Tag: Lucky Lo

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Lo Ersare is a Umeå, Sweden-born, Copenhagen-based singer/songwriter and musician, best known as Lucky Lo. Ersare relocated to Copenhagen in 2014 and quickly made a name for herself as a busker and as an integral part of the city’s underground music scene, performing everything from folk to experimental jazz to improvisational vocal music. Throughout the years, her love for Japan and its music and culture has brought her to the island nation, where she has performed a number of times, grown a devoted fanbase and has gathered inspiration, which naturally has seeped into her music.

Supercarry Ersare’s full-length debut was released earlier this year through Tambourhinoceros Records. The album featured “Heart Rhythm Synchronize,” a song about synching heartbreaks through love and song. I’ve personally written about two other album singles:

  • Album title track “Supercarry,” a sleek and seamless synthesis of Annie Lennox and Peter Gabriel, that thematically finds Ersare quickly establishing a major thematic concern in her work — the transformational power of radical love.
  • “Ever,” a swooning and infectiously optimistic pop song centered around glistening synth arpeggios, a strutting disco-inspired bass line, shimmering and reverb-drenched guitars, a rousingly anthemic hook and Ersare’s plaintive pop belter vocals. Arguably, the most dance floor friendly of the album’s released singles, “Ever!” brings Talking Heads, and Annie Lennox to mind paired with the euphoria of Sylvester‘s queer anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” 

Supercarry has received praise from the likes of KCRW, Clash Magazine, Amazing Radio, Radio Eins, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, The Revue, Swedish P3 and P4, BR Puls, Gaffa Denmark, P6 Beat, NRK, and others. 

Ersare closes out a big year with the standalone single, and Supercarry follow-up, “I Will Always Be You.” Centered around the Swedish-born, Danish-based artist’s gorgeous and expressive vocal literally dancing over a buoyant, ebullient production featuring propulsive and pulsating percussion, ambient electronics, looping Afrobeat-like guitar, enormous, euphoria-inducing hooks and a subtle nod to Bulgarian folk music, inspired by her childhood in Sweden: Her mother used to play Bulgarian folk music on the home studio when Ersare was a girl.

The song invites the listener to remember the playfulness, imagination and lightness of childhood, to take care of yourself — and to find that same childhood playfulness, imagination and lightness in adult life. “Children’s gut feeling is more intact and they are great at following their intuition. When we grow up, we tend to forget our ability to listen to what our body and subconscious are trying to communicate”  Lo Ersare explains. 

“I would encourage people to take a break and look back at their childhood. What can we learn from it?” says Lo Ersare, who personally experienced how gut instinct and immediacy took over when “I Will Always Be You” was created in the studio. 

“We were in a situation of trying to be serious adults. But it evolved into an experiment where we let ourselves be childlike, playful and humorous. We went with our gut feeling and instantaneous nature, which succeeded in evolving into this track”, Ersare says of the first days in the studio with producers Frederik and Fridolin Nordsø, who later continued the same process with Lucky Lo’s drummer Casper Henning Hansen and guitarist Mads Nørgaard.

Ultimately. the song is a loving tribute to the intuition of magic and childhood and a call to bring that magic into adulthood. It’s also a call to push boundaries wherever possible and not put restraints on yourself. And it’s a reminder to “find your way home, to find your way within,” the Swedish-born, Danish-based artist explains — both in everyday life and in tense situations. It’s often necessary to take a breath, rewind the tape and feel from the beginning.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Lucky Lo Releases a Swooning and Euphoric Anthem to Queer Love

Lo Ersare is a Umeå, Sweden-born, Copenhagen-based singer/songwriter, musician, and the creative mastermind behind the emerging indie pop project Lucky Lo. Ersare relocated to Copenhagen in 2014 and quickly made a name for herself as a busker and as an integral part of the city’s underground music scene, performing everything from folk to experimental jazz to improvisational vocal music. Along the way, her love for Japan and its music brought her to the island nation, where she has performed, grown a devoted fanbase and gathered inspiration, which has seeped into her music in various ways.

Ersare’s full-length debut, Supercarry is slated for a March 25, 2022 release through Tambourhinoceros Records. The album will feature previously released single “Heart Rhythm Synchronize,” which was about synching heartbreaks through love and song and album title track “Supercarry,” a sleek and seamless synthesis of Annie Lennox and Peter Gabriel, that thematically finds Ersare quickly establishing a major thematic concern in her work — the transformational power of radical love.

Supercarry’s latest single, “Ever” is a swooning and infectiously optimistic pop song centered around glistening synth arpeggios, a strutting disco-inspired bass line, shimmering and reverb-drenched guitars, a rousingly anthemic hook and Ersare’s plaintive pop belter vocals. Arguably, the most dance floor friendly of the album’s released singles, “Ever!” brings Talking Heads, and Annie Lennox to mind paired with the euphoria of Sylvester‘s queer anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

Lyrically, the song’s narrator has found a way to transform the hardships of living in a cruel and judgmental world that won’t allow them to be themselves into a deep, sustaining hope and confidence; the sort of quiet confidence to be self-assured in whatever your truth may be. As Ersare explains the song is an anthem for queer love.

The inspiration for the song began deep inside a YouTube rabbit hole. Ersara was binging on Freddie Mercury videos one night. That eventually lead to her researching the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, and the blacklash of homophobia the gay community felt back then.

She came across a video of a gay man, who bravely announced to a reporter that no amount of homophobia could keep gay people from loving each other that struck her as timeless. Since the dawn of society, gay people have been — and will keep on — loving in secret, despite antagonism, until the world eventually accepts them.

This video resonated with the Umeå-born, Copenhagen-based artist, who was then inspired to make a song for “anybody, who feels they are living a truth in secret can listen to, dance to, and feel that they will be accepted. By repeating the motion, it’s going to change the world,” she says.

Animated by Isabelle Friberg, the recently released video is a life affirming love song: We follow the video’s protagonists, who have a meet cute at local bowling alley and fall madly in love. They represent the love that man in the 80s video clip talked about. And while we get a glimpse into their lives and their love, we see Ersare and her band performing the song, while looking like characters straight out of Jem. The video manages to be brightly colored, overwhelmingly positive and a sweet visual that emphasizes the song’s swooning euphoria.