Timeless Cruise

Norwegian singer-songwriter Mikhael Paskalev has had a heady rise over the past two years. From making a play on Risky Business for the film clip of I Spy to some scintillating performances at South By Southwest that caught the attention of Dew Process, who promptly signed him, Paskalev has been living the charmed life, something that feels out of place yet nonetheless is nothing to shirk away from.

“I would love to pat myself on the back and say I've been working really hard on this for the past six years and my life has been just music, but truth told everything has come in stages,” Paskalev admits. “I have always been working in Norway, and it has trickled out from there over time. But it was really when I signed with Dew Process over at SXSW when things took off. I had no idea they would make this happen for me, where I can play in Australia and get paid for it, you know? It isn't often that getting up really early in the morning to talk to strangers about myself would sound like a good idea, but I'm really enjoying how everything is going. I feel a connection to Australia and Australians – I feel appreciated. You cannot always say that about places as a musician, so it's a great feeling.”

The key to Paskalev's process is a timelessness to his music, leapfrogging from not just one genre to the next, but between eras too, a bowerbird of pristine hooks. Paskalev never wants to be seen as cribbing other people's ideas, but he's always searching for the melody that will crack his songs wide open. “Timelessness is a massive word; it's almost as huge as the word magical, so to achieve something like that is like the be all and end all. I feel that I may one day achieve something timeless in the same way that Paul Simon does as opposed to the way Elvis Presley is timeless. I'm not comparing them to me at all, they are classic, but Elvis was pinned down to a fairly specific era, even if what he did was shake things up. Paul Simon seems to truly jump from genre to genre, where something will have an African feel, a country vibe, a pop song. The point is that no matter what he attempts to do, it seems to make sense when he does it. Everything (Simon) does seems to make sense, and that is because it comes down to writing good songs first. That way you don't have to worry about certain hit genres... the song comes first and everything else comes after.”

Even so, Paskalev sees the songwriting process as finding the nuance in the smallest changes to the norm, thus making the song your own, inherent in the way he approaches everything in his life. It's most apparent in the now famous I Spy video, where Paskalev dances around in his underwear, and the attitude displayed there is evident at all times. “I don't want to become a formulaic songwriter – I want to keep playing with the form. I'm not saying what I write is out there, I would say it's fairly regular-sounding music – you kinda have to follow rules if you want to write pop songs. I have some songs that are quite mellow too. But in that film clip, I just wanted to have fun and not give a shit, and I think that is very natural. There is a general carefree vibe in the music which is something I try to instil in myself.”

It's not all fun and roses on Paskalev's album, What's Life Without Losers, though, as highlight, Suzie, attests. Effectively a song about a dissolved relationship sung without the bitterness and chagrin often associated with that traumatic experience, the song imbues a sense of amiability beneath the melancholy: “I Spy is about frustrations but in a fun way, without anything personal or angle being put into it, and a lot of songs can be seen that way. Suzie on the other hand is about a girl I was with for some years, and then it ended. Most people end things on this really horrible note, and I have never wanted to do that. So Suzie is actually my birthday present to her that I wrote after we broke up. We are still friends, you know? Some other songs I take from ideas I get when watching movies, which is one of my favourite things to do. They aren't my exact experiences, but music is always meant to connect with people regardless of whether they are living this exact same situation or not. I find creating these worlds easier than focusing on my own – my life just isn't interesting enough to sing about.”