Alan: Hi Pontus. How’s it all going?

Pontus: I’m doing fine. Do you have something you’ve thought about that we could talk about or discuss?

Alan: Yeah, I’m thinking maybe we should talk about Angelina Jordan for a change.

Pontus: Oh, let’s do that.

Alan: I was mentioning to you the two words, emotional delineation, which a very interesting combination of words. Because people understand someone who can run a hundred meters in 10 seconds and they can measure that and they can admire that. Or they can appreciate someone who is very good in mathematics. But the whole field of how a person feels and what they do with their emotions is not exact, it’s very subjective.

You know, for example, some people, their emotion is very like this it’s strong and overpowering and other people their emotion is … [whispering & mumbling] … And you don’t have to have a doctorate in psychology to understand the difference.

Someone like Angelina Jordan, I think the only way she could communicate this type of emotion is she is so emotionally articulate. And this is something which is hinted about by some of her admirers and some of her fans, but without great detail and without fully understanding the implications.

Because she has such a wide range of complex emotions, which are right there at her fingertips all the time. it’s a gift. This is an absolute gift. And the artistic creativity aspect of it is she’s able to inject that into her music and to communicate that. And this is an aspect of Angelina Jordan.

And it then reaches us in a special and unique way, which makes it just absolutely unique in what she does.

Pontus: Is it a gift? Maybe it’s not always good to be this emotional or have this… I mean, somebody said that she was an empath. Do you know that expression empath

Alan: Yeah of course, yes.

Pontus: I didn’t know what that meant. So I looked it up on the internet and I realized I could myself, I could tick a lot of those boxes, for an empath. And an empath is not always a good thing. I mean, there’s stuff like taking on other people’s feelings like it’s your own, even if they’re not happy feelings. She has said that she has suffered from the loss of both of her grandfathers.

Alan: This is the situation of a doctor. The doctor comes home at night and his wife says to him – How can you listen to every one’s problems the whole day? Doesn’t that get to you? Doesn’t that affect you? And the doctor, if he’s a good doctor, to his wife he will say – Well, if I took everyone’s problems on as my own, then I could not do the work that I do, but I have to make a separation.

Now, Angelina Jordan she is now only 15 years old, maybe she hasn’t quite developed that type of filter or that type of barrier.

But in English we say it is better to have loved and lost and to never have loved at all. And the translation of that in this situation means it is better to maximize your feelings. And she has the gift of being sound enough and together enough and well brought up enough to keep her emotional world in perspective and to keep it in balance.

And so, although the emotional intensity is at a very high level. She is very balanced with it. So in many ways she has the best of both worlds. So when she is happy, she is ecstatically happy.

I actually believe she is very emotionally articulate in a way that very few other people are. And I think that is one of the extraordinary things, which make her really, really special.

Pontus: My very first reaction to anything, was Angelina’s Million Miles and it made me think a lot about the loss of my father. He passed away 2011 and I hadn’t thought about him for a long time and I hadn’t cried for a long time, but that sort of made me go into that state that it was okay to cry.

And I told my wife, I had a good cry over my dad. That is sort of her goal with that song. Isn’t it? That sort of help us in our, or grieving in a way.

Alan: And also one of the things that you and I have discussed, what we are trying to communicate, we are trying to discuss how Angelina Jordan makes us a better person. And if she can put you in touch with a wider range of feeling, even if it might be unhappy, then we are a more complete person. We are a more complete human being.

Pontus: And of course, when someone passes, you’re supposed to grieve and have a good cry. I mean, it’s not good for, if you don’t have that. I had a friend of mine who’s mother passed away and he didn’t cry or anything. And his wife said to him – just you wait, it will come. And then he almost passed out a few weeks later because it all came crushing down on him at once instead.

Alan: If you own a house and you’ve had it for 20 or 30 years, you’re still making constant changes to the house.
You’re adding a room or you’re painting it, or putting in central heating, you’re making constant refinements to improve the house that you live in.

And it’s the same of what you can do inside of yourself. You’re making constant little changes to either make yourself more happy or to maximize how you feel or to understand when and why you are feeling sad or upset.

You know? So what we do outside really has a symbolic parallel of what we can do inside. And no one discusses this. This is something which is simply not discussed. We are so focused on what lies outside of our skin. I’m not a psychologist, but you don’t need to be a psychologist to understand how you are feeling at any given moment.

Pontus: There is something addictive about listening to Angelina the other day I listened again for the millionth time on I’m a Fool to Want You. And when I listened to that song, it makes me wonder about how it is possible to, invoke those feelings by just simply phrasing or the tone of voice or even the quality of a voice. How that is possible to give me such deep emotions?

That, that is, that is the mystery to me.

Alan: I completely agree with that. This is the magic of music. But, you know, if you saw a movie where you cried at the movie if you see it three times or five times, will you cry every time? The answer is probably not because you get used to it, you understand what’s coming, et cetera.

