AMERICAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN Johnny Cash was feeling particularly aggrieved in 1964 and wishing to highlight the struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States, so he recorded a whole album of songs called Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The resulting record, released on October 1 of that year, less than a year after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and a month before Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater, is often a kind of side note. I don’t remember if it came up in Walk the Line. He didn’t mention it in A Complete Unknown either, even though it had just been recorded.
But it’s a beautiful collection, with spare, percussive musical accompaniment by the Tennessee Three, Cash’s backing band, which included Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass, and WS Holland on drums. Session musicians Norman Blake, who is still alive (aged 87) and Bob Johnson helped out on guitar. The best parts of the songs are the lovely backing vocal contributions of The Carter Family. I had a hard time figuring out who was singing, but certainly Johnny’s future wife June Carter was in the lead, along with Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter. You can hear their sublime harmonies on “As Long As The Grass Shall Grow.”
“Custer” though might be my favorite on this record, if only for Johnny Cash’s dry and comic delivery. “Custer split his men / well, he won’t do that again.” We forget that for most of the time after George Armstrong Custer‘s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, he was considered to be an American military hero. But in the 1960s, the Lakota version of events started to win out (Custer’s widow Libbie, by the way, lived until 1933, which shows you how recent this history was.) Cash makes fine work of the legend here, though he didn’t write the song. Peter La Farge, a Greenwich Village folky regular, penned most of the songs on Bitter Tears. La Farge recorded several records of music with Native American and Western themes for Folkaways Records. La Farge died the year after Bitter Tears was released of an overdose.
Probably one of the most contentious aspects was Cash’s claim of Cherokee ancestry and accusations of being a Pretendian. On the cover of the album, his fist can be seen lifted in solidarity. Cash wears a headband, which makes him look just a little like Charlie Sheen’s character in Hot Shots. His claims of Cherokee identity were later debunked by Cash himself. He had no documented Cherokee ancestry. However, claims that he was purely of Scottish or British Isles descent are also false. A DNA test by his daughter revealed that she had African ancestry on both sides of her family, meaning that somewhere in Johnny’s “pure Scots” woodpile were some Africans. Note that this ancestry wasn’t documented either. And on Geni, at least some claim that Cash’s Hagler family from South Carolina might be linked to the Catawba Chief Hagler. So maybe Johnny was Catawba and not Cherokee. It’s certainly possible. This great record is the subject of a documentary and a tribute album too. “Custer” at two minutes and twenty-one seconds is not, maybe, the standout track, but it’s just perfect.
I remember that when Cash died in 2003, I said to a friend at that time, “But he was young, just 71 years old.” And the friend said, “But he had lived his life. He packed as much as he could into those 71 years.” I suppose after he lost June, just a few months prior, he had no reason to keep on living. But you are missed, Johnny Cash. We’re still listening to your music every single day.
THERE IS A DANGER when it comes to catchy Estonian songs. The danger is that they might become too popular. Then children’s choirs will start singing them, and they will become old ladies’ ringtones, which you overhear on trains, maybe in some place like Käru, and before you know it, you are pushing a cart down the aisle in an Estonian supermarket and you are wishing you never heard the goddamn thing! “Turn that shit off!” But, no, there shall be no such relief.
I shall not list the Estonian songs that have attained such a status, because you know exactly which ones I am referring to. But it is my sincere hope that “Igavene” by SADU never gets so far, but remains right where it is. I was sort of aware of SADU because its cofounder Sandra Sillamaa and I travel in the same circles and I was aware she was posing in various photos with the other cofounder, Sofia-Liis Liiv, but to be honest, they might as well have been promoting a lifestyle plan or deluxe shampoo. Who can pay attention to anything in this Instagram world?
But then one day I was at a friend’s house and this song came on. “Oh my god,” I thought. “It’s really good.” I have this memory of when I was about 12 years old and Achtung Baby had just come out. My friend had a small radio in his bathroom, and I slept over the house. “Mysterious Ways” came on the radio and I was hooked from those first sounds of The Edge’s guitar. I still listen to that song just to remember how tasty that guitar was the first time I heard it. Something about “Igavene” reminds me of that feeling. It’s like a delicious flavor of ice cream.
When I tried to describe the song, the words that came to mind were pop, world music, and Estonian folk. Then I read their Wikipedia entry, which states, in Estonian, “SADU is an ensemble that combines elements of folk, pop, and world music.” I am just saturated in Estonian folk music, living where I live, and honestly the runo song call and response template can get tiring, but this song reminded me of what I liked about world music, and even got me thinking about how world music leaked into the pop world. Fleeting memories of Paul Simon and his album Graceland, but also of Deep Forest (remember them?) Let’s put it this way, you could slide “Igavene” into a play list including “The Boy in the Bubble,” “Sweet Melody,” and “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, and it would fit right in. There is something refreshing about new sounds. “Igavene” manages to make something that was familiar sound fresh.
According to Sandra, she decided in 2024 to do something new, “something with female power up front.” She began to work with Frederik Küüts on some music, partnered with Sofia-Liis Liiv, and SADU was born. “Igavene” was one of the first songs they wrote for the project. It emerged from some lyrical ideas. “Life goes by so fast and people should be bolder,” says Sandra of the song’s concept. “Igavene” by the way translates as “eternal, everlasting, perpetual, or endless.” I guess “eternal” would be the best pick. But “Everlasting” sounds fine too. The song is included in their debut album Probleemid Paradiisis (“Problems in Paradise”). The record was released in September 2025.
I WAS COMING OUT of the woods yesterday, when a plump red fox ran before me. It was less than 10 feet away, unaware (or aware) of my presence, and went ahead through a snowed-over field toward another patch of forest by the lake. I’ve seen foxes quite a few times in recent years, and have developed a kind of rapport with them. I would not yet claim them as a spiritual animal, but they are contenders. They are intelligent, cunning creatures, true friends.
The run-in with the fox reminded me of Neko Case’s outstanding 2006 album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. In the year ’06, I would harvest new albums from the library and then rip them (or their best tracks) to my PC, and then upload the MP3 to a first-generation iPod, I think. It doesn’t seem like a very long time ago in my memory, but it was almost 20 years ago. I would listen to that album on the way to and from work in Lower Manhattan. I recall cold December evenings walking in the darkness in New York and listening to my favorite song, “Star Witness,” which according to Neko Case, is about witnessing a shooting in Chicago. Somehow the song’s topic never got inside of me, it was those lovely chords and vocals.
