Poliphilos

The idea for “I Held You Once” came from my time in India. I lived and worked there for a little over a year, on assignment that was meant to last two. The pollution cut it short and sent me back to Finland, but the country itself I loved without reservation. In 2010 Mumbai was chaotic, yes — but there is a strange beauty in that chaos, and I fell for it completely.

When my parents visited me in Mumbai, one of our favorite things to do during their weeks there was simply to sit on the street and watch life pass by. It is quite a sight. Holy cows wandering past, taxis and rikshas honking at everything and nothing, traffic jams, religious processions, a fire alarm… Heat, humidity, trash, and noise — all of it overlaid with people wearing every color in the world. I had some shirts made for myself: bright pink, orange, yellow. Back in Finland they went straight to the attic, because a Scandinavian wardrobe has no room for that palette. I still have them there, though.

My first moment in the country stuck with me just as hard.

Stepping off the plane, the immediate, physical realization that people had been living on this land for a very, very long time. Compared to the relatively young Nordics, India carries its ancient history in the air – and you can smell it. Over the year I traveled to New Delhi, Kochi, Kerala, Goa, Bengaluru, Hyderabad — I tried to know the place as deeply as a year allows.

There was also a relationship during that time, and it didn’t survive. So yes, this is a breakup song — but it is also my farewell to India. Both losses are in it.

I chose the title deliberately.

Not “I Loved You Once” or “I Knew You Once.” Held. The relationship had a sweet physical intimacy, and that seemed like the honest word for what was ending. The breakup happened on my way to the airport once. I offered to skip the flight, stay one more night, if they would change their mind. They didn’t. So here we are.

None of this song existed while I was in India.

It cooked in my head for years afterward — which actually was a pattern for me back then. I only wrote when I was unhappy, and every breakup in my twenties and thirties reliably produced five to ten songs each! I used to joke with friends that I wished I could find someone just so I could break up with them, because it was such a creatively fertile experience. What can I say? Misery makes good art.

That pattern is gone now, though; these days I can write from many other places. But it’s worth being honest about where this one came from.

On the album, “Eternal Echoes” is structured around the classical Hero’s Journey — meeting the monster, meeting the mentor, meeting the lover. “I Held You Once” is the stage where the hero loses the love. I needed a heartbreak song for that slot, and as it happened, this one was already waiting in the archive.

The original demo was a modest thing I’d sketched in Garageband years ago.

My producer Juho brought it to life — most of all when he replaced the synth piano and played the intro on a real piano himself. That one decision made it organic, and even more heartbreaking than the version I had played.

The song builds momentum steadily toward the end, and I’m proud of the slow, patient pace, and of the backing vocals I sang to sit alongside the main vocal. When my vocal coach and I listened to the final mix in the studio, we both started crying. Even saying that myself, I stand by it — it really touches.

One discovery along the way: listeners kept telling me it reminded them of something, and it finally clicked — Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” No borrowing, no stealing, just an apparent kinship in the musical DNA. If the opportunity ever arises for live performance, I’d love to build a transition from this song into “Forever Young” and stretch the performance into something bigger.

One honest piece of advice, offered as a fellow listener: this song only fully blooms on real loudspeakers.

On earbuds you’ll get the melody. In the studio, on the big speakers, you get everything my producer layered in there — and there’s a lot.

And one closing note. As I write this, I’m actually preparing to return to India in December 2026, to meet colleagues and friends there.

The song is a farewell; but the farewell, it turns out, was not permanent.