I was looking for the lyrics of one particular song by Hartvig Kiran; "Aldri Meire". It's about a girl waiting under a bridge for her lover, and she's cold, tired and angry. She tells him exactly how angry she is, and swears this is the last time he'll ever find her waiting for him.

For some reason this song was stuck in my mind this morning, and I discovered that I remembered a lot of it. The words of that song roll off my tongue with such ease, and her mixture of longing and despair expressed as anger and defiance fits so well with the mood of the girls from Ålesund, hometown of Hartvig Kiran as well as me, that the song was through the years of coming to age a very common refrain among us girls.

"Aldri meire skal du sjå meg stå ved nattestid og vente på din veg, aldri meire skal du få å seie på meg, at eg gjeng omkring og vaktar dine steg. Reis i frå meg - den som vil kan gjerne få deg, den som gir seg blanke søtten det er eg...." "Never again will you see me waiting for you at night on your way home, never again can you hold it against me that I am watching your every step. Leave me - who ever wants you can have you, I don't care..."

I didn't find any homepages of Hartvig Kiran though, but I did find an other lyric he has written, about hering - this is one of the things I love about him, he writes about commonplace things, like one of the most important sources of wealth in Ålesund after the war and into the sixties: the hering. In this song he describes the hering logic of migrating towards the coast in large schools for protection - and how that is their undoing. Quite neatly done.

And among the 117 hits google gave me on Hartvig Kiran was a site with norwegian and english traditional music, with translations from norwegian to english. Enjoy: Greensleeves: Tradisjon