I now find that she has helped to ruin one of the world’s most brilliant and beautiful pop songs! The song in question is Where The Lost Ones Go, a duet between Norwegian pop singer Espen Lind and classical singer Sissel Kyrkjebø. Looking up info about Espen just now, I discovered that Katherine has covered this incredible song along with Garðar Thór Cortes, who I don’t want to hate because he’s Icelandic, but frankly their version is completely wrong.
The reason I love the original is that it’s a very grand song, but Espen (who wrote it) has typical pop vocals, in fact sounding very similar to Gary Barlow, which mix wonderfully with Syssel’s classical voice. Syssel of course does sing in an operatic style (sorry I can’t use more technical terms), but she is not extreme in that sound, and the balance with Espen is original and perfect for the song. It was written for them to sing, after all. Katherine and Cortes, in comparison, seem to be having a ‘who can sing the poshest’ competition. While I appreciate that this kind of music is very well-regarded and it takes great talent to sing like this (although Katherine was a bit crap on X Factor), I just feel like the emotion in the original is far more real and sincere, because the singers sound so much more natural.
Luckily it doesn’t seem likely to become a single, but that only shows the crapness of these two singers – they can’t be that great if they can make a song like this not sound good enough to be immediately released and rocketed to no.1 in the charts. I’m still hoping it will re-emerge as a Take That/Leona duet, a surefire Christmas no.1.