Is that…is that an actual Queen? It is now! All hail Lina Hedlund: Saviour of Pop, 2019.
A good performance, was it? She single-handedly brought the FEST to Melodifestivalen. Her song, ‘Victorious’, is a revved-up schlager powerhouse – the likes of which requires a true diva performance to really do it justice. Lina stepped up to the plate and delivered flawlessly, with a little help from a lot of swoosh-friendly fabric. It was the type of package that would have won Melodifestivalen in 2007, but which by Melodifestivalen 2017, was normally a dead-cert for a 5th place finish and a whole week of heart-break. And it was so close to becoming the latter. But she did it – thanks to the votes of a clearly-quite-parched-of-this-kind-of-thing-these-days nation of Swedish people. Bravo to everyone involved. The Melodifestivalen 2019 final is already looking and sounding ten times better thanks to last night’s result.
What else happened? Well, with a performance and song as big as Lina’s, everything else just paled in comparison, really. But ok, let’s run through this briefly. Jon Henrik Fjällgren got down on one knee and performed to a video of a reindeer, thus making the final. Martin Stenmarck and Rebecka Karlsson both charmed their way fair and square into Andra Chansen. Dolly Style performed their worst Melodifestivalen entry to date, and quite deservedly earned their worst Melodifestivalen result to date – 5th. Omar Rudberg finished in 6th, but probably deserved better. And The Lovers of Valdaro, whom we were expecting a lot from, really didn’t manage to sell any semblence of a tune in that three-minute slot they were alloted, and crashed out in 7th and last place.
And that was that? One more thing – we were bitterly disappointed to have woken up this morning not to find Eric Saade’s cover of Ted Gärdestad’s ‘Sattelit’ on Spotify. An excellent opening number that took him right back to his best moments on Så Mycket Bättre.
You can find our Best New Pop playlist frontloaded with five of the seven songs from last night’s heat (the two finalists have their songs released after Heat 4 – so only one week to wait for ‘Victorious’, yay!).