There’s a famous line delivered, and apparently ad-libbed by Orson Welles on post war Vienna’s big wheel, in the classic film The Third Man. “In Switzerland,” he declared, “they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
It’s not the most historically accurate line, but tries to get across the point regarding Switzerland’s inoffensive history. So with that overtly cliched image in mind, the name Heidi Happy conjures up an image of a buxom shepherdess running across the hills, frock and pig tails flowing, singing a Swiss folk song to a bunch of disinterested sheep. There is, of course, a whole lot more to both Heidi, and her homeland.
Born Priska Zemp to a musical family, her mother being a classically trained soprano, she worked with various local bands before finally adopting the Heidi Happy persona and embarking on her own musical career.
She has been writing music all her life. In many ways her songs are like reading someone’s private thoughts written down in a letter or diary. Instinctively you know that her music is of real life experience. Quite simply, Heidi wears her heart on her musical sleeve.
There are songs of upbeat innocence, where the joys of life are perfectly expressed. There are songs of cloying sadness, and regret, amid tear soaked lyrics. There are songs that, according to her publicity material, have made her sad, happy, scream, cry, or even puke.
A couple of years back I was strolling through a record store in Paris and I heard the song “Other Reasons” sung by a girl with an impossibly smooth and genuine voice. It stopped me in my tracks. The singer was Heidi Happy and the album was her debut released in 2006, Back Together.
Here I am on New Year’s Day, 2009, listening to her second album, Flowers, Birds, And Home (Little Jig Records). It isn’t set for release in France until March. You can rest assured that whoever chooses the music in that Parisian store will be looking forward to playing it over the shop's hi-fi.
Something has happened to 27 year old Heidi since Back Together. She is clearly not so happy and that generously honest heart seems to have suffered more of the twists and turns of life. Heidi, or Priska, has however turned those experiences into some striking music. Intensely personal, sometimes disarmingly direct lyrics express feelings of internal conflict. Like life itself it is a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows.
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