Eivør Pálsdóttir


Eivør Pálsdóttir, known professionally as Eivør, is a Faroese singer-songwriter with a distinctive voice and a wide range of interests in various music genres spanning rock, jazz, folk, pop, and European classical music. Her musical roots are in the Faroese ballads.
Many of her songs are in Faroese, some are in Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, and the most recent are in English.

Career

Eivør was born in Syðrugøta, Faroe Islands. At 13 she had her first performance on Faroese television and won a national singing contest the same year. In 1999, at the age of 15, Eivør joined the rock band Clickhaze.
One year later, in 2000, she released her first album, Eivør Pálsdóttir. It is a mixture of classical Faroese ballads accompanied only by guitar and bass with jazz influences, and songs based on texts by famous Faroese writers, together with songs written by Eivør herself. By this time she was already a professional musician.
In 2001 she won the national Faroese band contest with her band Clickhaze Prix Føroyar. In 2002 Eivør moved to Reykjavík to study classical and jazz music. A mentor of the Faroese music scene, Kristian Blak, asked her to be the lead singer for the jazz group – Yggdrasil, which released its first album the same year.
Well known as a jazz performer, she released a rock album with Clickhaze the same summer, thus again proving her wide range. Clickhaze made a very successful tour of the Faroes, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Greenland.
After her second solo album, Krákan, there occurred possibly the most important event in her career with her nomination in 2003 for the Icelandic Music Awards in no fewer than three categories. She was awarded best singer and best performer – normally only given to Icelandic artists.
Educated as a classical vocalist, Eivør also sings with the Faroese symphony orchestra and sang solo in Kristian Blak's 2004 opera Firra.
Her album eivør from November 2004, featuring the Canadian Bill Bourne, sold well in the U.S. and Canada. Bourne's contribution with acoustic guitar gave the project an American country flavour, with Eivør contributing several songs in Faroese. In Iceland it was again in the charts, and was nominated for the Icelandic Music Award, together with an album by Björk, though neither was successful.
On 9 February, Eivør was named Faroese of the year 2004 – being the first person to ever bear this title – for "Putting the Faroe Islands on the map in a positive way with her songs".
On 7 March 2005, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation big band issued its 40th anniversary album. All titles on that CD are written and sung by Eivør. Once again she was honored in Iceland on 16 June with the national theatre award Gríma for her composing and performance in the piece Úlfhamssaga, based on the Norse sagas.
Eivør's 5th album Human Child was produced by Dónal Lunny and was issued in an English and a Faroese version under the title Mannabarn. It was released on 18 July 2007 in the Faroes. The album was recorded throughout 2006 and early 2007 in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. This was followed by an Irish tour in Summer 2007. The album charted on the Tracklisten, the official Danish Albums Chart.
In 2008, Eivør collaborated with the English classical composer Gavin Bryars on Tróndur i Gøtu, a work for two voices – hers and that of Faroese bass Rúni Brattaberg – choir and chamber orchestra, based on a 10th-century Faroese saga hero. It was performed in Gøtu, Faroe Islands on 12 July 2008. She has recently worked with Gavin Bryars again on a chamber opera Marilyn Forever based on Marilyn Monroe, with libretto by Marilyn Bowering and produced by Aventa in which Eivør played the leading role. Parts of this were developed during a workshop in Banff, Canada in June 2010 and two scenes were performed there on 12 June 2010. The opera was performed in Victoria British Columbia at the McPherson Theatre in September 2013 produced by Aventa, and with co-star Thomas Sandberg.
Eivør's 2010 album Larva presented a new side of Eivør, as she moves away from the folk sound of recent years into a more experimental and raw musical style. It included haunting renditions of arrangements by Faroe Islands classical composer, Tróndur Bogason, the Icelandic string quartet Kaputt, the Faroese choir Mpiri and a children's choir from Eivør's hometown of Gøta.
In 2012 she married the Faroese composer Tróndur Bogason; they worked together with her album Room, which won huge acclaim and made her win three awards, "Best female singer" and "Best artist" and "Best album of the Year" during the Planet Awards. In 2013 she released a single "Dansaðu vindur", a cover of the 1996 Swedish Eurovision song "Den vilda" by One More Time with new lyrics. The song charted in Iceland.
In 2015, Eivør released two albums, Bridges and Slør, where the former was sung exclusively in English and the latter in her native tongue, Faroese. Eivør only meant to make one album sung in English, which ended up being Bridges, but she got so inspired during the writing of it to do a Faroese "sister" album that she ended up doing two albums instead of one. As she put it in an interview with stacjaislandia.pl, "My next album SLØR. It´s a sister release to Bridges. All lyrics are written in the same period as the songs on Bridges, only the lyrics in SLØR are in my native language Faroese. While I was writing the songs they kept coming to me in such a manner that I would write a lyric in English and straight afterwards a lyric in Faroese would arrive – a kind of mirror image or reflection. Most of the songs were written together in pairs. The albums are therefore two different works yet also a unity. This has been my dream project for over 2 years now."
In 2016, Eivør appeared at the start of the E3 2016 Sony Press Conference where she along with the live orchestra performed the theme to the God of War video game.

Discography

Albums