Kings Of Convenience, Quiet Is The New Loud

Three and a half years ago, I was driving to my first day of work at Barnes & Noble, listening to KRUI, when I heard �Singing Softly To Me�. I fell in love with it immediately and sat in the parking lot until the DJ came back on to tell me who performed the song. I think it was right after that first shift that I hooked around the mall to Best Buy and bought Quiet Is The New Loud. That same spring, Sarah Burk had a radio show that I listened to faithfully. I harbored a not-so-secret crush on her and I melted a little every time I ran into her. She often promised to play Kings Of Convenience and/or Saint Etienne on her next show, just for me. Around the same time, Speed Of Sauce was approaching its apogee and subsequent denoument, and the more brash and vociferous our songs got, the more I�d take refuge in the quiet, endearingly delicate arrangements on this album. I drove to work in the rain listening to �Failure� all spring, singing the harmony parts.

When autumn came, when the band broke up and our Freedom was Attacked and Everything Changed, I continued to find simple comfort in these soft songs. One rainy October afternoon Neil and I tried to watch some Japanese action movie he'd rented, but the subtitles proved too taxing for our tired minds, and we both dozed off on our respective couches. I woke up to hear the wet slap of raindrops against the leaves outside, and drove to work in a sleepy daze while �Winning A Battle, Losing The War� went through its chiming progression and I nudged my car through the stripmall purgatory of Coralville. That fall I had a tape in my car with this album on one side and Either/Or on the other; you can probably imagine what those rainy drives were like.

The bass line during �Failure� is a product of genius in a way I can�t really articulate. The lead guitar line during the final instrumental section of �I Don�t Know What I Can Save You From� always makes me inexplicably sad and evokes nonspecific memories of people I will probably never see again, a different person every time. These songs always leave me quiet and melancholy, but satisfied and static, like I could go the rest of my life without speaking, or getting drunk, or watching television. And snow could fall for the rest of time if it looked like �Parallel Lines� sounds.

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