A Dance to the Music of Time — “Satellite”

A Dance to the Music of Time is my attempt to pinpoint exactly why I like pop music (and also try my hand at music criticism). It’s entirely subjective, but if you’re interested in starting a conversation I’ll be down in the comments. It’s gonna be published whenever I feel like it and I’ve no intention to target specific songs — when a song gives me joy or makes me think hard enough, I’ll do it on the spot.

---

The song: “Satellite”
from the Eurovision Song Contest 2010
reached #1 on the Official German Charts/#30 on the UK Singles Chart

When Petra Mede and Måns Zelmerlöw hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2016, they performed during the grand final a song called “Love Love Peace Peace” — a silly, bombastic five-minute number both satirizing and celebrating the ESC. The song was gloriously hammy, replete with wonderful in-jokes and utterly funny — and also a brilliant way of introducing someone to this utterly weird kitschfest. There is no audio-only version for “Love Love Peace Peace” — but what kind of monster would want to miss the visuals?

Here’s the masterstroke though: I feel that “Love Love Peace Peace”’s greatest achievement is in how it captures not only the spirit of the ESC — the theatricality, the flamboyance, the utter lack of gravitas — but also its raison d’etre. This song isn’t just showy — it cannot work without the visuals. If you listen to it with your eyes shut, you have a great orgy of sound and fury that signifies nothing (literally, because there are so many references to former contests onscreen). And that’s the troubling thing about the ESC: the average ESC song relies so much on presentation, on wowing the viewer (who accounts for half the votes) with stunning effects and rousing melodies while having lyrics that sound completely ridiculous. (Consider 2018’s runner-up “Fuego”, which had me humming its tune for days, but once you look at the lyrics: “Take a dive into my eyes, yeah the eyes of lioness/ Feel the power, they ain’t lying”. The songwriter needs a lesson in cohesion, that’s for sure.) It’s that deficit which has got a lot of people dismissing the ESC, saying that it’s all show and no substance, and that you can’t find real music in there.

In recent years there have been attempts to raise the standard of the songwriting: the 2019 runner-up “Soldi”, for instance, was lauded as a raw and intimate R&B song, a respite from all the pyrotechnics. The quality of songs like these are indeed a major boost to the contest, and I’m glad to see them there alongside the usual loud and brashy Eurovision fare. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking that there’s something missing from these offerings. Maybe it’s just me stubbornly thinking that pop songs need to have a little joie de vivre in between all the solemnity. Maybe I’ve been struck down forever by “Satellite”.

It’s time once again, as they say, to rewind and see what the winner of the 2010 Contest can tell us about Eurovision, personality, and music itself.

Chapter 1: It May Not Be America

Eurovision has such a reputation for kitschy music and trashy visuals these days that it’s easy to forget that it was originally just a peace project. Like many of the world’s greatest (and/or silliest) institutions, it was set up after the carnage of WWII by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), as a kind of goodwill gesture amongst nations: the idea was that if all these countries were too busy lovebombing each other with their mushy songs, they wouldn’t have time to throw any actual bombs at one another.

The downside to such a devotion to peace, of course, is that you get much less wiggle room for artistic expression. The first contest in 1956 featured calm, peaceful ballads across the board, and it stayed like that even as rock ‘n’ roll took hold in America and then the Continent. When Luxembourg won in 1965 with a yé-yé song, viewers were scandalized (and not just because it was written by Serge Gainsbourg, who never met a sexual perversion he couldn’t capitalise on); even in 1981, when popular music had moved on thrice over, grizzled old balladeers were directly rejecting the newest music trends from America in their lyrics. There was always a conservative streak in those years, accompanied by a benign strain of superiority: whatever turbulence happened to rock the world — literally — Eurovision would remain above it all, a stately, refined paragon of culture, the peacekeeper of Europe.

In 1998, though, two things happened. The first was that the EBU finally allowed countries to use whatever language they wanted in their songs: apart from a brief few years in the 1970s, all participating entrants had up till then been required to sing in their own mother tongue, which inevitably meant that all the points gravitated toward the British and Irish songs because they were the only ones everyone understood. When the language rule was relaxed, the UK and Ireland’s Anglophone advantage disappeared, and they promptly went down to the bottom of the scoreboard (and have mostly stayed there ever since). The second, and more important change, was that they also adopted televoting as the norm, giving all the viewers of Europe the power to choose their favourite song. This meant the people they needed to impress shifted from music professionals to the average watcher of television, a person who was more likely to be impressed by explosions and gimmicks rather than songwriting depth. The result was a mélange/shipwreck of visual extravaganzas as countries tried to one-up each other in making people like them. We had genuinely good jazz and hard rock songs winning, but we also got stripteases and breakdancing businessmen and turkey puppets. The early 2000s were weird, man.

