Oh Land Explores Heartbreak on New Single “Human Error”
Photo Credit: Lasse Bech Martinussen
On her first EP since 2013’s Wish Bone, Oh Land, real name Nanna Øland Fabricius, eschews her usual experimental pop sound and smart lyricism for some self-reflection.
“Human Error,” the first single off Oh Land’s EP, Family Tree, follows a slurry of changes in the singer’s life. After giving birth to son Svend in New York two years ago, the singer relocated to Denmark with her partner, only to part ways in October last year. It’s not difficult to locate the singer’s past few years in her lyrics; she is unforgivingly candid, crooning against the delicate, stripped down instrumentals, “My baby didn’t ask for change. They say what you only need is strict routines and my baby doesn’t know the rules. He’ll grow up missing me when he’s not missing you.”
The album, Oh Land explains, was never planned, but rather came together when she turned, as she always had, to music for solace. “Everything I’d been working on musically seemed unimportant and irrelevant to the new life I had to slowly piece together,” the singer explains. “So I ditched all the songs and recordings I had done and started writing from the uncertainty of where I was.
Soft, melancholy vocals take center stage on “Human Error,” sometimes rising and falling in tender singularity and other times echoing in an ethereal fog of layered harmonies. “No real mistakes, just human errors make human hearts break,” she sings. “Just human errors make human hearts change.”
It’s delicately produced, as if Thomas Bartlett (St. Vincent, Florence & the Machine, The National) has simply cleared space to allow the track to breathe and unravel. “Working with Thomas allowed me to create an album that’s more organic, and more cinematic, than anything I’ve ever done before,” Oh Land notes. The result is at once vivid and graceful, an intimate exploration of heartbreak and humanity.
Oh Land also composes music for film and theater, and has performed with Lang Lang and Joshua Bell at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She also orchestrates concerts for the Danish Symphony Orchestra in her native country of Denmark.