Podcast transcription

Pontus: Welcome to Wrapped in a Warm Blanket, a podcast with Heart-To-Heart talks about Angelina Jordan’s artistry and how it affects our inner world. Co-hosted by Alan Papier and Pontus Osterlin.

Pontus: Hi, Alan.

Alan: Hi, Pontus, how’s it going?

Pontus: Great. What’s the subject today?

Alan: We have so much momentum it’s hard to know which rabbit hole to go down with Angelina Jordan.

Pontus: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Alan: Well, you know, when I was four and five years old, I thought to myself, why do people have wars? Why why are there wars? And then also and at the same moment, I thought to myself, why aren’t people all very nice to each other all the time? I don’t understand why they’re not. Now, that was when I was four and five years old. That’s like sixty-five years ago. And although I have much more experience of life and I’ve learned a lot in many ways, I still have the same thought. Why cannot people be very kind to each other all the time?

Pontus: The benefits of having this child-like or if you call it a naive way of looking at things and naive doesn’t mean ignorant, of course, because being ignorant is like blocking out things that you don’t want to see. Being naive is more like how I see it, it’s like seeing the best in every situation. If you do that and stop analyzing everything, just letting go, then there’s sort of a nice Lyric part in Angelina’s 7th heaven that sort of fits into that idea, I think. And the lyrics are like this: “Sometimes you have to let go and get lost in the moment. Sometimes you want to be careless and let go of sadness”. I think that speaks to, in my heart anyway, to the fact that if we just keep analyzing things, we will get bogged down by negativity. There’s nothing good coming out of analyzing everything we are witnessing in life and experiencing in life. We should be more like a child and just take it in, and by doing that, I think we can actually be happier and let go of sadness, as she says.

Alan: Sadness is such an interesting choice of words because there are so many different aspects of being on the negative side. I mean, some people can dislike something and some people can complain and some people can be unsatisfied and some people could hate. And all of these negativities actually in the body act as a physical toxin. They’re really, really harmful to maintain this type of negativity in the body. And this is much better known than the positive effects of being positive.

Pontus: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s… I mean, I have two small girls, five and seven, and me and my wife, we try to be aware of how we say things. I mean, just saying negative words puts actually a negative feeling inside of you, and that is what we are going to try to avoid. So, for instance, the word hate, we never use the word hate. And this has resulted in my youngest girl, she says, when she doesn’t like something and she says, oh, I don’t love that. It is an interesting fact that negativity is almost always the first thought we have in our mind.

Alan: It is. I mean, Dante, 700 years ago wrote The Divine Comedy and he wrote about different levels of hell and different levels of heaven and all the different levels of hell, are really well documented and well understood. But the different levels of heaven are not part of the common language. They’re not part of the common understanding. And it doesn’t take great effort or imagination to be positive. But it’s just it’s not part of the mindset. It’s just not part of the common currency. And I mean, from an evolutionary point of view, I can understand where it comes from because, you know, ten thousand years, twenty thousand years ago, people, men, all mankind were in competition with each other for food and land. And there was a real, real struggle for survival. But we don’t have that anymore. But evolutionary wise, we haven’t changed. Basically, there are four types of people in the world. One, there are very, very rich people who know how to give and contribute and share their fortune, like Bill Gates. Then there are very rich people who hold on to their money for dear life and who do not believe in the concept of charity. Then there are poor people who do not have enough to give and they have too much of a struggle to give. And then there are poor people, even though they have very, very little, would still share with what little they have. So it’s not a matter of how much wealth you have, it is how much you have in your heart.

Pontus: You have to have the ability to really convey a message in a certain way for others to accept and start living like that.

Alan: This is one of the spectacular aspects of Angelena, the fact that she is able to trigger something so, so profound. And, you know, those of us who follow her career closely and those of us who watch a lot of reaction videos, you have a lot of people analyzing what she’s doing, analyzing her vocal technique or her singing technique or talking about her style of music. But that is so… That is 99 percent of the conversation. But you and I are trying to focus on the other one percent, which is what happens inside of the listener.

Pontus: Yeah, that’s true. Just the first few lines of the song, really you can see the effect it has on the face of the reactor. And it’s quite an amazing sight, really. And then that is the first level, of course. But then there is the… When she continues with her song, then there is the level of some kind of a connection being made between the singing and the listener. And it’s almost like it’s calming or contemplating. You’re going inside. They’re just thinking, they’re just taking in everything. And then there’s another level after that. And that is the way that this affects them in their life that we have spoken about in previous episodes. The new me, I said, I mean, it really does affect you in a way. I think it affects your being in some way.

