ELIN BRIMHEIM HEINESEN is a Faroese singer-songwriter who has been well-known to the Faroese public since the mid-70’s. Elin is perhaps best known as one half of the duo NALJA, which in the late 80’s released a cassette tape with very popular songs like “Á, Tann deiliga Havn”, “Sjeikurin” and “Eitt dýpi av dýrari tíð”.
Although Elin has been well-known for a long time as a musician, she has only released three albums:
- The album “NALJA” together with Kári Linderoth Jacobsen, where they wrote five tracks each. The album was released in 1988 as MC, and again in 1998 as CD.
Read more about the alum HERE and listen to the album on your favorite platform online here: https://album.link/i/1019759045 - The album “Yndisløg – Ein ferð aftur í farnar tíðir” (Treasured songs – a trip down memory lane) with Ad Libitum, containing different well-known evergreens, released in 2010.
Read more about the album HERE and listen to the album on your favorite platform online here: https://album.link/i/1317126745 - The album “Handan stjørnurnar” (Beyond the Stars”), which was her first solo album with 12 of her own songs, released in 2018.
Read more about the album HERE and listen to the album on your favorite platform online here: https://album.link/i/1406252217 - Her fourth album “Eitt dýpi av dýrari tíð / A Chasm of Precious Time” was released in November 2023 with contemporary classical symphonic music, Elin has set to her father, Jens Pauli Heinesen’s poems.
Read more about the album HERE and listen to the album on your favorite platform here: https://album.link/eitt-dypi-av-dyrari-tid
WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DOES ELIN PLAY?
Elin has played and composed music of many different kinds all of her career. She has sung jazz, musicals, revue songs, pop rock – even performed with a heavy rock band. Lately she has composed several symphonic songs.
In her childhood, the very lively song tradition on the Faroe Islands where Elin grew up, of course influenced her a lot – and of course it has had an impact on her composing style, which always has been quite vocal oriented.
In the seventies, she made songs that can be called folk songs, which was a very popular genre at that time. During these early years in her music career, Elin was also very much into jazz and blues. She made broadcasts on Útvarp Føroya, the national radio, about the history of jazz and helped found Havnar Jazzfelag (Tórshavn’s Jazz Club) in the mid-seventies, where she also performed, among others together with her maternal uncle Svenn Brimheim, singing songs from the jazz bible “The Real Book. This period also greatly developed and shaped her musical preferences. So this has had a great influence on her music as well.
In the eighties she formed a duo with Kári Jacobsen and made the pop album “NALJA”. It was an album, that in many ways reminded of other pop albums from the eighties – but the album was also unique in a very ‘Faroese’ way, and became very popular as such. In interviews Elin & Kári told journalists, that they saw the album as kind of a reaction against the political correctness in music, which was very common in those years. This was not really an intentional goal with the album, but in retrospect, it could be seen that way. Elin has always insisted on making music, that has a right in itself – and not only as a mean to promote something else or ‘sell’ some message, current for the time… Ideally, music should not be about anything else but expressing true feelings whether it is joy and happiness or sadness and despair. The songs on the NALJA-album ,which was re-released in 1998, still get a lot af airplay in Faroese radio channels.
The album “Yndisløg” (Treasured Songs), released in 2010, had a very different relaxed and easy listening feel to it. While her solo album “Handan stjørnurnar”, released in 2018, had a whole other, more kind of a poprock expression. And her album “Eitt dýpi av dýrari tíð” is then again something completely different, because here we are talking about impressive neoclassical symphonic music.
Additionally, Elin has composed many other unreleased songs that defy easy categorisation. Her music is diverse and expressive of her artistic evolution. Much of her music may be labeled as pop rock or folk rock – but these are very general terms which tell nothing about, what the music really sounds like.
PLAYLIST
Listen to a playlist with songs by or with Elin Brimheim Heinesen:
