My first thought when the postcard ended was “Fucking hell – how many people wrote this song?” My second thought was “Why is she singing this in her bedroom?” Followed by ”That’s some damn prop she needs to play with”.
Rosa manages the skill, and it is a skill, of interacting with the background (which has lots of things to pull at and has the infinite ability to go horribly wrong at a moment’s notice), whilst singing a remake of Denmark 2020 (that no one other than us will care about).
I know what she is trying to achieve here. Rosa Linn is telling the story of the song that when she “snapped” she turned her life around. I just don’t know if setting it in a bedroom with Post-It notes that she rips off to reveal phrases is the way to go? She said the mix was too loud in her ears, a seemingly common problem throughout all of the first semi-final rehearsals, but to my ears it didn’t seem to bother her.
Her second run-through was as good as the first one, apart from the camera work focussing on the bits of the wall that she needs to remove being a beat out of sync with what Rosa was doing – it really distracted from what was a decent performance. This, again, highlighted the issue that Lesley Roy had last year – well one of them – if you over-burden a singer with too much shit to interact with and it goes wrong, or you forget something in the moment, or the camera is late by a beat then you end up with an unholy mess and your three minutes in the sun is ruined.
Overall, though, it was a performance trying to tell a story rather than focussing on the lyric of the song. My issue is whether the story telling aspect has been overplayed.
