In January 1886 a Shetland mail boat called the Columbine lost its crew in a heavy swell and sailed on with a single passenger aboard, a sixty-year-old crofter named Betty Mouat. Eight days later, having lived on a bottle of milk and a few ship's biscuits, she fetched up at Lepsøy, just outside Ålesund. That is the town where Annbjørg Lien was born in 1971 and learned the Hardanger fiddle from her father, and it tells you something about Drifting Like a Bird that one of its most striking tracks carries Mouat's name. Lien is not interested in the sea as scenery. She is interested in what it does to people.
The album, her ninth, began as a commission for the North Sea Festival in Farsund in 2013. Before writing a note, Lien interviewed sailors and seamen around the North Sea basin, and the songs that came out of it, recorded at Kongshavn Studios outside Kristiansand and released by Heilo in November 2015, keep that documentary grain. There is a waltz for sailors, a piece about the Gulf Stream, and a closing number named for the Shetland Bus, the wartime boat traffic between Shetland and occupied Norway.
What holds it together is a band that reads like a chart of the same waters. Roger Tallroth of the Swedish trio Väsen brings twelve-string, bowed guitar and bouzouki; his countryman Anders Löfberg plays cello and bass. Cathy Jordan of Dervish sings and plays bodhrán, the Irish end of the route. Tori Wrånes, better known as a performance artist, contributes vocals, accordion and, at one point, a ship's bell. Bjørn Ole Rasch, Lien's musical partner since the folk-rock group Bukkene Bruse formed in 1987 and later played the closing ceremony of the Lillehammer Olympics, produces and layers Hammond, harmonium and mellotron underneath. Rune Arnesen is on drums. It is a lot of texture for a fiddle record, and she lets it swell.
That has always been her way. She first recorded at twelve, has won six national championships in traditional music and a Spellemannprisen with Bukkene Bruse, and could have spent her career as a keeper of the repertoire. Instead she has written for string quartet, folded in electronics, taken up the Swedish nyckelharpa, and on Khoom Loy in 2012 wandered as far as Asian traditions. Drifting Like a Bird is more settled than that: a song cycle rather than a fusion experiment, with the hardingfele's sympathetic strings doing what they do best, which is haunt the room a beat after the bow has lifted.
The record also sits at a hinge. Four years later Lien completed a doctorate at the University of Agder on how the Hardanger fiddle is actually played, and Janus followed in 2022. Heard now, the sea album sounds like the last thing she made before turning inward, and it was already asking the same question: how a tradition survives once it leaves the shore.