(Sometimes I would go out and walk on the beach, with the cold sea beside me, listening to this song. I went out for such a walk when I found out my second daughter was coming.)
The song has followed me. Consider the refrain, “Hey there, there’s such tender wolves ’round town tonight.” But this is my real life. There are tender wolves lurking in the woods in Estonia. There’s something deeper at work here. Something involving foxes, wolves, and Neko Case.
The record itself was recorded in Arizona. Garth Hudson (yes, of The Band) played on it. The title was inspired by a Ukrainian folk tale. It seems Neko is one of these musicians who puts a lot of thought (or afterthought) into her song and album titles. But it’s worth reminding readers that Neko herself is of Ukrainian ancestry. I have to say, she always struck me as incredibly intimidating. Women who are about 10 years older than me are these soul-scarred, battle-hardened characters, and it’s not so easy to get close to them, because they’re like, “Then I started living on the streets and busking, after I was legally emancipated at the age of 15.” And I’m like, “Uh, can I get you a cup of coffee? Anything else I can get you, Miss Case?” Tried every drug known to man, survived scrapes with the law, leather tough. Or at least, that’s my image of her. Maybe Neko Case is marshmallow soft, but with that kind of voice, I doubt it.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I had the good luck to see the guitarist Stuart Ironside perform at the Pärimusmuusika Ait in Viljandi, Estonia, at the very end of November. This is the one song that I took home with me, or the one that wouldn’t leave me alone. There it was, watching me. It was hovering and flitting around me like …
… like a bat in a tree.
Ironside — yes, that’s his real name — is originally from Oxford and came up playing classical music, Oasis, and Radiohead like a loyal Briton. But he’s since ventured into something that might be called “minimalist ambient meditative guitar.” In particular, he’s drawn, especially in Estonia, to being in the presence of and reacting to nature. He goes out into the woods with his instrument and listens to the trees talk and he talks back at them with his strings. There’s an almost monastic devotion to this experiment, as he communes in his sensitive, musical way. As such, the forest sounds on this recording, available on his new record Music from Somewhere Else: The Enclosure, were recorded in Vääna-Jõesuu, a beachside village to the west of Tallinn. Ironside recorded “The Bat is in the Tree” and other songs in a sauna there. This is not music designed to sound like something. It is that something, captured in the raw.
Ironside made a first attempt at the song in London in 2023. “I had the main riff at the start of the song for a few months, but didn’t know where it would go,” he recalls. “I refined it over a few years and live performances, with an emphasis on trying to ring as much emotion out of as few notes as possible.” Ironside also tried to emulate West African lutes like the xalam and koni for “The Bat is in the Tree,” but also drew upon both British and Estonian folk. The result is a satisfying and pretty listening experience. This is the kind of music you listen to at the start or end of the days, when you put your legs up on the bed, breathe out, stare at the ceiling and close your eyes, trying, perhaps in vain, to forget the tiring agony of the world.
AN ARREST WARRANT was issued for me due to an unpaid parking ticket in the Pärnu Beach area. I went to the police headquarters and turned myself in to await the outcome, and was told to head downstairs. The punishment would be about a night’s incarceration, and I figured there were worse fates than to spend a night in a Pärnu jail in December. While not a deluxe Danish facility, they had comfortable bunk beds, and surely I could get some reading done.
Once I got downstairs though, I discovered that there was no one there and nobody came. After about half an hour of waiting, I decided to leave the building. Again, nobody was watching me as I walked off toward the Port Artur shopping center, where I ordered some Hawaiian food from a very complex menu. “Did you want the spam with plain rice or with fried rice?” the woman at the counter asked me there. For reasons unknown, my parents were with me and they also wanted some Hawaiian food. My father was glum about the whole police situation. “You know you’re going to have to go back to jail,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Later, I went with my family to a new adventure park that had drawn upon East Coast maritime themes. There was an old whaler’s church, for example, and a series of Algonquian wigwams made of fresh birch. My wife and I went into the picnic area with our children and had something to eat. By this time, I had forgotten all about the Pärnu police and that they wanted me to do hard time for the parking infraction. But then a police officer turned up at the adventure park and announced my name through a bullhorn. He said that I had to return to Pärnu police headquarters at once, that I still needed to serve out my one-day sentence.
Not knowing what to do, I kissed my family goodbye and headed toward the tip of the peninsula, where I found my old friend Annikki selling crafts at a fair. She was there and her mother Liivika was there, and her three children were climbing all over her. I bought a coffee from a vendor and complained loudly of my plight to some Estonian journalists I knew, one of whom had been just recently posted to Kyiv, and so had seen far more in his time than I had in mine. Here was a man who has seen the charred bodies of drone attack victims, and I was crying about spending a night in the Pärnu police station. “Your father was right,” he said, while biting into a powdered donut in the concessions area. “You have to go back to jail.”
Just then I noticed some police officers approaching, and I took Annikki by the hand. We hid beneath a blanket, and I watched her breasts rise and fall with her breath. She was wearing a skirt and a black top. Annikki smelled quite nice, maybe of lavender, and I was surprised that I had never noticed her scent before. Her mother Liivika came walking by and noticed our legs sticking out from beneath the blanket. “What do we have here?” she said. “We’re just talking about Annikki’s handicrafts business,” I told her. Annikki was happy to hold my hand, but just that. She wasn’t ready for any below-blanket hanky-panky. “I expect much more from a man than holding hands below a blanket,” said Annikki. She had very blue eyes and very platinum hair and was very beautiful. “Especially a man who is being pursued by the Pärnu police.”
They started to pack up their wares from the festival and Annikki was loading boxes of goods into the back of her car. They were set to go to Tallinn to another festival. Her children were climbing all over a nearby playground like happy woodland squirrels. I kissed Annikki on the cheek and began walking along the bluffs overlooking the seashore toward the bus station. I came down long, sandy lanes dotted with pines and hedges. At the intersection of two streets, a young man was out selling a whole house full of handwoven traditional baskets. It was really just the bones of the house filled out by long shelves, stacked up with his goods. I tried to take a picture of it, but by the time I got my phone out, he had begun putting the baskets away.
