Oceania chords by Björk

SONG INFO Performed by Björk with the London Choir Beats: Shlomo Piano: Nico Muhly Vocal samples: Robert Wyatt Programmed by: Björk, Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson This song was premiered at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. "Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'We Are the World' type song. Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, 'Maybe there's another angle to this.' When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing." Björk decided to call on Sjón Sigurdsson, Icelandic poet and previous lyrics-collaborator. Needing something epic, Sjón took a course in Greek mythology, and then wrote these lyrics for 'Oceania', a kind of aquatic sojourn and the last song recorded for Medúlla. "The Olympic version will be a little different. But it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn't see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjón came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land. He has The Sea saying, 'Your sweat is salty / And I am why / Your sweat is salty / And I am why.'" (Björk 13 Aug 2004) "It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and people that aren't beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - trying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to do things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. It wasn't til the last day of mixing that I though - oh! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology! So we called up an English choir, and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit like sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno tango beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it's good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing." (Björk, XFM 25aug04) Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.