Monday, January 10, 2011

Bizarre coincidences from Andy’s birthday party

January 10

You might recall that I went to an Icelandic fashion show the other day. I neglected to mention that there was a singer at the show, too. He just sang one song and it was hard to hear over the audience, which completely ignored him. I didn’t catch his name, and so I just let it go.

Then, there he was, sitting across from me on Saturday at my good friend Andy Battaglia’s birthday party.

He was Andy’s house guest, you see.

It turns out that he’s Snorri Helgason, a musician of some note in Iceland, where he’s the lead singer of a bang called Sprengjuhöllin.

Snorri lives in London, released a solo album in late 2009 and is doing some performances in the U.S. I’m not sure why he’s staying with Andy, but Andy is a music writer of some note (and the proud owner of two ukuleles), so it all makes sense in a way.

After we finished drinking at The Roebling Inn (I drank a fairly dark IPA from the Hudson Valley called Hurricane Kitty), we went back to the apartment of Andy and his girlfriend, Jennifer Prediger, and Snorri and fellow band member Atli Bollason (sitting on the far left in the video), who was visiting from Montreal, performed a song that I managed to find on YouTube and posted here.

It’s called “Worry till Spring” in English, but in Icelandic it’s “Verum í Sambandi,” which consular official Hlynur Gudjonsson tells me means “let’s stay in touch.”




More small-world stuff from the party: Andy’s girlfriend Jennifer is a documentary producer, among other things, and at Andy’s party I learned that she produced my friend Rachel Wharton’s “Let’s Eat” spots on NY1.

I often say that it’s not really a small world. In fact, it’s a big world with more than six billion people and encompassing every experience that every human being has ever had. Indeed, the world is not just the world, for most practical purposes it’s our entire universe. It’s huge.

But really, it’s a small world.


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