Alan: And we will have very, very interesting interviews of people describing that. There are some other questions that are implicit in everything we’re doing. I consider the songs that Angelina Jordan produces to be consistently, unbelievably beautiful. And so the question then becomes to the individual or to the listener, what is the most beautiful thing you have ever experienced? And how did you react to it? How do you react to an extreme of beauty? How did that change your being?

Pontus: Yeah I mean, my wife, we lived two years in the United States and we went travelling a lot. And I mean, the moment you get to see the Grand Canyon for the first time, I mean, that is quite an astonishing moment.

Alan: Angelina Jordan has been compared to many things, but I think this is the first time she’s been compared to the Grand Canyon.

Pontus: Yeah, that’s not a bad comparison, I think.

Alan: When you visited the Grand Canyon and you saw this beautiful view in front of you, did that beauty change your life?

Pontus: Yeah, that is the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

Alan: Yeah, and the answer is probably not because, you know, you could marvel for ten minutes, you can marvel for an hour, and it could really give you a wonderful day. But a week later or a month later, it may not have transformed your life. But with Angelina, the beauty that we encounter actually changes our life in a certain way. And that, again, is a mystery of what our podcast is focusing on.

Alan: Angelina Jordan creates this unbelievable beauty, but it stays with people. And that is a paradox and that is a miracle in itself. And that beauty is really like the ripple in the pond. It hits you from the inside and it ripples into every single cell in your body.

Pontus: It’s like a snowballing effect, really. You’re not aware of it at first. You just think, oh, this is I mean, this is an amazingly good singer this Angelina Jordan. And then you listen to a couple of more songs and then all of a sudden you’re your sort of… I don’t know what it is, but somewhere along the lines, you get interested in her as a person and her values really. And… That could happen with anybody, but for me, I wanted to share those values for some reason, and that is the most amazing thing I’ve so far been… I mean, experienced because… Well, we’re not going to use the O-word are we?

Alan: And what is the O-word?

Pontus: Obsessed.

Alan: Oh, that that O-word, OK.

Pontus: Well, it’s almost an obsession, isn’t it?

Alan: It is. But, you know, if you’re talking about addictions of one of the best addictions to have is being addicted to kindness. That is an acceptable addiction. And, you know, we should not make any apologies for trying to elaborate on the mystery of what goes on inside of us. You know, this is really, really a very necessary thing for us to discuss.

Pontus: Yes. And I think one aspect of this being kind and trying to make good is that you can be accused of being naive. And I actually did a little research on a naiveté. I don’t know if that’s the correct pronunciation, but I did a little research on that and I found a freelance writer. She calls herself Viktorie. And she had an article that said “Six reasons why being naive is the best thing that can happen to you”. And that was really interesting. I mean, she says and let me quote from the article, if I may: “After years of overanalyzing and overthinking everything, I decided to start taking life as it is, focus on the positives and let go of control. I realized that I had never had any control to begin with. After all, there is so much that happens to us that is beyond our control. The only thing we can control is our reaction”.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, I think naiveté is to be desired and it’s something that if we have a chance, we could and should go in that direction. Because if you’re naive, then you give a person the benefit of the doubt. You know, if someone does something that you don’t quite like, you say, oh, yeah, OK. I mean, he was having an off day or I can forgive him, et cetera, et cetera. And this is in a direction really of love. This is in the direction of being kind-hearted. So naive is definitely in the right direction. The problem is that we are in the minority. You know, we may be 10 percent or 20 percent in the world of people who are in this direction and the forces of what do you call it, commerce or government or corruption are very, very heavily apparent in our society. But that does not mean that we give up.

Pontus: No, of course not. And I believe a person like Angelina Jordan with her agenda of giving love through her music and also the… I mean, the kind of fame she could rise into will give her a platform to really communicate that message. And I also read somewhere, this was when I did a video with the artist, Halsey, the singer-songwriter. She said in an article that she wanted to do art… ”As an artist you want to say what you feel and you want to make art that’s a reflection of your feelings.” But then she said: “You also want to make art that changes you and changes the world around you”. And I think that is what Angelina is going to do with her artistry.

Alan: That is exactly how I would say it too. This is absolutely her focus, and I am actually of the belief that Angelina Jordan with her team, thinks that the communication of love is at least as important as her music. I mean, her music is absolutely wonderful. But at the end of the day, I believe she’s using her music as a vehicle to communicate something which is really aspirational, which is something that cannot be put into words and to change the nature of who we are and how we are. And, you know, it’s almost like a dog chasing its tail if we try and put things into words. But there’s something going on inside. It’s the mystery of not just how she creates the beauty, but how the beauty hits us from the inside and then gets transformed into kindness. I think that is the… It’s almost like trying to turn lead into gold. How does that happen? It’s a mystery to try and explain that.

Pontus: Go to wrappedinawarmblanket.com to find out more about this podcast and how you can share your stories and experiences.