It was in the beautiful natural setting of the Pickathon Music Festival that KEXP DJ Kevin Cole discovered Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren. Pickathon is where Norgren made his U.S. debut back in 2016 with a goosebump-inducing performance so stunning the fest invited him back in 2018. With his rootsy, meditative sound, he's a perfect fit for the Oregon-based outdoor music fest where stages are adorned by tree branches and audience members sit on bales of hay. Cole himself said, "I gotta tell you, I really get what everyone is talking about. In his live show he just really takes it to the next level, connecting with everyone. At his set at the Woods stage, I looked around and he just had the audience in tears.”
In his native country, Norgren is an established artist, up to album #8 in his discography. That upcoming octo-release Wooh Dang will be his first ever worldwide release. Today at 3:00 PM PST on The Afternoon Show, Kevin Cole premieres the track "Let Love Run The Game." Hear it again below.
The song was inspired by Norgren's daily walks around his home in rural western Sweden: "I’ve written the songs on Wooh Dang in the woods where I walk. I need nature to function – always been a country boy – and when I say I’ve written the songs in the woods I mean, I’ve written all the songs on a trail in the woods… haven’t added a single word outside that one trail. Songs usually come naturally out there."
The album came naturally, too, recorded in a single room of a 19th-century textile farmhouse in the woods near his home. “The interior looked it hadn’t been touched for the past 80 years,” Norgren says, via a press release. “I moved a lamp and it left a dark red ring on the pink tablecloth underneath… goldmine! The house was huge, full of good, inspiring mustiness, creaking wooden floors, scary old portrait paintings on the walls, and an old, black German piano which I used in all the songs.”
Wooh Dang will be released worldwide on April 19, 2019, via his own Superpuma Records label.