I looked down at the sea and noticed how strange the coastline looked. There were large underwater knolls in the water, and I could see how vegetation had grown up and down the sides of these features, and how little whirlpools had formed between them. Down the way, I came into a seaside tavern, and then was ushered into a back room, where a group of Estonians had assembled to sing traditional songs. They began to sing together and as they did, I looked through my bag, only to realize I had left my journal with Annikki! My prized journal, full of all of my darkest secrets, brimming with compromising material. I left the singing room and called her at once. Annikki picked up. “I know everything now,” she said.
“For your own sake, please don’t read any more,” I told her. “I’ll come up to Tallinn to retrieve it. Just don’t read any more of my journal.” “I saw what you wrote about that girl,” she said. “You said you wanted to …” “Oh, this is just horrible!” I said and hung up. What a day, pursued by the Pärnu police and now a missing journal? At the tavern I was approached by some Indian students, three or four of them. “Don’t you recognize us?” one of them said. “No,” I answered. “We’re studying at TalTech, you wrote an article about us last year.” “I did?” “Yes, it was about our new steam apparatus.” “It was?” They all looked at each other. How could this journalist have forgotten everything in so short a time? “Are you okay, man?” one asked. “You don’t look so good. Let us buy you a beer!” “It’s the Pärnu police,” I said. “They’re after me.” “Even more reason to start drinking,” one of the students said. The singing room was just letting out and one could hear the lovely chiming sounds of kannel music playing gently in the background.
AND THERE SHE WAS, reappeared. She was standing on one of the sacrificial stones behind the castle ruins. She looked the same with those foxy foresty eyes of hers peering ahead, but I hadn’t seen her in so long that I wondered if I knew her anymore. She didn’t acknowledge me, not once, but by overhearing her conversations with others, I learned that she had been busy. Then, as surely as she had reappeared, this mystery girl vanished into the crowds. She was a mercurial woman and barely a woman at that, gone in a flicker. I felt like an arctic explorer who had just seen the sun for a few moments. Those moments were short but reassuring. There was a sun in this world that I had been lucky enough to see. I saw her there, the sun.
She dipped back into darkness.
BY THIS TIME, the opening ceremony of the festival had commenced. It was July but snow had fallen that night, and the entire festival area was under a white blanket. From one side of the hill, I saw mounted Lakota warriors make an entrance in full regalia, whooping into the air and raising their shields made of stretched buffalo hides in a provocative way. “The Lakota warriors are special guests at this year’s festival,” a spectator behind me said. “They came here all the way from Pine Ridge on horseback,” he said. “Did they cross the Bering Strait?” I asked.
OF COURSE, I had forgotten to get accredited, so I walked over to the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, and went in. I was given paperwork to fill out. I wrote in my name, the name of the publication, et cetera. I didn’t remember, offhand, the exact links to my previously published work. The woman behind the desk, a blonde who looked more like a bartender than head of press relations, told me I would have to wait while they processed my application, so I went into the press room, where a certain other woman was lying on the couch in the dark.
The certain other woman had just returned from a tantra retreat and was underneath a blanket. Her hair was a mess and she had haunting blue eyes. “Come lie with me,” she said. The lullaby sound of her voice masked a thrilling danger. One thing led to another, and there I was, in her embrace, if such doings beneath a blanket could even be called an embrace. I thought about the object of my affection the whole time I was there kissing the certain other woman. I thought about the woman I had lost in the crowds. I closed my eyes and begged her to love me but felt no reciprocity. I shut my eyes firmer and begged harder, but again felt nothing at all.
I HEARD A RUSTLING from behind the couch. Lata’s adolescent son was seated there, reading a comic book. I don’t know which one. Maybe Asterix or The Groo Chronicles. He yawned and turned the page. “You haven’t seen or heard anything tonight?” I asked him. He looked up and said, “Huh?” “Maybe you should go home,” I told the boy. He was about 12 years old. He got up and walked over to a dumbwaiter, put his comic inside and rang the bell. The door to the dumbwaiter closed and he left me alone in the room with the certain other woman. I followed him out soon after. To the certain other woman, I mumbled something about “accreditation.”
DOWNSTAIRS, my press pass was still being processed. The blonde in the press relations department asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping to shovel the snow outside while I waited. Never before had there been such a snowstorm in July. And during the major folk musical festival, what awful luck. I began to shovel dutifully. Big clumps of wet snow piled up on both sides of the path to the Ait. As I was digging, or pushing the snow, as the Estonians put it, I heard something metallic clatter. It was my keys. My keys had tumbled from my pockets, along with a few euro coins. It seemed like it would be impossible to find them in that avalanche. I kept searching, but I had lost my keys just as I had lost the object of my affection. Her real name was Esmeralda. I thought of her a moment and looked up, only to see a line of Lakota warriors approaching whooping their Oglala war cries. Their faces were grim and painted.
WHAT IS WRONG with the youth of today? The world’s on fire, the clock is ticking, and Tomás del Real is hanging in backyards from Canada to Estonia, tinkering with his guitar, jamming with fellow travelers and otherwise observing the downfall of civilization coolly from behind his sunglasses. Even the cover photograph for his single “Prólogo,” released last August, shows the chill Chilean in media res, as if he was caught off guard while he was contemplating something more profound. He looks like a Latin Sigmund Freud, I think, one who just survived a natural disaster because there are broken couches around. Maybe that’s exactly who he is.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Tomás feels mostly fine.The cover to the album’s single ‘Prólogo.‘
While listening to the entirety of the album Notas Rotas, I hear many interesting things. Released in the dreariest days of late November, it has a warmth to it. The opening song “Prólogo” is a burst of warm air, propelled by the violin of Alan Mackie and flute of Katariina Tirmaste. Right up front, this record promises something that food critics might call fusion cuisine. There’s del Real’s contemplative, Tropicalia-laced meditative poetry and innovative melodies coupled with what sound like North American and Estonian influences and driven forward by a thunderstorm rhythm section of percussionists Magnus Heebøll Jacobsen and Steven Foster: the former from Denmark and the latter du Canada.
