EUROVISIONI

My first memories of the Eurovision Song Contest are of listening to it on the radio in the sauna with my parents, because the broadcast happened to start at the same time as our sauna turn. From that I understood this was something exceptionally important. The following year, 1973, I became a complete Eurovision – and Marion – fan. The first vinyl album I ever owned was Marion’s “Tom Tom Tom”.

My first attempt to get to the Finnish Eurovision selection was in 1984. Despite my serious efforts, none of the preliminary juries has ever let my “Eurovisions” into the Finnish national selection for the public to judge, but twice I have been invited to compete as a lyricist. I have worked at international ESC finals as a journalist eight times.

For this collection, I made new versions of my own Eurovision candidate songs as well as a few of my all-time favorites. For each one, I have tried to do justice to the composition and the lyrics, and to imagine how the songs themselves would like to sound, or how they might have sounded back in the day.

I already made a Christmas album without shame using AI, and for lack of imagination, I used the same names here for the AI singers. Already with the Christmas album, I decided not to be ashamed of my naive teenage lyrics. The songs are children of their time. On this site, I tell the origin stories of the songs. In addition to love, the recurring theme in the lyrics has quite often been “making the world a better place”, since the original idea of Eurovision was to create a peaceful European campfire evening, even though it has always also been a political battlefield – too much so in recent years.

The last time there was live music at Eurovision was in 1998. In 2000, I put together a petition by European songwriters demanding the return of live music to the contest, but the ladies and gentlemen of the EBU refused even to receive it, fearing bad publicity.