Hanne Kolstø - While We Still Have Light (2015)

Hanne Kolstø rotates like a waterspout. Every year she sweeps past us with things she’s picked up and put down on a record, so that we, the other people, get the feeling that we’re standing completely still while she’s going in slow circles.

In early November, Kolstø releases her fifth album in five years. An over-ambitious project for for most people, but Kolstø says that the concept enforced itself during her the work with her first four albums.

”Five albums. Five years of my life. Five years where the lyrics gradually have become more important, where I feel I’ve found out more about how I look upon life and people around me and myself in all this. Five years with many different emotions”, Hanne says of the years that have passed since her first solo album, Riot Break, was released.

Three out of Kolstø’s four previous albums was nominated to the Spellemann award, and they’ve all received great reviews both at home and abroad.

It feels only natural to finish with an album which is about goodbyes:
“While We Still Have Light” mirrors the goodbye theme, which can be interpreted in many different ways. In the middle of this is doubt; the doubt before a decision, the doubt before you choose to break out of bad patterns, the doubt before you choose to leave a friend or a boyfriend, before you choose to enter a darkness, in the hope that maybe there’s more light on the other side”, Kolstø continues.

Luckily this is not a final goodbye to Kolstø as an artist, even though she says that after every album she gives herself a freedom of choice: Is this what she wants to continue doing? And we’re happy that Hanne Kolstø continues to pour out her seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of good melodies, personal lyrics and musical distinctiveness.

Parts of While We Still Have Light were recorded at Ocean Sound Recordings at Giske, situated about an hour’s drive from Kolstø’s home town, Sykkylven.

Her producer and collaborator through many years, Øyvind Røsrud Gundersen, has this time been more involved in the writing process, which among other things has led to an extensive use of two drumkits, as they both are so fond of playing drums.
Eivind Buene, one of Norway’s most renowned contemporary classical composers, wrote the string arrangements.