Whatever happened to the teenage dream?

Sometimes, the truth can seem a little mundane. Beloved of all sensible prog-leaning folk, Einar Solberg is embarking on a solo career, largely to save himself from getting bored. After 22 years as frontman with Leprous, he’s finally made a record under his own name. Entitled 16 and focused on events in his life between the ages of 16 and 19, it comprises songs co-written with a diverse array of musicians and composers, with a few self-penned songs thrown in for good measure. It’s a spectacular beginning to his solo endeavours, but one that grew from a simple urge to find something to do.
“I remember when I got home from a tour in 2018 – and it’d been a year with very extensive touring – I got back to Norway, looked at my schedule and thought, ‘Oh, there’s absolutely nothing there!’” Solberg recalls. “I got a bit depressed about it! It keeps on happening here and there. Leprous are a very active band, but suddenly you get into periods when there’s nothing, so what could I fill those with?”
Solo careers are far from an unusual phenomenon in the world of progressive music, and Solberg could easily have churned out a few tunes and left it at that. But as he notes, he was incredibly conscious that he didn’t want to write anything that sounded in any way close to Leprous. Instead, he joined forces with other songwriters and composers, exchanging ideas and striving to create something unique.
“I came to the conclusion that I wanted to do a solo project, but for the first album I wanted to try to work with other people, to get to know other people, but also to learn a bit about how other people work. So I make a sketch, send it to someone, and they can do whatever they want to do with it and send it back to me. We just repeat that process until we’re happy.”
Rather than only hooking up with big names from the prog metal world, Solberg has chosen his collaborators for their eccentricities and divergent ways of thinking. Not surprisingly, brother-in-law Ihsahn and sister Heidi (a.k.a. Starofash) were both involved, co-penning the eerie and mellifluous Where All The Twigs Broke and the vexed electronica of Splitting The Soul respectively. Elsewhere, experimental cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne, Vola frontman Asger Mygind and Norwegian post-everything polymath Magnus Børmark (from the bands Gåte and 22) all cross the compositional streams with our hero. TV soundtrack maestro and Agent Fresco guitarist Tóti Guðnason and actor-composer Ben Levin complete the set.
“When choosing people, I couldn’t care less about how famous the person was,” he explains. “That wasn’t interesting to me. What I cared about was that they had a strong musical identity and were unafraid in their approach to writing music. Of course I needed some sort of connection, so I could get in touch. I’m not very good at that sort of networking.”
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1684410528/articles/QWz01oBmH1685530310879/1156958555.jpg]
So he doesn’t slide into people’s DMs very often?
“Yeah, I’m really very bad at that! [Laughs] If I fear someone will say no, I don’t ask. But most of all I wanted people who had a different approach. People who could tone down my drama a little bit!”
At this point, Solberg allows himself an ironic chuckle. The majority of 16 exists in a very different musical world from Leprous, but dialling down the drama was never really a credible option. In particular The Glass Is Empty, the album’s closing track, may well be the most emotionally supercharged thing that the Norwegian has ever put his name to. Co-written with Tóti Guðnason, it ends 16 with layer upon layer of cinematic bombast.
“The funny thing about mine and Tóti’s collaboration, is that we’ve both ended up in the prog scene, but neither of us really appreciate prog so much anymore. We went into this thinking that we were on the same page, and we’d make something that had nothing to do with prog. Then we ended up writing the longest, most prog song on the album! [Laughs] That’s the beautiful thing about creativity: you never know where it’s going to go.”
Despite the scattershot nature of its composition, 16 is an undeniably cohesive and focused piece of work. It’s also guaranteed to put us all through the emotional wringer. Based on a series of events that took place in his late teenage years, the lyrics offer poetic insight into a tumultuous time in Solberg’s life.
“I’ve written about my mental health before, so the difference with this album is that it’s about more specific events and not so much about my mental health,” he explains. “I guess it’s the explanation of my mental health problems. There were a lot of life-defining things that were happening when I was 16.”
Solberg takes a deep breath. After softly admitting that he won’t be talking about this stuff in any other in...