Singer/songwriters are at the heart of the pop movement we’re seeing on all corners of the globe right now, and in his new single “Trespassing,” Morten Nygaard gives listeners plenty of reasons to take his style seriously. The passion that he offers his lyrics with is too moving to be artificial, too human to be synthesized, and there isn’t a moment of this performance in which he isn’t presenting in a manner indicative of a true musician uninterested in fleeting trends. This isn’t as experimental as some who listened to his first pair of singles might have hoped, but what it instead offers us is a more complete look at who Nygaard is as a singer, an arranger, and a commanding force ahead of a band.
The lyrics here are implicitly pastoral, but I would stop short of saying they’re folkish in nature. There’s a heady American pop influence over his songwriting technique that is impossible for the trained ear to ignore, but he isn’t composing around a specific concept here. It feels soulful when he delivers a harmony in this recording, and I even think that if “Trespassing” were remixed as a standalone vocal, it would be even more balladic than it is in this instance. Versatility is everything in today’s music, and it’s not something that Nygaard is going to have a problem using to his advantage as he continues to develop the aesthetics he’s utilizing so boldly in this song. This is definitely on the cerebral side, but it’s not anything out of his depth as a player.
You’ve got to admire the way Morten Nygaard isn’t hiding his vulnerability in these verses, and I believe that it’s his outgoingness in this performance that reaches out to us as much as the hook would. There’s nothing clandestine about the way he reaches for the chorus, but it’s timed in a way that brings us to the mountaintop with him rather than leaving us at the baseline to merely observe. His is a talent that doesn’t owe anything to an external element in a single like “Trespassing,” which just might make it the most personal piece of music he’s given up to the world so far. It’s hard to say from this perspective, but it certainly seems like a work directly from his heart.
As a critic, I wish there were more players that had the lyrical humility that Morten Nygaard does, but then again, it’s one of the main reasons why so many of us are talking about him this spring. Much as the case was in “Tomorrow Never Comes,” this has the stylization of a mainstream pop piece with the conventions of something left of the dial, and in a post-R.E.M. world, this is the kind of gentle melodic sound that captures the same essence of indie aesthetics and general accessibility. Nygaard has his finger on something pretty sweet in “Trespassing,” and I for one hope that he sticks with the present path that his creativity is taking him down.
Claire Uebelacker