Gabriel Jemsten is a 23-year old musician from Lund, an old university town near Malmö in southern Sweden although he is promoted by an agency in Copenhagen.
That’s yet another example of the cross-border cooperation you often find in this part of the world, on either side of the Øresund Sound and the bridge that crosses it, made famous here in the UK in the TV cop drama The Bridge.
And Gabriel does his own bridging here if you’ll pardon the pun, by allying a soft falsetto vocal that might have come from Aled Jones, fresh from walking in the air, gentle acoustic guitar finger picking, swaying strings, a heavenly synthesiser and a genuine sense of emotion into a single song.
The longer it goes on the closer ‘What Wonder’ gets to a full scale cinematic production and had it gone on for much longer Hans Zimmer would have had to step in to coordinate it all.
I went out of my way to feature this song because, to be honest, falsetto voices have never really done it for me. I’ve never been able to get out of my head the character Mel Harvey in the British TV comedy series Benidorm, singing ‘Lonely Girl’ in the hotel bar’s karaoke session as if he’d put on his wife’s thong by mistake.
But to be fair to Gabriel he convinced me that it does carry some gravitas, especially when wrapped up in a cohesive production like this.
The song is about loneliness, the longing for human connection, and the dream of sharing an intimate life and home with someone. A song for a ‘lonely man’…
As the lead single it is a glimpse into Gabriel’s forthcoming album, ‘My strange little world’, set for release in February, and a new chapter under his own name. He records and releases music also with the alias Jack Elliot, such as on his 2024 debut album ‘Far Lies’.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gabriel.jemsten.5
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gabriel.jemsten/
