The Comet Song

Album: Moomins and the Comet Chase OST (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the theme tune to the 2010 Finnish stop motion feature film Moomins And The Comet Chase, which was adapted from the second in the series of Tove Jansson's Moomin books, published in 1946.
  • Icelandic electronica singer-songwriter Björk co-wrote and performed the song. The other co-writer was Sjón, the pen name of Icelandic author and poet Sigurjón Sigurðsson. He was awarded The Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2005 for the novel Skugga-Baldur ('The Blue Fox'), but is perhaps best known in the English speaking world for writing some of Björk's lyrics.
  • The song was released as a single on September 6th 2010 with all proceeds being donated to UNICEF to support flood relief work in Pakistan.
  • Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Front Row program, Björk explained that she is a big fan of the Moomin franchise. She said: "I read the books as a child and then I read them for my children. I guess I realised that I still like them just as much. They probably stand for something Nordic, I think there's something quite stark, a certain kind of simplicity. You could speculate and say, 'because there are fewer plants there, and fewer animals, fewer buildings, so it's kind of more minimal. I've sometimes compared it to Scandinavian furniture, compared to Italian furniture. Italian - hundreds of little details, curls and curves and decoration - and Scandinavian furniture is kind of naked. And it's funny and sad at the same time. And the relationship to nature Tove Jansson has, that's very important to me. And everybody's allowed to be just as eccentric as they are, they don't have to conform. Reading to my children I actually noticed some kind of anti-authority aspect in it - there's no hierarchy between the characters, they are all equal. I like that a lot."

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