Danish composer Nanna Øland Fabricius, better known as Oh Land, has just released “Brief Moment,” the second single off her much anticipated album Family Tree, out May 3rd.
Oh Land on the single: "Brief Moment was recorded in New York withthomasBartlett, and Adi Zukanovic did a symphony orchestra arrangement for Budapest Art Orchestra for it.
"The verse melody was actually something my son kept singing while he was playing one day and then later that day, I ran around the lakes in my neighborhood and wrote all the lyrics for it. It’s about unexpected love and a video I once saw, of fishes making beautiful patterns in the sea beds- just to attract a partner."
Produced by Thomas Bartlett (St. Vincent, Florence & the Machine, The National), the new album is a departure from her earlier work, and is far more personal than anything she’s ever released. “Since the release of my latest album, I've experienced the biggest ups and downs of my private life,” she explains. “I had a baby, moved back to Denmark after living in NYC for ten years, and got a divorced -- all in the span of 18 months. Everything I’d been working on musically suddenly seemed unimportant relative to the new situation I was coping with. So I ditched all the songs and recordings I’d been working on and started writing from the uncertainty of where I was.”
The process of writing and recording the album proved therapeutic for Nanna. “I never planned to make this album,” she notes, “but in these melodies and music I’ve found some healing… As I have often found it, music is the best listener when you pour your heart out.”
Oh Land also composes music for film, theater, and the classical music world, playing with Lang Lang and Joshua Bell at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and orchestrating concerts for the Danish Symphony Orchestra in her native country of Denmark. She collaborated with the Queen of Denmark to create a ballet for the Danish Theatre (2016); created the music for Watermusic, a multimedia performance for over 15,000 people at Randers Harbor combining architecture, dance and music (2017), as well as creating the musical score for the exhibition “The Ship” at Nikolaj Kunsthal in collaboration with Eske Kath. Most recently she reimagined the Danish National Anthem as a dark, dystopian theme song for the new Netflix sci-fi hit “The Rain”.
