Pontus: Hi Alan.

Alan: Hi Pontus and hi Dave.

Dave: Hi, Alan and Pontus. Nice to be with you.

Pontus: So you’re an Angelina fan, are you?

Dave: Big, big Angelina fan. Yes. Discovered both of you gentlemen, through watching YouTube reaction videos. I had never seen a reaction video prior to discovering Angelina and then discovering that part of the singing music world.

Pontus: I think you should talk a little bit more about us, how good we are. Nah, I’m just kidding.

Dave: That will be another podcast.

Pontus: yeah.

Alan: So, Dave when did you first come across Angelina Jordan?

Dave: It was prior to when she was going to film ATG [America’s Got Talent] that fall of ’19, right. Something else that I was doing got me to child prodigies and I, somehow typed that in and I came across a couple of other artists that you might be familiar with Amira Willighagen, who’s an opera singer from Holland and Alma Deutscher who’s a composer prodigy from England. And then here pops up this seven-year-old ragamuffin singing on NGT [Norway’s got Talent] and just floored me. So that was the start of it. Gloomy Sunday was the first one I saw.

Pontus: Yeah, that’s a good start.

Alan: So let’s talk about your definition of the word floored. I know what it means in boxing, but let’s define it in terms of Angelina.

Dave: Very unexpected to have that depth of emotion and soul and voice tone come out of a child. So your jaw just kind of hung open there and I’m like, what am I, what am I seeing? What am I listening to? Couldn’t believe it. And I went down the rabbit hole.

Alan: The type of thing that Pontus and I are hoping to focus on is to talk about how long you kept getting floored. And with each new song that you heard of Angelina, if you were still being floored, or if you were being floored in a different direction?

Dave: if I can recall, I was in a really bad place emotionally at the time, which I think played a huge part in why I was so enamoured in the first place and then continued… I don’t know that if I hadn’t been where I was in my life at that time if it would have impacted me in the same way, I’m not sure. Because of my emotional state and the time that I had to continue experiencing more songs from her. Each song was so different. That was the other thing that, that fascinated me was you didn’t know what you were going to get and you still don’t.

Pontus: It’s like a box of chocolates.

Dave: Exactly, The old saying, right? So that was interesting in itself to discover what she was going to do next.

Alan: I came across a video just three days ago, which I hadn’t heard before. And I’ve heard it four times now. And each time I’m still crying, it’s just remarkable. I have to pinch myself.

Dave: There’s many of them were, I think just by your own experience you can associate and get that connection somehow. Which I think is the most fascinating thing with her. I don’t know where that other world she talks about going to is. She’s some kind of a conduit from not only the artists she covers I think, but to the listeners that can relate to that experience and makes it personal somehow to you.

Alan: Pontus also has said that when he listens to Angelina, whatever sadness he’s experiencing, pretty much evaporate.

Dave: She can definitely change your mood. If you’re sad and you hear one of her or sad songs you can feel that. And increase your sadness too if you want to let it happen and not keep it in. This morning, I watched Ceci Dover’s reaction to You Are Always On My Mind about her grandfather. And I teared up again. I mean every time…
I just lost my dad a year and a half ago, you know? And part of this journey that I’ve been on the last couple of years has been tough. So she’s been a very solid support in a way, to make you feel better.

Alan: We’re trying to understand the interplay between her music and the mood we’re in and how that mood changes and how often it changes. You don’t get used to it. You can hear the same thing over and over again, and you can still have the same emotional reaction. And for me that’s mind boggling. For me, I have to redefine everything just for that reason alone.

Dave: I’m curious about what factors cause those things to happen too, inside of you. And the kind of person that we think she is, that we have come to understand she is plays into the sincerity, I think that that you get from her. To think that somebody really is who they are and say they are, is I think, appealing and attracting.

Alan: A lot of the fans really place great praise on her family for bringing her up as well as they have. It’s not just that she’s polite and courteous. It’s that she has great insight into the values that usually only adults have and what is important in life. And she’s incorporated that into her being and also into her music. And the fact that she’s able to translate all of that and recycle it and display that in her music is also really incredible. Really incredible.

Pontus: It’s very seldom that you get that kind of honesty. And confidence, and also at the same time being humble, that’s a very strange combination, being both confident and humble at the same time. That is something that I now strive to be myself.

Dave: I try to be a little bit more compassionate. With the COVID and the pandemic and all the hardships that everyone’s gone through, you gotta be nice. At least I’m trying to be. I’m sure she’s had some part in that as well. Just as the timing with everything that has happened.
Her shield obviously is still in place, because she’s 15 years old now. Where she is at in LA and the exposure to life and people and experiences that are going to happen over the next several years will be very interesting to see, if she stays who she is. I mean, we all change. And a lot of it’s based on your environment, right? Who you’re around and who you’re with. And that’ll be fascinating to watch.