On the cover of the album, they all look like a bunch of farmers who took some time off from the harvest to fashion 10 incredible songs, and then went back to messing around with a tractor or something. But there was a method to this folk madness for del Real is the consummate artiste.
The album cover. From left to right, del Real, Foster, Mackie, Tirmaste, and Heebøll Jacobsen.
“In every album, we try to shape and find the reason and the language in which the songs exist,” remarks del Real. “There were a couple of musical languages that were present in the picture.” In the case of ‘Prólogo,’ Alan Mackie, who also played bass on the record, was a co-composer and co-producer of the single, as he was on many of the album’s songs, bringing along his own sentiment (Mackie is from Prince Edward Island). In combining with del Real’s own Latin American folk, they have created a blend of music they jokingly refer to as LatinAmericana. But there are Old World influences too.
“There are a lot of European folk influences, such as Eastern European uneven time signatures,” says del Real, “which we tried to implement in a very organic way, and some Scandinavian influences, both in the percussion and in different colours in the instrumentation and arrangement.”
While del Real wrote the songs on the album and the record is credited to his solo project, it is very much an ensemble effort and grew out of an ongoing collaboration with Mackie and Tirmaste. Mackie and del Real even hit the road and toured Asia at the beginning of their co-sojourn, with dates in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. “I had a bunch of songs waiting to be something and we decided that could be a good place to try them out,” says del Real. “From that experience we started to shape where the sound was going and it felt very natural to start working on this.”
Katariina Tirmaste was “another fundamental pillar” in the creation of Notas Rotas, helping to flesh out the compositions and to arrange them. Del Real credits her as a “creative and emotional performer,” one of who provided sensitive, flexible parts to the different songs that eventually made up the new record. “She’s incredibly versatile and also without taking up more space than needed, which is a very humble and Estonian approach in my opinion,” he says.
LatinAmericanaEstoniana on stage: Mackie, del Real, and Tirmaste.
The record itself was put down in home studios in Toronto, the south of France, the west coast of Sweden, not to mention a multitude of closets in apartments in Estonia. From this pastiche of on-the-fly audio recordings, a sound engineer of fortune called Jorge Fortune in Patagonia mastered the sonic tapestry of Notas Rotas, which is that rare record that sounds good whether it’s been played in the car, through headphones, or on your smartphone.
I know because I have tried listening to it in all three environments. These recordings hold up.
Del Real I have known as a musician for years and have attended his shows, including some with Tirmaste and Mackie. While I hesitate to say anything about his songcraft, I can say that some of the melodies on this album challenged me and required multiple listens to fully digest, which for me, as a listener, is the mark of the very best music. Having a minimal knowledge of Spanish, even after years of instruction in high school, his lyrical intent remains a mystery to me. In his own words, it reflected the transient nature of his life as he moved around as well as the emotional winds blowing through. “It had a lot of reflections around inconclusive situations, self-awareness, letting go, and letting life take its course,” del Real says.
He was also demoing the material on the road and in front of his fellow musicians, which took him out of the more introverted, isolated settings that fueled the creation of his last album, Principios de Declaración. Solo albums can be complicated territory for any musician, though del Real is a singer songwriter and thus a solo artist by default. With Notas Rotas I am reminded of David Crosby’s solo outings, particularly his first venture, If I Could Only Remember My Name, recorded at the very dawn of the singer-songwriter era in 1971, which saw a whole cast of characters join Croz in the studio (there’s even a cut with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead paired with Neil Young and Santana drummer Michael Shrieve).
While Croz’s musical influence might not be immediately apparent on Notas Rotas, his spiritual influence is everywhere and I think, might he have lived a little longer and heard the record, he would have approved. The kind of camaraderie that fueled Croz’s effort can be seen here, because these fellow musicians are del Real’s confidantes and he trusted them with this music.
A band apart or, for you non-Godard aficionados, a band of outsiders.
When this album was first released, del Real encouraged listeners to post their favorite songs. But what I have found upon multiple listenings is that my favorite track changes with each listen. Today, on a snowy January day, it is the sixth track, “Distracciones” with its vibrant fiddle parts. Any one of these tracks is sticky enough and interesting enough to catch a listener in its web. Perhaps “La Primera Nieve” or “The First Snow” is the most appropriate for this colder season. And then there is the finale, “Los Sueños” (which can be translated as ‘Dreams’ or ‘Visions’) which is carried along by lovely backing vocals like a ball being carried away upon the waves.
There is, whether it exists or not, and whether intended or not, a maritime fluidity to this music.
For del Real who, like the writer of this review, calls Estonia home, it was this seabound country that most manifested itself in this latest work. It found its ways into its lyrics, its melodies, its colors and moods. “Personally I think it’s very inspired by Estonia, its pace and imagery,” del Real says. He also sees in it a breakage with his past, or the path he was once on, and a fresh intimacy that he credits with producing its raw, unfiltered, and, I would add, touching result.
AT SOME MOMENT on Sunday evening I find myself in the grand hall of Viljandi’s Folk Music Center or Pärimusmuusika Ait looking for a good spot to rest a while and write. The hall is full of people, some standing, others gathering, talking and telling jokes. There are all kinds of people here, people with shaved faces and hairy chins, hippies, squares – but let’s be honest, most of them are a decade or more younger than I am. Beside the stage, three wonderfully light-haired girls are seated, one with shiny hoop earrings. I don’t know how old they are and don’t want to know. Two of them are looking at their phones, one has her head to her knees, apparently to just catch her breath. I watch them a moment more and then hoist myself up onto the edge of the stage. Every part of my body hurts: my legs, arms, back, and heart. My trustworthy satchel is wet from the rain, but my notebook is still dry. With a black pen, I begin to write. A few seconds later, a man appears before me, one with short hair and a brown sports jacket. He says he used to be my first daughter’s zoology teacher at the Viljandi Hobby School. That must have been a long time ago. His name is somewhat familiar, though I don’t recognize him. He has something in hand.
