Barefoot on the Malmö Shore

MAY 15 2013 · 12:15

Emmelie de Forest · "Only Teardrops" · Denmark · 2013 Placement: 1st · Language: English · Composers: Lise Cabble, Julia Fabrin Jakobsen, Thomas Stengaard · Venue: Malmö Arena · Host: Malmö, Sweden · Type: winner · Broadcast: HD On the night of 18 May 2013, at the Malmö Arena in southern Sweden, a twenty-year-old Danish singer stepped onto a wind-swept stage barefoot, flanked by a flute and a war drum, and sang the contest into a different decade. Emmelie de Forest had drifted through the Danish national final like an apparition in a flower crown, but in Malmö the small, wide-eyed aesthetic hardened into something stranger, a folk anthem staged like a peace treaty. 'How many times can we win and lose? / How many times can we break the rules?' she sang, each line the product of a Swedish-Danish writing camp that had been engineering exactly this kind of pan-Scandinavian earworm for a decade. The drummer lifted his mallet. The camera pulled back on a stage designed, deliberately, to look like a landscape after war. Denmark had been the pre-contest favorite since March. When the votes completed, Sweden handing the title over the Øresund to its neighbor, de Forest climbed the stairs reportedly still barefoot, reportedly still composed, and delivered a reprise that the post-broadcast clips would stretch into the streaming years. Sweden's Loreen had ended one era in Baku. In Malmö, across the bridge, Denmark opened the next. Context Eurovision 2013 sat at a hinge. The contest had just survived Baku's human-rights controversies; Malmö was pitched as a deliberate correction, smaller arena, tighter budget, an event about songs rather than spectacle. The hosts framed it as 'We Are One,' a line Europe was still trying to believe as the euro crisis ground on and austerity politics hardened across the continent. YouTube had become the real second venue: Eurovision's channel was by now a permanent fixture, and 'Only Teardrops' was engineered, consciously or not, for that afterlife. The song's co-writer Thomas Stengaard was part of a Scandinavian pop-export machine that would, within a few years, supply much of the Anglophone charts. De Forest herself had been discovered at a folk festival. The juxtaposition, cottage-industry artist, industrial-grade song, defined where Eurovision was heading. Legacy 'Only Teardrops' became one of the decade's most-streamed Eurovision tracks and kept a long tail on European radio into 2014. Denmark hosted the 2014 contest in Copenhagen's B&W Hallerne, a converted shipyard, an ambitious build that reportedly ran well over budget and became a cautionary tale for future hosts. De Forest went on to co-write the UK's 2014 entry, one of the first winners to pivot quickly into Eurovision's backroom songwriting economy. Her barefoot-in-a-flower-crown image became a template imitated, to diminishing returns, for several contests afterward. The song itself lives on as a reliable anthem in compilation broadcasts and Eurovision retrospectives. Mythology People remember the barefoot and the flower crown; fewer remember that the song had been a betting favorite for months before Malmö and that its victory was among the least surprising in modern Eurovision history. The folk-waif image also obscures how professionally constructed the song was, a Scandinavian co-write assembled for exactly this outcome.