My point is that for much of its history Eurovision wasn’t really that flamboyant: its penchant for fireworks and outrageous costumes is a product of the last two decades. But it was these two decades that gave the Contest its unsavoury reputation: that it was all sound and fury that signified nothing, that it was not a “serious songwriting competition”. Those who found Eurovision baffling would look at the entries and sneer at the tackiness of the whole thing, and the Contest became something of a joke amongst musical circles. Surely there could not be any “good” music as long as these people were sacrificing good songwriting for hollow spectacle? Even today, with a crop of songs that vastly improve on the offerings from the Noughties, it’s not difficult to detect a trace of condescension from American pop culture coverage, who tend to treat it more as a curious cultural sideshow.

Which fair enough. This is, at the end of the day, a song contest that is devoted to peace — a cheesy sentiment at the best of times — and there’s only so much that you can pack into three minutes’ worth of song. For people who take music seriously (and I like to fancy myself one of them), Eurovision does indeed seem to be thin gruel. But to dismiss it outright as something that can only produce songs of subpar quality would be to ignore the artists which actually made an effort: there are entries, then as now, which have paid more attention to harmonies, subtlety, lyrical depth, despite the limited themes. But is it really a dichotomy between vapid bangers and sensitive songs? Can a song be cheesy as hell — hollow, even — and still nod towards the critics?

The broader question is an eternal debate that will probably never be resolved, but for Eurovision, the answer seemed to be yes. After a decade of slowly declining returns, the producers at the EBU finally changed tack in 2009 and made the result dependent on both the juries and the viewers at home: two sets of points, combining to create the best song. The result was Norway’s “Fairytale”, which swept the board for both critics and audiences alike. Here was a man who could deliver the bombast while still making it sound melodious: a trained violinist with a flair for theatrics, Alexander Rybak knew what he was doing when he leapt onto that stage in Moscow. Unsurprisingly, “Fairytale” came out of the Contest with a record-breaking score. It probably helped that Rybak was the cutest man on Earth. (He was my age when he won Eurovision. I need to do more with my life.)

Though it’s one of my favourite Eurovision songs/performances, I still can’t help thinking that there’s a bit too much going on behind Alexander Rybak. There’s an excellent and simple story in the song, yet it’s just too much of a sensory overload at times — the swaying backing singers, the acrobatic dancers — and too often I find myself distracted from the storyline. What it needed, perhaps, was just a bit more streamlining — and who better to do that than the efficient Germans?

Chapter 2: I Am the Voice

For a nation that has strived to be “über alles” all the time, it should come as no surprise that Germany has had more Eurovision appearances than any other country. It joined the Contest on its first incarnation in 1956, and apart from one absence in the late 90s it has appeared in every single one since. Their track record, on the other hand, is not as dependable: at times they can post consecutive top-10 finishes, while at others they languish at the bottom of the scoreboard, beaten by Austrians with burning fake pianos or Ukrainians singing incomprehensible punk rock. It would be easy to attribute the successful years to a rigorous selection process and the fallow ones to everyone half-arsing it, but that’s not the case here. It’s not just a question of finding the right song for the right singer: the 2015 entry was extremely well-sung and staged, yet ended up dead last during the actual Contest; conversely, there is some absolute dreck that Germany has served up over the years, which to my amazement/horror Europe swallowed wholesale. It’s just hard to predict what will click with the European viewers, who might prefer eccentric garbage one year and delicately crafted pop the next.

Heading into the 2010 Contest, however, the odds weren’t good for Germany. It was staring down a string of flashy entries, all of which had landed with a damp splat. The previous year, they’d tried internal selection for the first time in almost two decades, and had ended up inviting (of all people) burlesque star Dita Von Teese onstage in an attempt to, erm, beat the competition. It hadn’t worked. The whole thing screamed outrageous excess and seemed implausibly tacky. Never mind that Norway was pulling the same kind of outrageous excess — it was not the accessible, wholesome variety that Europe apparently wanted that year.

Perhaps it was the failure of this outrageous excess that led Germany to swing wildly in the other direction the following year. Not only did they not invite a cabaret artiste onstage, they also handed viewers the reins to the whole selection process, allowing the public to decide who they wanted to advance. In addition, the producers for Unser Star für Oslo (“Our Star for Oslo”) also divvied up the selection processes of the artist and the song: in the national final, they had the finalists sing ALL the songs they were considering for Eurovision. If that sounds like desperation, perhaps it was: as I’ve mentioned upstairs, there was absolutely no guarantee that having a good singer or a brilliant song would translate to success on the Norwegian stage. Nor was it clear that Europe’s tastes would be in line with Germany’s; after all, much of the recent slate of German failures could be attributed to exactly that incompatibility. So they really were throwing every possible combination they could together, just to see what clicked.