It’s a button. The kind you’d find on a jacket. There’s a trick too. There is something behind the button. This man goes around Viljandi installing these buttons on walls. When you tug the button, it pulls a piece of string behind it, and when the string goes back into the wall, the magic button plays beautiful music. “You just have to pull the button,” the man says. I don’t understand if I’m dreaming or not. I am at this moment so tired, that it all could be a hallucination. “That’s genius!” I say. The music is the same you would hear from a music box. “Why are you putting these buttons up?” I ask the man. “I wanted to bring a little more joy to the world,” he answers with a smile. Then the button man disappears into the crowds.
When the man is gone, I take some more time to unwind. The three girls are still sitting in the corner, looking half dead. It’s dark outside now. I actually have no idea what time it is, and only know, in a foggy way, that it is Sunday, which means that it’s the last day of Viljandi Folk. The concerts are still ongoing somewhere. And I promised Arno Tamm earlier that I would go see him during the final concert.
During one concert, I saw the American guitarist Jed Clark, who is from Arkansas and plays with the bluegrass band Midnight Ride, look out with tired eyes on Käevumägi, or the Well Hill, and a thousand or so beautiful people and say, “This festival is like a dream I don’t want to wake up from.” In the great hall of the Ait, I think that Jed is right. Earlier in the festival, I had a chat with him at the Green House Cafe. Jed told me in his soft Arkansas accent that Viljandi Folk was “just like paradise.”
I wasn’t so sure it was paradise. But a strange dream nonetheless.
***
“PEOPLE COME HERE from the US, from Canada, and they have a hard time believing that this is all real,” Tomás del Real, a Chilean musician, tells me the day after his concert was well received at the Jaak Johanson Stage. He performed on Saturday night, and people praised his performance the following morning. “It was all so intimate and cosy and yet so grand and so global,” some gushed to me. I had planned to go there, but somehow got lost along the way, and must admit that I don’t know exactly where I was when Tomás played that night. I allowed myself to live a little that evening and so everything from that evening has already faded into the mist. But I survived and supposedly the music was good.
“They see the lake, the castle ruins, and they think, what place is this?” Tomás continued his story. “For a festival, it’s a really great place, and the way the festival uses the surroundings, the aesthetics, are done with incredible taste. Nothing is overdone, everything is very natural, and they simply fill out the environment,” he said. Tomás is in some ways like me. A foreigner who came to Viljandi and got stuck here. Years before we came, Ruslan Trochynskyi, the trombonist from Svjata Vatra, arrived here from Ukraine and was similarly seduced. We are now like one big Folk family and not just us, who have come from abroad. Estonians have arrived here the same way. They come to Folk, go for a swim, and stay.
There is some kind of invisible pull. Even Tomás del Real, who is as clearheaded as they come, acknowledges this: “It is magnetic,” he admits.
I have of course heard criticism, that Estonian folk music is mostly fake and mostly synthetic, that the prices are too high, that this year’s Folk isn’t as good as last year’s, and so on. “These Folks are not like they used to be,” some say.
It is true that before there were fences and passes, folk was an anarchic experience and all kinds of weird people turned up in town. I called them the “zombie army” at the time, the drunks, Nazis, and rednecks. But all was permitted and the people enjoyed that anarchy. At some point, it was decided that Folk would be a bit safer and those days drew to a close. But the magic continued. Gates or no gates, the spirit of Folk cannot be contained. And the security staff are only looking for alcohol, really. They give your bag a squeeze and then wave you through with a grin. You have been examined. Go on your merry way.
I wanted to say, in response to this criticism, that whatever they have, people never seem to be satisfied with it. Something’s always missing from the picture. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is too familiar to me. I find myself on a train south, staring from a window. I think, what am I doing here in Viljandimaa? My heart is full of disappointment and melancholy. Other people, such as those from Tallinn, have said to me, “Why are you wasting your life in some hole in Estonia?”
Viljandi indeed is an odd place, one you can only reach intentionally. No one shows up here by accident. Folk does offer a lot of reasons for people to come here. It is a rich and deep event. For those who are never satisfied, I would say, take a look around. There is some value here. There is something different at least. I had these thoughts as I hid myself away in the press room in the cellar of the Pärimusmuusika Ait. Outside there was rain and thunder, and the Ait was full of soaking wet people. In the corner of the press room sat my one true love, the object of my affection. But who is this quiet girl? What’s her name?
She’s a coffee machine, naturally.
***
THERE ARE ALL KINDS of stories shared in the press room during the folk music festival. One day, after a concert by Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, I found myself seated again beside my beloved coffee machine listening to her purr. I must acknowledge that Folk is an exhausting experience. Even after just a few hours at Folk, a person is squeezed dry. All of that noise, all of those conversations and songs. Espressos are needed for a quick pick-me-up, so that one can still walk and write. The Italian group CGS is from Puglia, the province in Italy from which my mother’s family originates. One of their songs was about love, of course. This melancholic song describes a lovestruck man who sits beneath a woman’s window night after night, until the woman closes the window. But there he continues to wait until death, so devoted is he to the woman he loves. For me, this song was somehow refreshing. I have never heard of an Estonian who would do such a thing. Estonians are too practical for that. They wouldn’t waste their time in the name of Mediterranean love. But Mediterranean love is just like that. Passionate. Full of devotion.
“But in Estonia,” I tell a colleague in the press room, “if you sat underneath that window, the woman would call the police.” “Well, yeah,” she answered. “That could be really annoying.”
“But what do Estonians do when they fall in love?” I ask. “Does someone gift the other some potatoes? Or a bucket full of chanterelles?”
“No, no, they just enjoy their time together,” the woman explained.
“So that they are in the forest somewhere and one says to the other, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Is that how they do it?”
The woman looked at me with her clear blue eyes. “If it’s love, then there’s no need to talk. You just have to feel it.” Simple. So, sitting underneath someone’s window isn’t especially welcome here in Estonia. But I have definitely wanted to sit beneath some women’s windows, at least a few times, whether I am allowed to or not.
