Valkyrian Music

Valkyrja; the seventh studio album from Faroese Viking metal legends Týr will be released next month (16^th September – UK release date). Having already released the album’s opening track, Týr have released their second single from the album; Mare Of My Night. The song is being streamed exclusively via MetalInsider.net. Frontman, guitarist and vocalist, Heri Joesen, had the following to say about Mare Of My Night:

Mare Of My Night was by far the most difficult song on the album to write, music wise. What I usually do is work on a basic idea, a melody with a chord progression. I make variations over the basic idea and then I pick out the best variations for the respective parts of the song, verse, chorus etc. For this one I had more variations than ever before and I made more versions of this song that I’ve ever done before, so it was very difficult to choose. I’m still not sure I made the best possible song, which is not a satisfying feeling at all. But there you have it.

As for the text, once I went to work on it, it was written in a day or two, in the evenings during studio time. I had the title and the story line long in advance. It’s based on the mare from folklore, the human-like creature that lies on top of you, riding you, causing bad dreams. As in nightmare, riding like a mare etc. Our anonymous viking, the protagonist of the story, finds in this song that his earthly woman has gone from being a goddess to being nightmare. It is also the most sexually explicit piece of lyric I have written so far.

Valkyrja is a concept album with a story line based loosely around an anonymous Viking age warrior who leaves his woman and goes off to impress the Valkyrie on the battlefield so that she may bring him to Valhalla, or to Fólkvangr, the home of Freyja—the goddess associated with love, sexuality, beauty, fertility, gold, sorcery, war, and death. One can say the album is also indirectly about women and how they affect men and what men will do to impress and obtain women. Front man and founder Heri Joensen goes on to explain:

The woman that the warrior leaves may represent the earthly women. Freyja, The Lady Of The Slain, may represent the perfection of Women, and the Valkyrie is the link between the two, taking men from earthly to godly women.

Tyr online:

http://www.tyr.fo/
http://www.facebook.com/tyrband

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This entry was posted on 13th August 2013 at 4:42 pm and is filed under News, Uncategorized with tags Fólkvangr, Freyja, Heri Joensen, Týr (band), Valkyrie, Valkyrja, Viking Age, Viking Metal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.