Olvida Me in Sunrise Avenue

Post from April 2024...

Friday and it’s time to dive into some Finnish music again! This week we have quite a soft band - Sunrise Avenue. It was founded by 2 friends in 98th in Helsinki and called Sunrise. Later they split up, and Samu, vocalist, moved to Spain for a while. Half Finnish, half German, talented performer. He is one of those frontmen, which speaking to the audience during a concert actually makes some sense.

4 years later he returned back to Helsinki and recreated a band with the current name. This is the actual name of one of his songs. After another several years of working in Finland and around, gathering musicians, playing gigs, and selling producers' house to pay for recording studio, they did successful song and got to the Finnish and European charts. And signed up with EMI.

Samu is not of those arrogant musicians, who consider themselves better than anybody else. He seems to be open-minded, easygoing and fun! He is one of the judges in the German version of the show Voice!

I don’t have a big story about how I got to know Sunrise Avenue. I just heard them somewhere. I think it was a time when I lived in Minsk and changed a job after long years of corporate work. I downloaded an mp3 album of this band to USB drive and put it into the car. Every day of driving from work was accompanied by Sunrise Avenue for quite a while. This music gave me a feeling that everything is gonna be alright (but not so literally like Bob Marley). I had visions of the California coast and hills, the warm sweet sun, a car driving toward the pacific sunset. Might be silly, but the music of this Finnish person gave me that warm feeling. I actually didn’t know that he was from Finland back then. But now my inner piggy bank of music makers got one more Finnish talent coin.

Apart from musical talents, Samu also knows several languages. He participated in some big show in 2013 and did a Spanish version of his first big song - Fairytale Gone Bad. Spanish one goes like Olvida Me. And it is very beautiful!