***
LOVE WASN’T THE ONLY SUBJECT haunting me at Folk. Another was age, certainly. Not that I really needed to think about age so badly, but when most of the people around you are at least 20 years younger than you at least, and three of them are your own daughters, then it comes to mind. At some moment, Uncle Justin wound up in the company of some young ladies in their early-twenties and forgot for a while whether he was a responsible parent or just another one of the pack. So I went along with them. It was a good feeling. I started to feel like one of those older Beatniks, like the poet Allen Ginsberg or wild man Neal Cassady, when they joined forces with the young hippies of the 1960s. If things are moving in that direction, then why not go with it? Why not? Beautiful kids with beautiful eyes. Students who aren’t yet jaded or embittered. They still have hope. They go to sleep listening to music. They don’t make the sarcastic jokes of our generation. With them I am gentler, I listen more, and I’m supportive.
As I told a friend at Folk, we are some kind of bridge generation. There are those important icons from the days of the Singing Revolution: Mart Laar, Edgar Savisaar, Siim Kallas, Tiit Vähi, and the others. And then there are these fresh young people who know nothing about that era and for whom it’s all just history. We are in between them, people like Margus Tsahkna or Jüri Ratas, who were both at Folk. We know where the bodies are buried, metaphorically, but we don’t want to share that information with the kids. Let them enjoy their youth. Let them run around holding hands when it’s raining and the Zetod are rocking. When someone comes by and reaches out, we take their hand in ours and run along together.
The Puuluup concert was a truly strange sight though. Their music is one that really does haunt you. The Hiiu kannel has the kind of sound that makes it hard to determine where it’s coming from. It sounds as if someone is playing with time. If I could ever play the sky and the clouds, it might just sound like the sound of a Hiiu kannel. There were so many people at the concert, it looked like a sea or bubbling soup. I watched and listened. Afterwards, I arrived at the idea that I no longer had an age. Age was just a number. But I felt in that moment, standing on that hilltop looking down, that I was more like some kind of Hindu deity. The embodiment of Shiva or Kali. Even when I was a child I knew it. The world told me what my age was, but inside myself I couldn’t tell the difference whether I was three or four years old.
“I don’t feel old,” said the American folk musician David Crosby shortly before his death last year. “I feel the same way I have always felt. It’s just my body that has aged.”
I was and I am.
When Midnight Ride played on Kaevumägi, they called themselves the sons of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. But I thought instead that nobody is actually the son of anybody. There is no before and there is no after. Music doesn’t age, just like souls do not age. Music is undying, as they say and exists at all times. All you have to do is to play it. I exist. In this way, we are all like music, undying, immortal. These were the thoughts I had during the Puuluup concert.
***
A DAY AFTER THE CONCERT, I met up with Ramo Teder, half of Puuluup, who with his long white hair looks like he could be the managing director of Santa Claus’ elf toy factory at the North Pole. Maybe because he lived in Finland for so many years. Ramo is actually from Viljandi. On social media, one can see a photo of Ramo when he was a punk at the end of the 1980s. He looks quite stylish, a combination of Johnny Rotten and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Puuluup is certainly not a punk group. There’s no “Anarchy in the UK” here, or in Estonia for that matter. But Ramo discussed how punk had influenced the ideas behind Puuluup.
“The idea that you have to overcome boundaries,” he said. The idea that all archetypes are tossed out the window. Estonian punk was different from American or British punk. Estonian punks were more like intellectuals. Most of the people in the Estonian SSR were standard issue. They wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyles. That some young man was walking around Viljandi with such hair was against the system. Hair, in this way, can be dangerous. There he now stands on stage, with a kannel in hand, age 53, singing about small birch trees. He also belongs to the tribe. Ramo is another brick in the Folk castle.
After the interview with Ramo, I found myself at the Eesti Etno concert. There were all kinds of musicians there, and they looked so happy. Were they too happy? I was dealing that week with the death of a high school friend. News about a friend’s suicide arrives slowly, even nowadays. Nobody talks about it on social media, only when you are famous. It took time to understand why this 43-year-old man had died “tragically and unexpectedly” as it said in a news article. But I eventually found out. So those Eesti Etno singers were singing and I was thinking about death and suicide.
One song did lift my mood. A young Indian was singing and the other sang along with him. At that point, I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Their clothes were so colorful. The music was so good. As sweet and satisfying as a mango lassi. It all looked like some kind of pajama party or Indian cult. Maybe some ashram had come to Estonia? Anyway, that was the right song for me at that moment, a person who was destabilized. Tragedy is like a little black cloud that follows you around everywhere. A song can help. Music can save lives. I would have liked to save my friend’s life the same way.
One night on the First Cherry Hill, as it is called, I thought I saw him, standing beneath a tree. But it was someone else.
***
DURING THE FESTIVAL, it becomes difficult to put one’s thoughts together. Looking through my notebook, I can find these kinds of scattered sentences and half-memories. “I left my journal in the press room, but Peeter the Estonian Swede came after me to tell me, and I ran back to get it, because my journal is full of kompromat that could make my life really difficult.” Or, “Some pharmacist from Tartu came up to me and started to talk about Paavo Matsin.” And, “Lauri Räpp was talking about resilience.”
The days melted together. There were a lot of concerts, for sure. The Italians. The Mexicans. The 6hunesseq-ians. Now that was a powerful concert, held in St. John’s Church at midnight. I fell asleep multiple times, because I was so tired, but the music was soft, warm, and enveloping, like a comfortable blanket. The musicians were out of view, because they were on the second floor, where the church’s orel is located. After they came down and people applauded. I guess I went home after that. I don’t quite remember. My friend found a rabbit in a park in Viljandi around the same time and took it into her tent. Later, she found the rabbit’s owner. These kinds of things happen during Folk. The mind no longer works. There is too much information, too much stimulation.
Then one day I met a man who told me that Lennart Meri’s book Silver White is the Bible of the Estonians, and how the Estonians, or rather the Baltic Finns, are very special people, and how Meri, Uku Masing, and Valdur Mikita had written “philosophical diamonds!” The man is working with a project called Valge Laev, or White Ship, to develop the higher intellect of the Baltic Finns. “But if the Estonians are so smart,” I told him, “then why do you need me for your project?” “Because you can help us bring it to the wider world!” came the answer. He had a fur hat and a green shirt. A beard. Sparkling blue eyes. Like a photo from the collection of Johannes Pääsuke. The green shirt was inside out. Of course, I agreed to help. When the Land of Mary calls you, you heed that call.