But with Angelina Jordan, with her singing that doesn’t wear off. And that for me is a profound mystery and that makes her extraordinarily special. I can think of no other art form or phenomena, which keeps on renewing itself with that same emotional intensity.

Pontus: Yeah. I mean, it’s almost like when you listen to one of her songs for the first time, and then you go on repeat, the feeling almost intensifies each listen afterwards. You really get more and more emotional the more you listen to it.

Alan: I mean, for example, if you’re a fan of classical music and you really like Beethoven’s fifth. And it moves you greatly, but then after hearing it five times or 10 times, you’ll still like it, but you won’t be moved in the same way.

Pontus: No.

Alan: In a way I’m comparing Angelina Jordan to Beethoven, but Angelina Jordan doesn’t wear off.

She just doesn’t wear off.

The only explanation I can come up with is it’s not just the emotion she portrays, but it’s how she is constructed to portray that level of emotion. And, you know, she has a gift which is a musical gift, but she also has a gift, which is an emotional gift and she translates that.

She’s translates her emotional integrity or delineation, call it what you will, and she translates that into music and she then is able to create the ripple in the pond.

Pontus: Yeah. It’s not only sort of a wow effect or that you’re awe struck or anything like that. It’s also like an intelligent feeling I get when I listened to her. How can somebody make that choice to do that word in a way that it sounds like that, and that brings the emotion to me?

There are moments throughout a song where I can really sense this is the moment that triggers me to have this emotional response. It’s like, what do you call them, the Pavlov dogs?

Alan: Yeah. Well, I remember hearing Bohemian Rhapsody, maybe 20 times in the first four or five days. And the first once or twice, I didn’t cry, but then after the third or fourth time, I started crying. And even now, if I don’t hear it for two or three weeks, It will still bring tears to my eyes, even though I’ve heard it now, dozens and dozens of times.

Pontus: And I’ve listened quite a bit to the album she released when she was, I think she was 11. It’s called It’s Magic. Those songs that she has on that album, they are really, really varied. That’s the thing too, she can sound very different.

I mean, on that album there’s It’s a Man’s World, which is of course so powerful and so soulful when she does it.

And then there’s I’m a Fool to Want You. That is really almost like intimate or something.

And also songs like, what’s it called? Miss Lonely. Have you heard that?

Alan: Yeah, Mr Lonely by Bobby Vinton.

Pontus: Yeah exactly! And she’s made it Miss Lonely instead, which actually works better if you hear the lyrics. Mr. Lonely doesn’t work as good as Miss Lonely.

I mean, take those three as an example of how varied they are in the tone and in the emotion that they put through. And she just nailes them. All of them.

Alan: The opposite of Angelina Jordan fans are the people who are a little bit sceptical. They say, well, she’s only a child and she doesn’t have life experience. So how can she really do the full, proper rendition of a song without the life experience?

And I’m not sure I can answer that, but she does.

Pontus: Yeah, exactly! Somehow she has the ability to connect the lyrics and the music in a way that really is the proper, the optimal way to deliver that song with feeling. It’s quite remarkable.

Alan: I have no doubt that Angelina Jordan has received a very special type of unconditional love throughout her years, and that has shaped her in such a way that she wants to…

You know, it’s like a philanthropist. He accumulates wealth, and then he wants to give it back. Angelina Jordan has stored unconditional love. She understands it from within, and she has this feeling and she wants to communicate it back to people, to make it part of their common currency and part of their everyday life. And that is such a high level of art to have that vision.

Whatever concept you have around universal love, however you can communicate it to people is one of the highest thing that you can do in your life.

Pontus: Yeah, really. It’s almost like she’s invented her own art form now. The art form of communicating universal love through music and changing people’s lives.

Alan: Well, everyone focuses on the music. But you and I have decided to do this podcast because she has invented a new art form and because she has changed people’s lives. And that’s what we want to talk about. We want to talk about how peoples lives have changed. And we want to talk about how this art form impacts people, because as far as I’m concerned, this is really completely new ground.

I mean, there are great, great singers. You know, Whitney Houston or Frank Sinatra, there’s so many great singers over the last 50 or a hundred years. But she’s not completely relying on the music. The music is the vehicle, but it’s the pot of gold, at the end of the music, which we’re trying to put a spotlight on.

Pontus: Yeah. The gold within us.

Alan: Yes, and it’s a constantly evolving gold as well. It’s not a fixed amount. It’s not a fixed sparkle. And every one will have a different experience of that pot of gold.

And that’s really what this podcast is about, is to hear the nature of how people experience this pot of gold inside of them.

– – –

Alan: I have an idea Pontus that maybe for our next podcast, maybe we should do Angelina to Jordan again. What do you think of that?

Pontus: Yeah, let’s do that.

Alan: Because you know, there’s limited and then there’s unlimited. So let’s go for the unlimited option.

Pontus: Okay.

Alan: Okay, you take care, Pontus.

Pontus: Yeah you too, Alan.

Alan: Okay, bye.