Varje liten sak som du gör, varje litet ord som jag hör

I realize I'm at perpetual risk of sounding like all ballads, and especially those in Eurovision and Meldifestivalen, are a bad thing, so I thought I'd feature a song--a ballad--today that gets it exactly right. Its origin is made even more remarkable when you consider my general leeriness of young popstars. Let's travel back to 2006: Sweden had had a pretty dismal record in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest so far (fifteenth for three consecutive years, when there were only ever between sixteen and eighteen countries competing), which led to SVT, the state-sponsored channel which also runs Melodifestivalen, giving up the Swedish JESC national final and TV4 taking over (if I understand the whole situation correctly, SVT still runs Lilla Melodifestivalen, with the winner in that competing in the MGP Nordic--just for Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland--while TV4 runs a separate contest that determines who will go to the more cross-Europe JESC).

The result of this change in operating channel?



Det finaste någon kan få (roughly, "The Best One Can Have" or "The Best You Could Get")

A song and singer that took Sweden to third place in the JESC, its highest ranking yet. Molly Sandén, fourteen years old at the time and the writer of "Det finaste någon kan få" (as opposed to "regular" Eurovision, in which performers don't need to have any involvement in the creation of their song, performers in JESC must have written their song, a fact which I still find mind-boggling--surely the producers must play a large role in the creation of these songs, then?), presented a song that doesn't need to be followed by the qualifier "for children" with a performance that had absolutely none of that creepy child singer quality that so many young singers ooze (though, to be fair, the fact that she was fourteen and not, say, ten may help her in that respect, but she's a genuinely great performer).

"Det finaste någon kan få" epitomizes everything I want in a ballad (especially in Melodifestivalen/Eurovision) and is pure class. Completely lovely and with a feeling of genuine emotion behind it (it's a supportive song and a song about support, but something about it manages to make it completely heart-rending, as well as uplifting, every time I hear it). It's also a song I'm so glad is (as it had to be, based on JESC rules) in Swedish: the lyrics work and presumably would in any language, but the sound of the Swedish words here just fits the song so perfectly.

I'm very much looking forward to the day Molly enters Melodifestivalen, and I just hope, really hope, she does it with a song that has the quality of this one, as tall an order as that is.

You can buy the JESC 2006 CD (for one euro!) here (physical) or the CD for the 2006 Swedish national final here (digital).

Next up: I should warn you all: I've been enjoying the CDs for Sweden's final for JESC for 2006 and 2007 way more than I probably should this past couple of days, so there's a very good chance you'll be seeing more from them in the near future (honestly, give some of the songs a go in their studio versions--there are some great ones!). Sadly, I've only got a physical version of the 2007 one, though--I'd love to see more of the credits for 2006. Tomorrow may be an American singer, though.