Alan: There’s an expression in the English language: Give me the boy till the age six and I’ll make the man.
The foundations that are laid down in the first few years are so formative for the rest of your life. This is why I’m optimistic for her future because she is so solid, in terms of her integrity, that I can not imagine how that’s going to be compromised. I think that her integrity will remain intact.

Dave: We’ve all seen the train wrecks happen to other celebrities in whatever field and the child stars and, you know…

Pontus: There’s a little voice in the back of my head that says: This cannot last. Soon it’s going to end because this is too good to be true.
And I think that plays also into the feeling that you have when, when you start wondering, I wonder if this is going to last or if this will really be good for her.

Alan: The other thing I find fascinating is, some people when they come in at night the first thing they’ll do is they’ll have a glass of wine or they may have a gin and tonic. Just to unwind and relax. But the way you and I and others, we open up the computer and we listened to Angelina Jordan as the equivalent of changing our whole mental framework.

Dave: Yeah, I absolutely would agree with that. If you listen to her and have a whiskey, you’re in really good place. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Alan: It’s called the double shot that.

Pontus: Is there any other sector in your life, you think Dave that has been affected by listening to Angelina?

Dave: Well, I haven’t found anyone else that have the same effect. She has that “it”, whatever that “it” is, that everybody tries to define. That she can make that emotional soul to soul connection. That I’ve never found with anyone else.

Alan: It’s amazing that thousands of people all around the world say exactly the same thing. And I mean, it’s affected me. First of all, I never ever would have considered starting a YouTube channel for any other situation or person or phenomena other than Angelina. I mean, she’s actually driven me to start a YouTube channel not just as a matter of promoting her, but I want to have a channel where I’m actually thinking out loud. How is she doing this? And what is she doing? And I’m trying to give examples all around that.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would’ve never been talking to you guys or have joined Facebook fan groups, right? Yeah, she has caused myself to do things I wasn’t doing. And I think definitely for the better, right? She’s creating a global community with a shared interest and that’s fantastic.

Alan: I’m not a doctor. I don’t understand anatomy the way a doctor does, but I reckon that the connection between the ear and the brain is closer than between the eye and the brain. Because I think when something reaches the ear, some sound, it must have a more direct access to the brain than even seeing something visually.

Dave: You can hear music and not see the artist. I mean, growing up, we never saw the artists, right? You were listening to a record or a tape or a CD. Yeah, you can get all those emotions just by listening. You don’t have to see, at least for me. I can understand that.

Alan: And so many professional singers are driven by the career factor, by the commerce, by the fame and fortune. With Angelina Jordan it’s just such an organic talent that she had when she was 2 and 3 and 4, that the commercial aspect is very, very secondary. She is in that sense a very, very pure artist.

Dave: Absolutely. And I had peripherally listened to some jazz over the years, but I’ve really come to appreciate the music, and good music more than I ever have in the past. She’s caused me to listen, not only to her singing, but to the the musicians that she plays with. And really gives you an appreciation for what, I think good music is. And not the electronically created stuff we hear that seems to dominate the Grammy’s and all those things now, that I refuse to watch.

Alan: I have found over the last year or so from listening to Angelina Jordan, I am more emotional. I feel like I have a wider range of emotions. They’re more to the surface. And it’s sort of, I’ve had to evolve as a person because of my evolving relationship with my own emotional world.

Dave: I would agree with that, totally. It causes some introspective on your part to try to understand what you’re feeling And I think I’ve tried to be more expressive and more open. I’ve always been really kind of… kept everything in and just have really kind of changed a lot over the last couple of years with the experiences that I’ve gone through personally. And so she’s definitely helped me feel better.

Alan: Yeah, she’s like a very finely created drug that we take, which is perfectly legal. The way one really experiences Angelina is not between the ears. We experience her almost like viscerally, in our organs. And that’s really when it gets difficult to put into words.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. There’s some internal… something that happens.

Alan: The other thing I cannot get over is compared to everyone else, she pretty much has a monopoly on what she does. I cannot compare her… You know, people will say Oh, well, this singer is a great singer, or Have you heard this song? But what we are describing in a way is a different vocabulary. We’re talking about something beyond that.

Dave: The storytelling, the emotion, the empathy, it’s an amazing gift.

Pontus: Yeah, it really is. And also, I mean the variety that she can bring. I mean, she can do a song and It sounds a little bit like Amy Winehouse and then she can do a song and sound a little bit like Elvis Presley. And then she can sound like Billy holiday. So it goes, on and on. It’s amazing.

