Piper – What Is The Heart For?
Release: Piper – What Is The Heart For?
Format: CD/Digital
Release Date: May 26th 2023
Record label: Concorde Music Company
Genre: Singer-songwriter
Country: Finland
Through the passing of time and emotions, a sense on wholeness gets channelled into music in Piper’s debut album “What is the heart for?”. The noise of the world, the sudden silence, eternal longing and the stage that is nature form the themes of The Finnish artist Päivi Sihvonen’s debut album. Fully written and composed by the artist herself, the songs tell the story of the woman and the piano, and life’s trials and tribulations. Päivi also performs all songs, making the songs deeply personal and connected to her own experiences and emotions that reflect the hardships of life.
ON A FANTASY JOURNEY TO MELANCHOLY
I set out to realize my musical dream with my debut album “What is the heart for?” With it, I want to open up my musical vision of a fantasy world that you can completely immerse yourself in and escape to and create tunes. That world can be a bit broken and melancholic, but it is beautiful. It is a mixture of half-truths, dreams, illusions and fantasy, while being strongly connected to nature.
The lyrics connect the work into a story that carries from one song to the next. Each song has a distinct piano melancholy, but they are unique on their own. The melancholic piano metal you hear at the beginning of the album continues in the form of mournful keyboard notes and melodies until the end. The minor-chord sadness of the album is striking, and it’s easy to sink into its beauty.
THE TONES AND COLORS OF THE MUSIC HEARD ON THE RECORD
The stage of the songs is strong nature: pine forests with paths filled with the scent of needles, the shores of thousands of lakes, the flower fields of nightless nights and the glow of the northern lights of the fells. The album’s atmosphere is not light, you can hear a lot of sadness faced and felt during that period.
Without the tumultuous experiences of life, the album’s story would hardly have been colored from the coal-black landscapes heard at the beginning of the album to the iridescent glow, painted like jewels in pastel shades. The lyrics and the moods of the songs have indeed gotten their driving force from the questions of being human. When lyrics started to emerge, Päivi set out to create an atmosphere around them on the piano. The story as a whole was divided into parts, from which songs began to interweave.
The album was made in collaboration with Saku Anttila, who arranged the songs and played all the other instruments along with Päivi’s piano compositions. In the music, you can hear the creative interpretations of the working couple woven together. The result is a layered, “musical painting”, in which Päivi figuratively drew the outlines of a piano note, and Saku completed her art with colors.
The entirety of the album is described by a sentence that was left to be told from the first instrumental song of the album due to the omission of the words: “What is the heart for.. should listen to it more”.
