Sampling Schlager
In my last post I mentioned how I had been picking up selected albums from my parents' music shelf, and even laid them out in detail within the entry. These were, for most parts, various forms of Finnish adult contemporary music - iskelmä as we call it back home, and schlager as is the oft-used moniker throughout Europe. Music which derives its roots from classic 60s and 70s pop and rock music, but which has been infused by domestic influences and filtered through several layers of sonic safety nets to be easily approachable by as many people as possible, and specifically people who enjoyed those catchy melodies back in t'day and in their more mature days want to enjoy similar vibes without too many complications. It's pop/rock with all its roughness honed smooth, all its edges cushioned and which lives and dies by its own set of tropes. Absolutely everything that any normal teenager living in Finland is repelled by, of course.
Now, as I myself am getting older, I'm finding that the impossible is happening and I'm beginning to enjoy this music to some degree - and I'm sure my father would be delighted to say "I told you so" to me after all my protesting back in the day about it. I've been listening to a lot of this music in the past weeks, both the albums I picked up at home and others, though truth be told a small seedling of this was already growing earlier on before all this family tragedy around me happened. But after the last five months, it's definitely picked a different meaning. These songs are no longer just songs but artifacts of my own heritage, both from a wider cultural perspective as well as from a familial perspective as I can imagine my parents listening to these songs. One aspect of being an expat out of the country and losing both my parents who still remained in the old land is that I feel more isolated than ever about my own upbringing, and listening to this music has been a way to slowly re-build this bridge in my mind. Many of the songs on the various compilations I've taken ownership of are real evergreens, part of a constant cultural map which play so often in radio stations, TV programs and anything with an audio link that they've become almost ambient in nature - just part of the everyday world which made them so easy to take for granted and ignore back in my youth, and which now act as comforting reminders of that world.
One benefit of listening to this music while older (and perhaps when more "detached" about it all) is that you can appreciate these songs as songs. There are layers you have to dig through - corny lyrics, sometimes overbearing vocal performances, outstandingly dated production particularly in anything from the 1990s - but if you can dust off all the potential distractions, you do discover there's some very solid songwriting underneath it all. Schlager is at the end of the day pop music, and pop music wants to be remembered - thus, there is a weighty emphasis on strong melodies and arrangements, and "allowing" myself to appreciate these elements where they're pulled off well has been a part of this journey. There are great songs in there, underneath all the trappings of schlager, and it's been fun to discover how these songs I already knew inside-out suddenly sound very different when I actually pay attention to what's going on within them.
But really this is just an excuse to list some of my current favourites I've been enjoying the past few weeks, so let's have a quick crash course to the world of Finnish iskelmä through songs that I've been listening to recently.
Katri Helena - Anna mulle tähtitaivas
If we are going to talk about Finnish schlager, there's only one name to start from and that's Katri Helena Kalaoja, or just Katri Helena for everyone (especially given she's changed her surname a few times over the years). She's the indomitable queen of schlager, a household name who has reigned supreme since the 1960s and has retained her popularity across the decades, always finding new ways to become relevant for audiences new and old in a manner that befits her, not anyone else. The list of her hits and evergreens is so long that listing even a handful would make this paragraph obscenely unwieldy - she's even the co-writer of one of the country's most beloved Christmas standards (our Mariah, really) - and if there's a pop hit from the 60s or 70s, you can bet she's covered it in Finnish at some point in her career. The only time she's ever showed signs of stopping is right now, in 2025, as she officially announced her retirement at the end of the year and released her goodbye single (a Finnish cover of "Circle of Life" featuring a choir made out of a number of contemporary female artists).
That, and the period where this song comes from. Helena's husband died due to a sudden medical emergency in 1988, right in her arms backstage after a concert, and this shook her so much that for a while she considered retiring from music altogether. In the early 1990s she carefully began to make special concert appearances again, but didn't think about returning to recording until a fellow veteran musician Jukka Kuoppamäki presented her with a song he'd written that he felt belonged to her. "Anna mulle tähtitaivas" ("Give Me a Sky Full of Stars") is a song about perseverance and pushing through the darkest days, begging for life to provide something worth believing in once more and then running towards the sun that you can see breaking through the dark clouds once more. Unsurprisingly, it struck a chord with Helena while she was still grieving, and agreed to record it. The response was enormous and the song immediately beloved by all, shortly becoming her biggest hit ever: in a back catalogue full of big name songs, "Anna mulle tähtitaivas" stands up as her arguable signature track. It opened a whole new chapter in her career and you could make the claim that without the new wind it blew in her sails, she wouldn't perhaps be in quite as esteemed position as she is now.