Dave: It is. And I noticed right off, when I heard her first three originals, What is Life, Oslo and Shield. I’m like, this is three different people, three different styles, genres being expressed by one person. You can play them individually and think it was three totally different artists. And yet they all touch you in their own way.

Alan: I used to have a chess coach and I would be playing a game and I would be studying a move for 10 minutes and he would walk by without stopping and understand the position and the move better than I could after studying for 10 minutes. And Angelina is like that with music. She can hear something for five seconds or 10 seconds and completely take it in and absorb it on a different level that we cannot even talk about.

Dave: Yeah, she IS music. It’s in her DNA, right?

Pontus: Yeah, I think she takes it in, into her own world that she speaks about and some magic happens there in that world that we will never see, I think. But we hear the result of it when she comes out with those songs that she does so brilliantly.

Dave: Yeah. What a great place that must be. If you could somehow experience it, what she’s experiencing when she’s singing, that would be amazing.

Pontus: Yeah, it almost makes you want to sing, really.

Dave: I’ve always wanted to sing, but I can’t.

Pontus: Well maybe she can teach us.

Dave: There’s a lot of the vocal coaches that offer.

Alan: But she’s teaching us something so much better. She’s teaching us to feel. She’s teaching us to expand how we feel. And you know if we’re sad, she makes us less sad. And if we’re happy, she makes us more happy. So it’s a win-win situation.
She’s so continuously creative and original in how she understands a song and how she interprets it. It’s almost like seeing something or hearing something for the first time. If she sings a love song, it might’ve been a song I didn’t like. But then when I hear her sing it, then I understand it and suddenly it makes sense to me.

Dave: When she takes whatever song it is to her world, it’s like she understands what the song was supposed to be, what it was always meant to be. Regardless of who created it in the beginning, she interprets it and transforms it into something that connects with you, somehow.

Alan: She’s speaking a unique language that no one has ever heard before.
It’s so much inside of us, which is a mystery inside of us. The depth of our feeling or the variation of our feeling or the potentials of our feeling. And this is the type of area where Angelina Jordan has a special key. And she allows us to borrow the key for short moments in our life. And we can open a little door and see what’s inside and it’s a great adventure.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the first artist I’ve ever experienced that you can’t wait to see what’s next. I’m glad I found her. I really needed something and she’s definitely helped me a lot.

Alan: We fans are very lucky, that we have been able to tune into what she does and have benefits like this. Some people pay thousands of dollars to be in therapy for years and never reached this point. It’s a fast-forward evolution of personal growth that we go through.

Dave: She’s the first one that has caused me to not just hear the music and hear a song and appreciate it. But to really in depth, try to understand what’s happening. And not just for the talent and the art itself, but why it’s making you feel the way I do.

Pontus: Do you want to share what it was in your life at that point when you discovered her? Or is that too personal?

Dave: No, that’s fine. So, two years ago coming up in next month ended a 35 year marriage. So divorce. About the same time I was putting my dad into assisted living.

Pontus: Oh, that’s bad.

Dave: So two pretty traumatic things going on at the same time. And then he passed away in December of 2019. And then I had to move my mom out of their home and into a house closer to where I’m at. So yeah, it’s been a rough couple of years.

Pontus: I’m sorry for your loss.

Dave: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it’s just, you know, what life that we all experience. That is what people talk about that is so amazing with Angelina’s that empathy or that understanding. To emote those feelings and the sense of experiences that she could never have lived. Even though now we know she’s suffered quite a few losses from friends and family, that she definitely is able to pull from. Million Miles being biggest example.

Alan: One of the other songs she wrote What is Life? Okay, she talks about maybe it’s going to school or maybe it’s learning to play the piano or playing with your sister, but just the title alone. What is life? When we begin to answer that question for ourselves, it gives us a perspective that maybe we’ve not had before.
I have so much respect for her and her team, how they show what she’s been through while at the same time she’s showing her strengths and being positive. And she’s almost offering us a blueprint of how to get through hard times. Because she’s just giving us a little window into some of the losses that she’s had. While at the same time, that allows us to have an opportunity of: Right. Well, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I can get to the other side and I can get through this.

Dave: The Anthem for that thought exactly, is 7th Heaven, right? Life should be lived with hope. And the lyrics of that song are amazing. I love that song. The point of that song is how to cope with it and to keep moving forward.

Alan: Yeah, it’s so simple and it’s so basic, but for so many people it’s so elusive. Because when things are going bad emotionally, it could be like you’ve gone too far out in the ocean and the water is in over your head and you’re being swept over with all the waves. But in a way she’s throwing us a life jacket.

Dave: And why is a 15 year old girl from Norway the messenger? This I find fascinating, right? I guess we never know where it’s going to come from, but this… Obviously unexpected.