top of page

5 Songs I Love w/ Polar Bolero

Kenny Sandberg


We sat down with Polar after the release of their stellar new tune 'Portrait', to discuss what influences shaped their unique sound. Be sure to check out the single at the bottom and follow them on socials!


Pink Floyd - Dogs


Pink Floyd’s various conceptual albums have inspired us endlessly and constantly reveal new meaning upon every listen. Dogs is one of our highlights in their vast discography, the only song in our list which we both listened to for the first time together. For 17 odd minutes not a word was spoken and we’ve delved into this track countless times respectively. Musically, the track was eye opening to us due to the constant left turns in arrangement, poignant lyrics and a breakdown of conventional song structure. It’s a liberating listen for those who haven’t the pleasure and we recommend it highly.

Tom Waits - Martha


Tom Waits has inspired us in two ways, his virtuosic command on the piano in terms of songwriting and general musicality as well as his careers progression into the obscure and sonically challenging musical landscape that we have come to appreciate. Martha is one of the more accessible songs in his discography that allowed us to fall in love with Waits’ persona and story telling - a constant theme in the ever changing nature of his music. Waits’ ability to envelope the listener into his own wonderland is something very few artists are capable of achieving, and no one does it quite like ‘Old Tom Frost.’


Damien Rice - Cheers Darlin’


Damien Rice as the only fellow Irish artist on this list, is a writer who we can constantly look to for inspiration, his lyrics have a grasp on personal sentiment that we feel is unmatched by any of his contemporaries, perhaps due to our shared roots and his debut album ‘O’ is constantly used as a reference point in the various stages of creating our own music.

‘Cheers Darlin’ opened up doors in our perspective of how a song can invite the listener into a cinematic experience, with production being used as a narrative device and the studio becoming a tool for composition. We experiment with this approach ourselves in our debut single, ‘Passerby’ where we created soundscapes of our own.

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat


Leonard Cohen can write a novel in a sentence. This famous story of infidelity and betrayal is told in a way which highlights beauty and love, trying to emulate this ourselves as writers has only revealed the masterful subtlety in Cohen’s writing.

Duke Special & Ulaid - Shipyards of Belfast


This collaborative album was a huge inspiration to us, this stylistic amalgamation of genres is a breath of fresh air, the juxtaposition of contemporary songwriting and rich traditional Irish music proved to us that sometimes the lines can be blurred in the borders of genre. We’ve tried to take this approach with our own live performances which contain elements of Contemporary Jazz and Irish Traditional music, now bolstering our songwriting output.




0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


  • Facebook
  • Instagram
bottom of page