Katri Helena was my mother's favourite singer, and the only one she actively wanted to see live when she toured nearby (and quite possibly the only artist she saw live more than once). I was in kindergarten age when "Anna mulle tähtitaivas" became a hit and my mother had the album on cassette in her car; she'd always play it when she dropped me off to the kindergarten but because the drive was so short, we only ever really listened to Side 1 Track 1 together - which was "Anna mulle tähtitaivas". It became our song and has been a firm favourite of mine for years even when I didn't otherwise listen to this genre, and years later I discovered that it was considered to be her song by the rest of our family as well. It was the first song played in her funeral, and though I thought that would make the song unbearable to listen afterwards, I'm finding a strange kind of warmth and comfort in it now.
Kirka - Hengaillaan
If Katri Helena can be called the queen of iskelmä, Kirill "Kirka" Babitzin would be the king. Emerging in the 1970s, he retained his popularity steadily until his death in 2007: he's also credited for a madly wild amount of evergreen airplay classics, to the extent that the 12-track budget compilation I picked up from my parents' collection is chock full of songs most Finns know by heart, and it's still missing some. The difference between the two royals was that while Katri Helena came from a pop and easy listening background, Kirka was a rock and roll man by heart and many of his songs have a more energetic, muscular drive while still comfortably staying within the confinements of schlager.
Kirka was another one of my mother's favourites as well, and one of his songs was also played in her funeral (the vaguely reggae-tinged ballad of longing, "Surun pyyhit silmistäni". But that's not the song I've been coming back to. Instead, it's his breezy entry to the 1984 Eurovision song contest, "Hengaillaan" ("Let's Hang Around"). It's a carefree, leisurely pop/rocker about being stuck at the train station with your lover at the dead of night waiting for the next train to arrive and spending the time laughing and dancing in the quiet building, and out of Kirka's many hits it's not from the deeper end. It is however currently being used as the theme tune to a quiz show that both my parents really enjoyed, and which we often watched together in the evenings when I visited them in the past few years. The song now reminds me of those cosy, lazy evenings with my family.
Rauli "Badding" Somerjoki - Paratiisi
Rauli Somerjoki, or Badding as he's more often called, is one of the Finnish pop culture canon's beloved tragic figures: a tender, pained soul who struggled with anxiety and stage fright all his life, battling his depressive periods with the help of alcohol, which ultimately caused the death of him at the young age of 39. He's also one of the more cherished names in this list even among the "serious" rock critics, primarily thanks to his roots in the Finnish underground rock and roll scene in the 1970s. Somerjoki's first releases were part of the more counter-cultural youth music scene, largely covering 1950s rock and roll classics with a more contemporary muscle and punk-like attitude (even if not a punk sound, as such). But Somerjoki was only part of that world through coincidence and connections, and his heart always yearned towards softer pop music and classic schlager and ultimately despite his label's protests he shifted his career towards his own preferences. At the time this was a Dylan-goes-electric level of betrayal, but Badding eventually turned the tide by releasing a number of classics that now form a part of the great Finnish songbook.
"Paratiisi" ("Paradise") is the sound of summer: of long road trips out in the country with windows down, of sandy beaches and forest-side lakes full of people cooling down by the water, of lazy days full of warmth and sunshine. Badding's soft croon narrates a tale of summer-time passion, as tender as it is wild, and the music softly weaves the way for the words. That gentle groove of the song is essential for its leisurely vibe, with that immediately identifiable lead guitar sound which is practically synonymous with iskelmä, softly picking away lingering melodies.
Vicky Rosti - Sata salamaa
Another Finnish Eurovision candidate, this time from 1987. Virve "Vicky" Rosti was the teenage firecracker of schlager when she made her debut in 1975 at the age of 17: young, full of vigour and with a big voice and bigger charisma. She found her career in the adult contemporary world but brought a strong, feminine rock and roll spirit with her, with many of her translated import hits (which were a key part of every schlager singer's arsenal) coming from rock side of the 60s and 70s.
"Sata salamaa" ("A Hundred Thunderbolts") is so marvellously 1980s in that way that affected the domestic adult contemporary scene of every single country in the world. The electric guitar chords, the synths, the booming drums, the shoulder pads - it's all so deliciously dated and charming. It's still clearly iskelmä but with a contemporary make-up on. It's also a great example of what Rosti brought on the table, her commandeering voice bursts in the chorus booming with power that very few of her peers ever played with. It also helps that it's just such a maddeningly catchy chorus too - so exuberant and fun in its sweeping hooks. Should've landed much higher than 15th place!
