Maria Lithell Flygh writes: “It’s hard to pinpoint what makes my heart sing when I read a poem, but that’s what it takes to get me composing. Another source of inspiration is to picture the musicians and singers who will be performing the piece, which is the case for the material on this album. The pandemic brought certain things home to us: what we truly long for. Encounters with other people, experiencing music and other art forms in groups, having good health, being together. While reading Nya dikter by Lotta Lotass, I realized that an undercurrent of longing ran throughout the poems. The images of chained circus elephants she chose to include in her collection reinforced this feeling and made me want to create music that combined the sense of longing and melancholy present in Swedish folk music with my own, more contemporary, expression.”