The following morning I have a slight hangover, because I thought the prior evening that I would allow myself to live a little. I asked myself, what would your favorite writer Scott Fitzgerald do if he was at Viljandi Folk? The answer arrived at once: start drinking wine! Life is for living! That night I wound up at the Untsakad concert at midnight. This was really like Anarchy in Estonia. I have never seen so many happy young people before. Untsakad are old men. They played at the first festival 31 years ago. But their fans are teenagers, or at university. I’m not sure what’s the attraction. Waltzes? Polkas? I like the Mexican band Kumbia Boruka more. They brought every cell in their bodies alive with their rhythms. They also appealed to writer Gert Kiiler, who said they reminded him of the show Miami Vice. “You know, they always have that kind of music playing somewhere in the background.” My friend, a Tallinn businesswoman who attends Folk regularly, recalled how she once had Don Johnson’s picture in her bathroom, so she could see him while she was taking a shower.
But Untsakad won over people’s hearts in the end. Even my 17-year-old daughter awoke the next morning and started to sing the “The Forest Brothers’ Song.” Ai-tsih, ai-tsah, ai velled, me metsavennad oleme! Which means something like, “we are the forest brothers, we are.” It really got inside her. For her the experience was also something like a dream. I received her rendition joyfully. “You’re a good forest brother’s daughter,” I thought, “even if your father is not a forest brother.”
***
SOME PEOPLE COME and go during Folk, but then there are people like me who are folk soldiers and stay until the last concert. We gather in the rain as Ando and Friends sing. Ando Kiviberg is the founder of Folk and the festival usually falls on his birthday. This year, he’s 55! Ando and Friends is some kind of variety show. Every kind of band performs there. The man himself is a Leo, naturally. He is the king of the jungle. There he is with his fuzzy face in his white suit and white hat, looking like some kind of Latin American drug dealer. He plays the bass and sings along. It’s nice to see the king in his element. The leader role suits him well. Ando is neither arrogant nor pretentious. He doesn’t think that he’s better than the others, no. But still they come, like small house cats, with their offerings to the Great Lion! Neither dead birds or mice, but songs. Silver Sepp has taken Tony Rennis’ 1962 Italian pop song, “Quando, Quando, Quando,” and made it over. The song’s new name is “Ando, Ando, Ando.”
At some moment, I get tired of all those bagpipes and fiddles and go to the other side of the Second Cherry Hill. There I stand beneath an umbrella and put on my headphones. I’d like to hear a little Led Zeppelin now. I am done with all of this folk music! I’d rather listen to “When the Levee Breaks.” To my surprise, these two things suit each other surprisingly well. I look up at the big screen and see Ando singing. But instead I hear Robert Plant’s voice. Ando is singing, “Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good!” It’s still raining. We are all soaked. Soon the levee really will break. An incredible combination. Ando and Zeppelin. My own levee really has broken. Then I realize that I have really lost it by now. I march over to the Ait. I look for a comfortable corner inside where a burned out writer can relax a little. Then that stranger appears with his magic button in hand. The three girls are in the corner and I am sitting on the edge of the stage. The man is showing me his button.
“That’s genius,” I say. My voice sounds distant, as if it belongs to someone else. “Just genius.”
An Estonian version of this article appears in Edasi, and the original was written by the author in Estonian and rewritten into English. The English and Estonian versions have some differences, so do read both!
I ALWAYS KNEW they had rooms for rent, or stay, in the cellar of the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Traditional Music Center, but I did not know they had these kinds of exclusive suites, or that a woman had been living down there for some time. I didn’t even know how I happened to get into that room, or into her bed for that matter. We were lying together in a queen-sized bed, with messy beige sheets. The frame of the bed was made of a darker wood, and there were some shelves across from us lined with vinyls and compact discs of groups and solo performers supported in one way or another by the center, plus thick compilations of runo songs collected from various rural municipalities over the preceding century and a half.
None of that matters though. What matters I think is the quality of those kisses in that basement bed. She was a younger woman, she had a round face, freckles, blue eyes, and inside of those eyes was kindness. In situations like these, you don’t even need to kiss, you don’t even need to touch, you can just look at each other. It’s better than a kiss. There we both were, beneath the blankets, perched in some kind of euphoria. The young lady said, “Mother was right about you. She said you were a good kisser. And so good in bed.” This of course was fluff to my ears, and I almost found myself adopting a Sean Connery accent, “Yes, yes. Of course, Domino. Of course.” But that word that preceded it, mother, made me sit straight like a rock.
“Who is your mother?” I asked the beautiful girl. “You know very well who she is,” she said, in a playful way. “She’ll be here soon.” But didn’t even know that she had an adult daughter, and still was confused about it. Sexual anxiety throbbed in my veins. I pulled my trousers from a chair, buttoned up my blue shirt, and ran upstairs, the girl’s warm kisses still all over me. In the garderoob or coat room of the center, a number of folk musicians were arriving, among them the mother. She was so busy talking to a guitar player though that she didn’t see me as I grabbed my things and was out the door. I felt bad for her. I felt bad for everyone. I felt like I had done something wrong. I hoped that she would never know about this. She should remain blissfully unaware of the cellar tryst with her daughter. And it was still a loving experience.
SOMETIME IN THE BLEAK DEPTHS of the pandemic, I became aware of the arrival of some dark-haired, shadowy strangers in town, mysterious characters who would lurk at the margins of parties, or whose strumming of guitars might be overheard whenever I passed the room they were renting on Posti Street. The Chileans! The way people around me referred to them, it was as if a whole orchestra from Valparaíso had been shipwrecked on the shores of Lake Viljandi. In reality, there were just two: Tomás del Real and Javier Navarro. But they were important. They were part of something new: a little South American community in Viljandi.
Viljandi, despite its rather small size, has always hosted pocket-sized minority enclaves. One stretch of Pikk Street was once called “Jew Street,” because of the active Jewish community that dwelled there before the Soviets deported some and the Germans and their evil helpers murdered the rest. Viljandi’s Jews even had their own sauna and fire brigade. There are also stories about the Romani people, or mustlased, who once camped in the forests where the Metsakalmistu, or Forest Cemetery, is now located, and how the Romani women tried to convince Mayor Maramaa to buy them horses so that they could leave. As far as I know, there was never a Latin American community here, until the arrival of Tomás and Javier from Chile, and Pepi from Argentina, and Tito from Cuba, and Miguelito from Mexico too. Slowly, something new is coming into existence.
