feel good and not
(feeling that I have) to please everyone. I think that I got better at not
pleasing everybody, as I got kids, because it has to be very important if you do
something. The lyrics (are influenced), because I see the world differently of
course and I am not so important anymore. We say we don’t look into your belly
so much. There are more important things to take care of. (My perspective) is
more mature of course and I see things differently.”
Montell says it was her first album
Jeg Er Her For Dig, released in 1994,
when she was twenty-four years old, which gave her the main push that resulted
in her reaching stardom on the Danish music scene. She either wrote or co-wrote
all eleven songs on the record and two of the songs were the most played songs
on national radio in Denmark. 
“It was my debut album that made people say, who is
this? Then I was nominated for a Grammy and I had a radio prize. When I did my
second album, it was the song “Di Da Di, (And So The Story Goes),” and I went to
twenty countries. I was on the charts. I went to # 1. I traveled with that
record for two years. It was out in Asia
and South America. A Chinese singer Coco Lee also did “Di Da Di,” and it sold
two million copies.
When asked if she received good royalty checks for the
Asian success of “Di Da Di,” she says, “Well it is in China you know,” and then
she laughs. In other words she
didn’t see any royalty checks or at best, very little money from the Coco Lee
cover.
“I think my publisher was making some deals. I don’t
know what he did. Also it is this jungle when you are traveling and playing and
you need people to take care of this and that. You can’t actually know what is
happening. I would just say, okay, we will do that.
My schedule is full, you take care of that and I will take care of this.
I went to Shanghai and I heard my song in the airport and I heard the
song in the elevator and I heard the bands playing my song. It is still going,”
she says.
For some music fans the release of Maria Montell’s 2005
Jazz album Bossa For My Baby, after a
very successful Pop career came as a surprise.
“My father played the clarinet and I grew up with Jazz
music and Bossa music Brazilian style. I think it (Bossa
For My Baby) is some kind of look back on my childhood and with the things
that I grew up with. I didn’t grow up with Rock
or Pop, it was Jazz and Bossa. It was the kind of record that I always wanted to
do and it made me go back in time with these songs. It was nostalgic for me to
make that record. The record company just gave me free hands and when I came
with the record, they said ‘Oh shit Maria, this is not a Pop album and there are
a lot of chords in it.’ I did this
with the most respected pianist in Denmark, Thomas Clausen (Dexter
Gordon, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz) and
he has been playing with all the big Jazz names since he was sixteen. Now he is
seventy, but he is very famous in Denmark. They (the music label) were just
like, okay, what is this? I thought what can I say? I just had my first baby and
I was pregnant when I did the album and I don’t give a flying shit. I just want
to make this album, because I think this is the right thing to do,” she says.
As for the name of the album
Bossa For My Baby, Montell explains,
“I recorded it when I was in my eighth month of pregnancy and then I mixed the
album when my son was just born. When I was tucking him in when he had to go to
sleep and I sang those songs. He was so calm. He grew up with these songs and
every time I sang these songs he would get a relaxed smile on his face. Now he
is ten years old, but I can see now that he thinks, mmm this is nice.”
In recent years, Maria Montell has also authored two
children’s books and she takes time to talk about them.
“The first one is called
Drengen, der Havde Alt (The
Boy Who Got Everything) (2007). Many years ago I dated the Crown Prince in
Denmark and I saw the whole upper-class and how miserable people can be when
they have too many things. Maybe the parents are not home or they do not have a
lot of time for the kids and the kids just get money. You can find that
everywhere that people have money and they are running fast to get the money and
they forget that they have children.
It is a story about this little guy who has everything and the only thing
that he doesn’t have is the nearness of his parents or any nearness.
It is about that. He meets a guy who has a family and they are just doing
nature stuff. They are close and they have good conversations and all of those
nice and healthy things. He finds himself in this family. It is a very nice
story. I was rewarded very highly and I was in front of the biggest Danish
newspaper that called me the new talent of children’s books.
After that book, I also wrote another story about a
girl, Prinsesser Spiller Ikke Fodbold
(Princess Don’t Play Football)
(2008). It is about a girl who is a boy girl (tomboy) who wants to play
football. She has a very snobbish mom and she is going to do a lot of things
that she doesn’t want to do. She just wants to play football with the guys. It
is also a nice story.
If I have something really important to say (she
laughs lightly) then I think I will do it again (write
more children’s books). It is very nice. When you write a book you can’t go
out and play afterwards with that. You can’t go out on stage with a book. It is
a lonely thing, but it is also nice I think,” says Maria Montell.
Montell displays her sense of humor when talking about
hosting a television program a few years ago.
“I had several (opportunities) to host a program, but
the one that I did was in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. It was a Nordic program
that was collaboration between Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I was the host of the
program and I lived in Buenos Aires for one month, as I was recording every day.
It was a big, big show and it was fun.
My husband had to take care of the kids. I had only two
kids then. I actually found out the last week that I was in Buenos Aires that I
was pregnant with my third kid. I phoned my husband at home and he was just fed
up with kids (by then) and on Skype I showed him that little thing and I said, I
am pregnant again. He didn’t say anything and he was totally numb. He was just
like what? He was, as long as the
baby does not have black hair, because (she
bursts out laughing) we are totally blonde in my family and also my kids are
totally blonde. It could be fun if something totally different came out.
I showed him that it was a blonde baby (she
laughs). It (going to
Argentina) was fun and it was a little bit like running away from home,” she
says.
Between raising a family, writing songs, recording
albums, hosting a television program, Maria Montell still found time to give
back to the world and other people.
“Yes I did. If you have the opportunity and people are
looking up to you then you can make a good example. I was involved with a water
project in Africa for three years and we made a documentary. We were collecting
money in Denmark and we built some water holes in East Africa.
I have been with the Red Cross in areas where they didn’t have any water
and they didn’t have clean water. Many children die of waterborne diseases. I
have been making this documentary film to show the people in Denmark what we are
doing and that help is going the right way and where specifically the money they
gave went to. I went to television and I talked about it and they saw the
programs (the charity work) that they did. It has been very exciting and I have
been out in areas of Africa where no white man has been. It was also very
exciting and I feel very privileged to have been there,” she says.
Please visit the
Maria Montell website.