the Songs Were Already There: Einar & Freya - Memory, Myth, and Making of Reborn

To Ingrid, Christmas 1948. May this remind you that home is never as far away as memory.A line written inside a secondhand book, by someone nobody can name, to a woman nobody can find. An old bookseller in a Norwegian fishing village gives it away wrapped in brown paper, and two people read it in their car, in the rain, and go quiet.Einar Blackstone spent fifteen years behind a DJ table and eleven in a studio making other people's records better. Freya Hollow's voice was on six years of someone else's albums, with no name attached. They meet at the only free seat in a crowded harbour café, and spend the years that follow driving to places most people drive past: drowned walls, stave churches, a medieval town under a field, a harbour stone with four names on it. The songs come from those roads.Then they make a record, and nobody wants it.What follows is a winter behind a shut door, and the slow work of saying out loud what they have both learned to leave unsaid.Told by both of them, with the parts they got wrong left in, The Songs Were Already There is a novel about love, music and memory on the coast of Norway, and about the small kindnesses we leave for strangers in another century.