Of these Latin Viljandiers, musician Tomás del Real is perhaps among the better known. On August 26, he performed at the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, to celebrate the release of his latest album, Principios de Declaración. Del Real is no stranger to the iconic Ait. He even used to live in the cellar when he first arrived in Viljandi and got an artist’s residency.
“Downstairs is where my room used to be, and every time I go there, my heart skips a beat,” he says. “Next to it is the rehearsal room, and that also gets me emotional.” Tomás recalls staring at the stones in the wall, or looking out the windows of the Ait on winter days when everything about Estonia was new, and he would take long walks around the old castle ruins. “Every spot in the Ait contains memories,” he says. “Every time I perform in the Ait, I get nervous, because it matters to me.”
His own performance, in front of a mostly packed house, came off flawlessly. While the songs on the record have diverse origins, the quiet introspection of Viljandi life has seeped into all. He also structured his show in a unique way, with one half of the stage divided between a standing microphone, where he addressed the audience as would any singer songwriter, standing and at times, and discussing the political situation at home in Chile. On the other part of the stage, he had a “living room,” where he played his tunes just as if he was at home. Tomás says this is part of the duality of being a character and a witness to music being created. He adds that during the “living room” segment of his show, he for a time felt like he was home, which, for now at least, means Viljandi’s Old Town. He even has a composition on the record called “Viljandi.” Though he grew up so far away, he also says there are certain commonalities between Chileans and Estonians. The era of the military dictatorship in Chile officially ended in 1990, while Estonians restored their independence the following year.
Tomas del Real on stage in Viljandi on August 26. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.
“We have both been oppressed and in difficult situations,” says Tomás. Because of that, he says, both cultures value friendships, because they have learned to rely on each other. “It’s the only way that people who have suffered for so long can function as a society,” Tomás says. He adds that Chileans have also learned to be tight-lipped like Estonians, for the same reasons.
Viljandi has also fostered a creative streak in Tomás, which is another reason why he has stayed here. At one point, he was writing one new song a day, some of which appeared on a record he cut with local musician Lee Taul last year, calling their duo Don’t Chase the Lizard. The rest of it populates the hypnotic tunes on his latest solo outing. But Tomás is not the only musician from South America in Viljandi these days. There is at least one other sudamericano.
He is the one known to all as “Pepi”.
Indeed José “Pepi” Prieto might, in some future almanac authored by local historian Heiki Raudla, be considered the pioneer Latin American in Viljandi. He was the first to explore it, the same way that explorer Juan Diaz de Solis once dropped anchor in what is now Argentina in 1516. A native of Buenos Aires, Pepi had almost anything one could dream of by his early twenties: a steady girlfriend, a band, a career. He was restless though, and decided to go abroad for a spell, where he worked as a programmer in Indonesia. A chance encounter with an Estonian woman there inspired him to come to the northern margins of Europe, just as it once inspired a young American journalist to do the same. It was a decade ago, and just a few days before Christmas. “I was told that it was -30 degrees, but I had no idea of how cold it actually was,” he says of this frosty arrival. Like any true South American, he showed up in Estonia in December wearing shorts. “We went straight to the shop after that to buy a good coat and boots,” he says.
Then he came to Viljandi. Immediately, it struck him as a quiet, inspiring place, where his creativity for unknown reasons began to surge in the same way that it would for Tomás later. For years, Pepi kept a room in the Koit Seltsimaja, or Koit Society House, on the corner of Koidu and Jakobsoni Streets that once housed the Ugala Theatre from the 1920s until the 1980s.
For a time he even managed a creative space there, called the Sama Sama Studios.
“I started to feel like I was the guardian of that house,” says Pepi. “I was the person bringing people to the house, and always showing people the rooms.” It also inspired him to write new music, to invite people to collaborate on music and to perform.
Araukaaria, as seen through the gates of the Koit Society House. Pepi Prieto, Lee Taul, Johannes Eriste, Fedor Bezrukov, and Norbert De Varrene. Photo by Paul Meiesaar.
These days, Pepi performs with Araukaaria, a quintet that also features Lee Taul on violin and vocals, as well as percussionist Johannes Eriste, a guitarist called Norbert De Varrene, and a bassist from Narva named Fedor Bezrukov. The band’s music is informed by South American psychedelia from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Estonian folk. They have an earnest but passionate sound. The band named itself after the sacred tree of the indigenous Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina, and araucano is a Spanish name for the Mapuches. “I grew up seeing these trees,” says Pepi, whose father was Chilean. “They have always been in my life.” Pepi sees other kinds of trees these days though. Birches, pines, and alders. He loads them into his wood-heated furnace. He also has a summer place outside town where he is raising cucumbers and potatoes with his Estonian family.
That’s right, Pepi, like myself, has contributed to population growth in the Republic of Estonia. He can now be seen walking a small blonde child down the street and speaking Spanish to her. Sometimes his friend Leandro, another programmer from Argentina whom he enticed to Estonia, tags along. Leandro is also a regular in town, but has opted to live in Tallinn full time. When I see both of them, I have to look twice. Latin Americans in Viljandi? How did it even happen?
“They are not like stereotypical South Americans, because they enjoy winter and silence, so in that sense they are in the right place,” says Lee Taul, who collaborates with Tomás and Pepi. “We are richer that they have come here, and they also know how to attract people with their energy,” she says, describing both del Real and Prieto as industrious, motivated musicians.
“They love nature too,” says Lee of her respective bandmates. “That is perhaps one reason they are here, because the forest is in the city,” she says. “For every true artist, nature provides a rich environment, a golden nest from which to hatch something new to life.”
Tomás for his part concurs with her assessment, calling the Estonians’ relationship with nature as “connected and profound.” “It’s absolutely true that I am more creative here because of the environment,” remarks Pepi. Here I would have to say they are correct, even if I am not a South American, or only in my heart. I am grateful for the arrival of these Southerners. Not only are they inspired by Viljandi, but they have inspired me. I agree with them, and wholeheartedly.
north! 