Poliphilos

Six Weeks Between Two Countries

My song “Love Boat” is rooted in the six weeks I spent as a performer on a cruise ship travelling between Finland and Sweden in 1999. It was a strange experience, because I remained onboard for almost the entire time. I may have stepped ashore once or twice on either side, but the ship was in port for only an hour or so — never long enough to go anywhere or experience life on land.

That created a kind of bubble: a universe of its own in which the entertainers and crew, dinners and sleeping, makeup and hair, costumes and rehearsals, music and partying passengers all blended together into one seemingly endless celebration.

The Comfort of Dancers

There were five dancers in the cast — two men and three women. The show had begun in May, and by the time I joined, the others had already been cruising for about two months. The cast kept changing: every few weeks, a new dancer would arrive, we would rehearse briefly, and then the show simply went on.

Those were fun times, and I remember the cast fondly.

There is something deeply comfortable about being around dancers. I am a trained dancer myself, and I performed professionally all throughout the 1990s, so the kinetic ease dancers share feels very familiar to me. You become close very quickly. Choreography requires trust and constant physical contact, and that naturally breaks down barriers. At the same time, everyone in the profession understands how important personal space is precisely because the work brings people into such close proximity. We each had our own room on the boat — a private place where we could close the door and be alone.

So, life onboard was pretty much all fun and games, singing and dancing. There was some partying when friends came our way, and some drinking — not too much, but it was part of the atmosphere. In that sense, it was escapism on a professional level.

The Ship Keeps Swaying

The idea for the song arrived quite quickly after this experience. What stayed with me was the swaying — the constant back-and-forth motion of the ship, caused by the sea and the engines. It was strange at first, but then you got used to this constant hum, the ship and then the swaying. You were never really on firm ground, so when I eventually stepped back onto land, even that felt unnatural. So the constant back-and-forth movement became “Love Boat.”

Another musical inspiration was “By The Sea” by the Scottish girl duo Strawberry Switchblade — the B-side of their 1984 hit single “Since Yesterday” — which also has this chromatic melody progression.

The version of “Love Boat” that eventually appeared on “Eternal Echoes” was produced by my current producer, Juho. This is probably the third, fourth, or perhaps even fifth reincarnation of “Love Boat.” Over the years, I have worked on it — and on many other songs — with different producers. After every project, I was left with the feeling that the song still was not quite there. It had not yet begun to bloom or reached its full flowering.

That is why it feels so remarkable now, and why I am eternally grateful to Juho, who finally was able to find the right identity for these songs — and, in the case of “Love Boat,” to help it reach the full bloom I had always sensed was possible.

A Ship That Sails South

It was important to me that each of the album’s ten songs should have a distinct identity — each one needed to come from somewhere, or at least seem to hail from somewhere. Until then, we had spent a great deal of imaginative time in continental Europe, which is very important to me when planning “Eternal Echoes.” For “Love Boat,” however, we decided to travel elsewhere and place the song, atmospherically and thematically, in South America through a touch of bossa nova.

The track’s most distinctive cultural elements are the bossa nova rhythm and the guitars, together with what may be a sampled “yo-ho” in the arrangement — I will never say which. These details give the song its particular colour without overwhelming its original character. More precisely, the bossa nova pulse sits naturally beneath the chromatic melody of the chorus, giving the song an atmosphere and structure that finally feel right.

Easter Eggs in Plain Sight

One remarkable thing about Juho is that he comes to know my songs more intimately than I do. In a sense, that is what a music producer must do: during production, he spends far more concentrated time inside a song than I initially have. What I find so rewarding is that, when I return to the finished recording weeks, months, or even years later, I may suddenly notice something I had never consciously registered before. “Love Boat” is one of those songs. One day, I might hear a single touch of nylon-string guitar as if for the first time.

That experience reflects something I also want to offer listeners — and the readers of my writings: small Easter eggs, never announced or explained, lying in plain sight until they are discovered by accident long after the first encounter.

Why the Hero Boards the Ship

Within the sequence of “Eternal Echoes,” “Love Boat” comes after “My Dreams of Tomorrow,” in which the hero experiences the tragedy of losing his friend. After that, the story needs a release — a moment of relief — and “Love Boat” provides it. For the hero, the ship becomes a dive into oblivion: a place where he can get lost and begin to deal with the grief left by the previous song. Yet it is not only an escape. It is also a transitional space in which he gathers strength for the next phase of the journey and prepares himself for the final challenge still to come.

The Only Darkness I Ever Saw

If there is any tragedy, or any darker current beneath it all, it is simply that eventually you have to return to the real world. Some people build their lives around working at sea, and that is the life they know and want. For us, however, the cruise-ship shows were temporary engagements. The dance company created and choreographed a production for perhaps two or three months, usually in summer and sometimes over Christmas and New Year, and afterwards everyone went home to resume their ordinary lives.

I once performed over Christmas once. My mother was not at all happy that I missed the family celebration. When I called her from the ship, I could hear immediately how she felt, which was entirely understandable. I had wanted to try the experience once, but I never did it again. At the time, none of us treated these periods at sea as tragic; they were simply part of the business. It might be interesting to ask people who have made their careers in that world whether they recognise a deeper dark side to it. The only one I ever understood was this: sooner or later, the performance ends and you have to go back ashore.

Today, in the post-normal times we are living through — amid wars, environmental crises, rising prices, and events we once thought could never happen — life can sometimes become too much. We need moments when we can step away, not to abandon reality, but to make it possible to continue. A cruise can provide that kind of relief: a temporary world apart, after which you return to ordinary life with renewed strength.