What does a Swedish alt-pop singer-songwriter know about life on the Greek artists’ colony of Hydra? Based on her song of the same name, ‘Hydra’, from the 2022 album Mentor, Annika Norlin knows enough to know that she wants to be there. At least, part of her believes that THAT is where she should be, not running around picking up the kids and making dinner and doing all of the mundane things that we all need to do every day to hold onto our lives.
Norlin is not a superstar, but she makes a living writing and playing music and, like the rest of us, trying to keep a creative spark alive without letting it burn her life down.
In ‘Hydra’ we hear the voice of that creative spark, as it berates the rest of the singer’s life. “There you go running and I’m stuck in you, God it’s a nightmare” says the artist’s creative voice to the artist.
“Shouldn’t we be living on Hydra?”, that voice asks, “Wearing white clothes, drinking white wine, sleeping around.”
In the 1950s and 60s, the tiny Greek island of Hydra got a reputation as an artists’ colony. Leonard Cohen is said to have written at least a couple of songs there, and it’s still known as a cultural center.
Getting to a literal island is not really the point. The point is that, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re someone who’s trying to write and express yourself, but you’re squeezing that life into the space between obligations.
This is what we all face — even if you could get to your own version of Hydra for a week, or an afternoon, the mundane demands of daily life will tug on the hem of your robe and call you back to chores, bills, and the grocery store.
On the other hand, I can’t help but opine that the friction between these aspects of life is the paprika in the goulash of the creative process. If things are too easy, when everyone says “yes” to you, when you’re always on the island, how are you relevant to the rest of the world?
There are few movies that mess around with this duality as explicitly as 1981’s My Dinner with Andre, in which struggling playwright Wallace Shawn (played by Wallace Shawn) has dinner with his acquaintance Andre Gregory (played by Andre Gregory). Gregory has just returned from a sojourn that seems to have brought him into contact with some of the wackiest creative minds on the planet, including a monastery in Scotland that’s literally designed around making contact with extraterrestrials.
Gregory’s stories of artistic breakthroughs and inventing new forms of theater in the woods in Poland are almost designed to test the audience’s tolerance of pretentiousness. Wallace Shawn becomes the audience’s proxy, asking Gregory how his high-falutin’ artistic ideas are supposed to connect with a working artist, who has to deal with the million tiny details of living in Manhattan: buying envelopes and rushing to the post office (this was the 80’s, long before there was e-mail). As Shawn says: “The life of a playwright is tough…. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living…. So, you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade.”
Shawn is the one most of us relate to, but you can see how, together, they represent a creative unity: if you could just take parts of both of them, you’d have an artist who was capable of moving their body through space and time to get things done, while their mind was off coming up with new variations on theater in the round (theater in the parallel?).
In “Hydra”, Annika Norlin asks herself: “how good could you get if you lived a poet’s life?” It’s an upbeat song, in spite of its theme of subverting your own life in order to achieve an artistic goal. But I don’t think that the answer for most of us is to escape the friction between the quotidian and the transcendent. Maybe a genius like Leonard Cohen is the minority — the ones for whom the rarefied air of Hydra is not somehow sterilizing.
And this is where it gets meta, because I find Ms. Norlin’s song absolutely stunning, moving even, and it’s not a song that someone living a poet’s life could write, except from memory. I imagine this song being written on scraps of paper while driving around, waiting in line at the grocery store, making dinner, and just before falling asleep. Frankly, that is how I am writing this article, and probably how most of us do most of our writing.
I’ve never taken much nourishment from the adage that “pressure makes diamonds”. It always struck me as something people say when they don’t want to apologize for naked aggression in a professional setting. But it is true that we need a certain amount of stress to perform at our best.
I leave you with this modern music industry fable: in 2005, Leonard Cohen learned that his longtime manager had stolen $5 million from him while he had been tucked away in a Buddhist monastery (Mr. Cohen, not the manager). So in 2008, at the age of 73, he started playing live shows again, which he had always avoided. And it turned out that he loved it and was great at it. Was part of it that being in a monastery for 10 years gave him a new internal foundation? Did he port some of that “retreat” into his “active” life? I would guess the answer is yes.
