Album Notes

Scandinavian charmer Marie Frank has delighted music fans since the release of her popular 1999 debut album "Ancient Pleasures" (BMG/RCA).

Two Top 10 hits, an international dance floor smash as Frankee (Under The Water), and two arms full of Danish Grammys made for a pretty good year. In 2001, her second CD "Vermilion" (BMG/RCA) brought music lovers more of the same ... only better.

This year, Marie Frank's new mini-album, "Swimmingly" is being hailed as her best record yet.
One respected writer called it "deeply demure and wonderfully wry." Another praised it as a refreshing alternative to the current wave of Scandinavian pop, "a brilliant musical stroke in a sea of sameness."

But "Swimmingly" is more than just Miss Marie's latest release ... it is the story of an independent-minded artist's break from her major-label past and the tale of how fate works in mysterious ways.

You see, Marie was one song short of finishing her first album in New York City when fate brought her back to The Living Room, the downtown hipster hangout where Norah Jones got her start. On the small stage, American rock-poet Neill C. Furio was one verse into a set of new songs when tip-toeing Marie accidentally caused a ruckus. When Neill stopped his chorus mid-couplet, little did he know that the song he was singing would complete "Ancient Pleasures".

And when Marie and her band recorded that song, the drop-tuned Rockette 88, little did anyone know that it wasn't the last of Neill's songs she would sing.

Fate must have planted the seed in New York that would blossom in Scandanavia this spring, because after two gold records, four years of wishing, five(!) Danish Grammys, and hundreds of concerts and TV appearances with her fabulous band, "Swimmingly" is a reality.

Written entirely by Neill and atmospherically produced by Marie's drummer and music partner Kent Olsen (with Neill on hand), "Swimmingly" finds Marie Frank singing both bittersweet and sweetly wistful story-songs in a flickering wide-screen range of dreamy pop-noir places that envelope her familiar voice in a whole new way.

As a lovingly engraved "thank you" to her longtime fans and a beautifully developed departure from the confines of record-label expectations, "Swimmingly" is a funny, moving, haunting, whimsical, sad, and entertaining song-cycle that (in 24 minutes) covers half a lifetime of joyfully lost innocence and better-late-than-never-found experience.

Opening with Neill's moonlit cricket-accompanied recitation, "Swimmingly" floats fom the teenaged lakeside lament of Drowningly to the drizzly modal plea of Scrabble-ina. The dizzy self-effacing summer breezy hit parade of Whoops Wrong Daisy fades into the defiant electric explosion of As Is, which is sung from an overlooked antique watch's point of view. Last is the mini-album's fitting coda, the woody and elegiac goodbye hymn Rust In Peace.

Fittingly, the danish press has been rapturous:

"In a world that has been styled to death, what has happened to sweetness?" asks Information's Torben Bille, who answers, "I have found it, and its name is Marie Frank. Marie sings like no one else ... articulate, guileless, inviting, yet tantilizingly out of reach. With spider-web strong yet delicate songs, Swimmingly is understated and elegant, a quiet triumph full of quirky unexpected turns and enough space to let your own dreams and memories wander."

No less than Politiken writes, "Swimmingly is dusty, warm, melancholy, and charming. It offers love songs that are both colorful and cunning."

And Danish Radio has heard the news: The first single, Whoops Wrong Daisy, has been on the radio hit list since the week it popped out.

Conceived in New York City and born in Copenhagen, "Swimmingly" is a Danish-American kaleidoscope of words and music and feelings from days gone by ... and for better days ahead.