As Bjørn Riis returns to the spotlight with his latest solo album, the Airbag guitarist talks about his close-knit Norwegian prog family, creating narratives in music and finding inspiration from an infernal 14th-century poem for Everything To Everyone.

Words: David West

Images: Anne-Marie Forker

An elegant melancholy pervades Everything To Everyone, the fourth solo album from Bjørn Riis, as the guitarist once again spreads his musical wings outside of Norwegian prog mainstays Airbag. Drawing inspiration from Dante’s Inferno and exploring questions around how we present ourselves to the world in the title track or face temptation in The Siren, it’s an album that could have been born on a lonely, windswept hillside under a grey Scandinavian winter sky. But that’s not quite the case.

“I think a lot of people have this image of us Norwegians sitting in a cabin on some mountaintop and it’s raining and dark, but most of the stuff I write is done back and forth to work on the subway,” says Riis. Apparently, all the moodiness is in the music, not the man, who sits happily writing away with his headphones on during his daily commute. “Obviously, when I record and do guitar solos and the vocals, I have to be in a certain mood to capture the performance, but I don’t consider myself a particularly gloomy person,” he says.

For Riis, creativity isn’t something to turn off and on again, but rather a continuous process that works best when regularly exercised. He’s always working on something, even if it takes a long time to reach the ears of the prog public. The Siren was first proposed for Airbag’s A Day At The Beach in 2020, and the bulk of the writing for Everything To Everyone took place in the autumn of 2019 into the winter of 2020. “The challenge was to get access to studios and other musicians during the pandemic and the lockdowns, so that’s the main reason for it to have taken so long to finish,” he says.