LOUIEN we touched base with just a matter of days back, in an ensemble sense, when she lined up alongside Siv Jakobsen and The Northern Belle for the Nordicana loveliness of “No Rush”, bringing three-part harmonies to a chiming beauty of a tune reminding us to take care of each other.
Now Miranda Solberg (for Louien is she) has returned to pursue her own, rather fine rootsy trail; she’s putting out an EP, No Tomorrow, on Oslo’s Jansen Records on June 4th; and she’s released the lead single from that, “Better Woman”.
Hailing from Nesodden, a peninsula in the Oslo fjord south of the capital, Louien first emerged in 2019 with an album, None Of My Words, which dealt with the trauma of her father’s death. She found some catharsis and closure, and No Tomorrow sees her facing forward and living now.
“Better Woman” is bold, driving, confident country rock; “We deserve to work this through / This isn’t who we wanna be,” she holds forth, before warmly overdriven guitars make their entrance and the song moves into a pop exultance, six strings thrumming and strings swirling.
“[It’s] about an argument between a woman and her partner, someone she’s in love with, but [who] she doesn’t know how to get through to,” Miranda says.
“So she blames it on her lack as a woman; that she isn’t good enough, warm enough, funny enough. She wishes she didn’t have so many feelings. Maybe she even wishes she was a man.”
Elsewhere on the EP expect more folky stylings and even nods, stylistically, to Courtney Marie Andrews and Gillian Welch.
Miranda says of the EP: “I wanted to play around a bit more, not take myself or the songs too seriously as the debut was very heavy and took years to write.
“I mean, writing a thoroughly happy song might still be out of my reach, but I’m trying to get more than one perspective in there,” she concludes.
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