About Una Torfadóttir
Una Torfadóttir started writing songs about heartbreak long before she experienced it herself. As a child, she wrote dramatic texts in English and sang with great emotion, but when her teenage years began, Una began to write about her own experiences and then her mother tongue took over.
“It’s the only way for me to write from the heart,” says Una. She has been working on the EP Tangled and Lost and Lonely since September 2020, but she aims to release it in the spring months.
Una’s soundscape is colorful and the arrangements rhyme well with the topic of each song, but the songs were written over a period of several years, but all focus on the same theme. Different moments become a continuous narrative that the listener can find themselves in, each song is like a diary entry or a letter that holds all the things you think and wish you could say, delicate speculations about feelings that are often so difficult to express.
Una writes most of the songs on the guitar in her room with the diary open in front of her. “It’s such a funny process to write a song, I have no control over the song, my task is just to search and try, listen to what comes and write it down before it’s forgotten.”
An exclusive team of professionals and Una’s friends is involved in making the album. Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir produces, Hafsteinn Þráinsson mixes and Kári Ísleifsson masters. Tumi Torfason, Una’s brother, plays bass, Svanhildur Lóa Bergsveinsdóttir plays drums, and Una herself plays guitar and piano.
The process was full of experiments, play, and joy, and the result is a beautiful five-song album that will see the light of day in the coming weeks.
“It’s one of those songs that was fascinating to write, I felt it and I let it be heard. There is pain and bitterness in the lyrics which are not pretty emotions but they are human and we all know them. We all like to find reasons when things don’t go as we had hoped.
You often blame yourself and don’t believe it when you’re told there’s nothing wrong,” she explains, adding that she thinks it’s appropriate that this is the first song people hear from her. “Here I am exposed to releasing music for the first time and in this song I put all my cards on the table.”