Taiska - Mombasa
More or less everyone I've listed in this article is an industry icon of some degree or another, whose names have left a permanent imprint in the public consciousness. That's not the case with Hannele "Taiska" Suominen. Her greatest hit with most longevity is her debut single "Mombasa", released in 1975, and though she was fairly popular for the next few years with some other hits to her name, she never quite captured the spark her debut song had. Taiska eventually retired from touring and recording in the mid-1980s and became a theatre director, and though in the 2000s she's taken part in some nostalgia tours and recorded a few new songs for special occasions, she's never become part of the wider tapestry. Most people only know "Mombasa".
But what a great song it is. Like a surprisingly large amount of Finnish schlager, it's a translated version of an Italian song (Italy seems to really share our taste in adult contemporary) but the Finnish cover is so ingrained into our world that not many recognise or even consider it a cover. The minute-long soft vocal intro eventually leads into a softly growing, widescreen ballad full of bittersweet yearning and longing for a special moment in time in the narrator's life, now long left behind in the past and all that remains are the vivid memories of that one tender night on the coast of Africa.
Kaija Koo - Kuka keksi rakkauden
"Kuka keksi rakkauden" ("Who Invented Love") was a song I had honestly always kind of ignored. The title-drop melody in the chorus is such an immediate, persistent earworm that of course I knew the song, but I had never really given the rest of the song much thought. But in a classic schlager hit fashion, it's a song that represents breaking through difficult times. Kaija Koo started as a backing vocalist for other schlager stars (you can see her as a backing vocalist for the Eurovision performance of "Hengaillaan" linked above), before getting a chance to break out as a star of her own in the mid-1980s. While she got her first hit single with the debut album, she pulled the brakes on her career because her father passed away while recording the album. Processing the grief took a number of years until she finally returned in 1993 with her second album: it became Finland's 7th most sold album, and contains this song.
And simply going by memory at first, I didn't expect this song to be like this. While still schlager in its production and approach (check out that guitar sound again), the lyrics, the structure and the format goes beyond the genre limits. So much of this reminds me of Leevi and the Leavings, an absolutely classic Finnish pop/rock mega band who as a reference point will mean absolutely nothing for most people who are reading this, but who made their idiosyncratic pop songs into the whole nation's favourites disregarding any boundaries. The middle-eight melodically sounds like it was lifted from a dramatic 80s new wave song, only dressed in a different kind of guise and brought down to earth. And any schlager song that soon after starting makes a direct reference to Hitchcock's Birds is one that's a step above more interesting than most others.
This is kind of what I mean when I said I'm listening to these songs with a new kind of focus now. Purely in terms of production and arrangement "Kuka keksi rakkauden" gets lost in the schlager radio fodder, or it would anyway if it wasn't for that killer hook of a title drop; but listening to it in isolation, more closely, really reveals what a smart little song it is. It suavely builds and grows atop its backbone of a beat, steadily increasing the stakes and the intensity without ever lifting away its cool nonchalantness. You could play this through a production aesthetic with more street credibility, and it would work just as excellently because the song in the core is real strong.
80s esque middle eightEero Raittinen - Vanha holvikirkko
The oldest song in this list, from 1968. "Vanha holvikirkko" ("The Old Vaulted Church") was written by the Swedish songwriter Sven Lindahl and originally performed in Swedish by the local popular singer Lenne Broberg. The song became a major hit in Sweden and thanks to the constant cultural exchange between the two countries, Broberg also recorded a version in Finnish; however thanks to the clumsy translation and Broberg's non-native linguistic skills, the song was more unintentionally amusing than anything worth taken seriously. A new translation in Finnish was done by the translation song wizard Niilo "Saukki" Puhtila and sung by Eero Raittinen, whose former band Eero & Jussi & The Boys had been a key part of the Finnish wave of rock and roll and early sixties pop. Raittinen's version became the iconic, canonical one.
It's a beautiful song. I'm a sucker for a good organ part and "Vanha holvikirkko" leans on it, appropriately for its name. The song is about the song of church organist who's spending the night in the empty church playing the instrument and dreaming of becoming like his father - and Raittinen packs that narrative full of pathos, pride and awe. The melody is superb and the arrangement downright lush, the emphasis being on the organ of course but the rhythmic piano part is just as vital for the song. It's a very short song but it's so full of melodies and chord sequences that retain their resonance. There's something truly timeless to it, while at the same time sounding positively like an old relic you can admire.
This song was already familiar to me from my Finnish #1s project - or should we say familiar again given how I simply hadn't placed the melody next to the title in my mind - but I've been coming back to it a lot and especially recently, thanks to these hit compilations where it resides. Just a very beautiful song that I think my dad especially loved - he was also a fan of organs.