Silver Lining are something of a Norwegian supergroup featuring members of the Northern Belle and Louien. Their sound is tight, rootsy Americana, focusing on a heartfelt connection as it does with their lovely, longing live arrangement of “Awake”. The band—Stine Andreassen, along with Bjørnar Ekse Brandseth, Halvor Falck Johansen, and Live Miranda Solberg—perform a ruminative version of the single, noted for the atmospheric sound that they develop with their guitar collective and gorgeous harmonies.
“Awake” features on Silver Lining’s album, Go Out Nowhere, which was released on 13 May. Regarding this performance of the tune, Solberg tells PopMatters, “We wanted to create a dreamy, airy, almost sleepy sound to compliment the theme of the song. We changed things up by having me sing the first verse and then Stine doing the second one and tried to mesh our voices together in the chorus so that it’s hard to tell them apart.”
Andreassen says, “I wrote the song, but I always had Live in mind for it, and we sang it as a duet, which I think turned out great. It was supposed to be one of the more stripped-down songs, and we planned it without the rhythm section. But in the studio, Kim Åge Furuhaug and Chris Holm (drummer and bassist of instrumental psych group Orions Belte) really wanted to give the song a go, and it turned out beautifully.”
“It gave us a real Krauss/Plant vibe. However, the live version is closer to what we originally planned for the song. It was done in one take – both the video and the performance – to really catch the interplay between us, as well as the rawness and imperfections of a live performance.”