Finding The Finnish Version

Earlier this year, I told the tale of spending a night in the small town of Kemi, Finland, in April 1974 and of the grand romantic gesture that arose from that visit. One of the events in Kemi that I didn’t relate in that post took place the following morning. I wrote about that omitted event in another venue about fifteen years ago when I was sorting out my thoughts about the 1971 record, “Never Ending Song of Love” from the album Motel Shot by Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. I said: 

During my European travels, I spent about ten days wandering through northern Scandinavia with an Australian fellow named John. We spent one night in Kemi, a small town in Finland. The next morning, we learned we’d forgotten about a time zone change and had missed the first train back to Sweden. We had a couple hours to kill, so we sat in a café near the railroad station, drinking coffee and listening to the jukebox. At one point, a record came on that sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to place it. I have never heard anything else in my life quite as strange as “Never Ending Song of Love” sung in Finnish. 

Having remembered “Never Ending Song of Love” in Finnish as I wrote, I made a few attempts in 2008 to find an mp3 of the record. Why? Because having heard it once in such memorable circumstances, I thought it would be fun to hear it again. Having no idea of the Finnish performer’s name or of the record’s Finnish title, the search essentially began with a barrier that could not be overcome. It was a Google here and a Google there, and eventually I gave up. 

Then, about five years after those attempts, I was wandering around the web digging into a different portion of the history of Delaney & Bonnie, and one of my searches pointed me toward a post at a blog titled Finnpicks that mentioned both “Delaney & Bonnie” and “Finnish lyrics.” 

Intrigued, I clicked on the link, and found a brief account of Finnish singer Lea Laven and her recording that put Finnish lyrics to Delaney Bramlett’s tune for “Never Ending Song of Love.” The resulting track, said the post, was titled “Mun On Niin Niin Hyvä Olla” (which translates, said the writer of Finnpicks, to “I Feel So Fine”) and was placed on the B-side of Laven’s 1973 single “On Ja Ei.” I clicked the player at the blog site, and this is what I heard:

Just to refresh your memory, here’s Delaney & Bonnie & Friends and “Never Ending Song of Love,” which went to No. 13 in the U.S. in mid-1971:

Now, almost fifty years removed from one hearing, I couldn’t testify in court that the record I heard in the café in Kemi was Lea Laven’s. But how many Finnish records could there have been in 1974 that used Delaney Bramlett’s melody? I’m reasonably sure that it was Laven’s record that John and I heard as we sipped incredibly strong coffee and ate fresh doughnuts.

– whiteray