Enter a young woman called Lena Meyer-Landrut. Now my German isn’t very good, but as far as I can tell, Lena already had a bit of experience in acting and singing when she signed up for Unser Star für Oslo in the autumn of 2009. Even if she had not been “actually trained” before, her knowledge of how to act in front of a camera meant that she was already at an advantage when she stepped into that so-called “casting box” — confidence makes a hell of a difference when it comes to a broadcast show. But this didn’t matter: most viewers were oblivious to all of this. For all they knew, Lena was the girl next door who had lucked into getting on national television, and who happened to have just the right amount of talent to ascend the ladder one step at a time.

That image, carefully cultivated or not, is still seductive. Most stars, Eurovision or otherwise, strut onto the stage with their godlike status more or less confirmed: the performance that follows is merely a coronation, a demonstration of their superhuman powers which the explosions and powerful vocals help reinforce. Lena’s “lack” of obvious star power meant that viewers saw a representation of not a star, but themselves in her: someone who could accurately portray human emotions and feelings. The song didn’t have to be complex — just believable. Lena sold that believability. I haven’t watched the entire Unser Star für Oslo series, but it’s very easy to see why, as Wikipedia says, she was “the firm favourite” from the moment she walked onscreen. Coupled with the deliberately relatable lyrics of “Satellite” — of which more in the next chapter — Lena became someone to root for.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder that she won the talent show, and that two and a half months later, she found herself representing the entire nation on the Eurovision stage in Norway. Or at least, those who still cared.

Chapter 3: That Sweet, Sweet Psychosis

Normally at this point I would dive into the song itself, describe the feelings that the audio track stir within me. I don’t like talking about songs solely based on their music videos: it takes away from the voice, the lyrics, the rich aural landscape unfolding in the background. But this is the EuroVISION Song Contest we’re talking about here. As the name implies, vision is everything. So for once, allow me to describe what the people of Europe saw, live from Oslo, on that sultry May night in 2010.

A darkened stage, a roaring crowd. For a moment we soar above this seething mass of humanity, hearing their cheers in the dim blue light — perhaps we realise that the cheers are a little louder than normal, vaguely remember reading somewhere that Germany is second or third favourite to win — but there’s really nothing out of the ordinary. Then the stage lights up in a pale blue wash, and the beat begins to drop. We train our eyes on the stage, and the first thing we notice is how little there is going on. A typical Eurovision performance begins with a huge shock to the system, a rousing “let’s go” from the performers, but we don’t get that here. There are no backup dancers swirling round the stage, nor are there any impossibly huge pieces of furniture filling our sights. We don’t even get a closeup on the singers as we begin. All we see is a solitary figure, silhouetted against the turquoise: it’s Lena, just moving her body to the steady beat. She doesn’t move fancy — she doesn’t even look fancy — but it’s clear, from the very first moment, that she’s enjoying herself onstage. Barely five seconds have passed, yet she’s already made sure that you only pay attention to her.

And so we only pay attention to her, to hear what she has say. We will realise, after the performance has long finished and we have had time to reflect, that Julie Frost’s lyrics leave a lot to be desired. “I went everywhere for you/ I even did my hair for you/ I bought new underwear, they’re blue/ And I wore it just the other day”, she sings in the first verse. This is not exactly Shakespeare; in fact, any sentence you utter in the next couple of seconds would probably make a better lyric than this. (Try it and see.) Perhaps it feels odd and out-of-place because it sounds utterly mundane: here is a teenager who is sputtering things about leaving the porch light on for somebody she claims to love, who feels obligated to report to the listener the purchase of new undergarments. It doesn’t just feel weird, it feels sickly sweet. This, frankly, is not what we expect from what is supposedly the best song Europe has to offer.

Yet in looking closer, we can spot a picture being plotted. These lines are so banal that they would seem like they come from the diary of an infatuated teenager — one who perhaps spells out her obsession in pretty direct terms. As she walks us into the chorus, Lena drops an explanation for the title: “like a satellite, I’m in an orbit all the way around you”. Perhaps the sudden metaphor throws us for a bit, and we swoon at the celestial comparison she’s making. Perhaps we even find it cute that she’s so devoted to him: after all, falling into somebody else’s orbit is one of the most romantic things imaginable. (“Satellite” is just such a perfect English word.) But sooner or later, the darker side hits: wait, does that mean she follows her lover around, unshakeable in her pursuit? Does the object of her affections know that they’re being followed all the time? Cause that’s what seems to be happening: “where you go, I’ll follow”, “I’ll follow in your wake”. What appears to be a simple, cutey love song takes on a menacing implication: is she merely finding out what love feels like, or is she someone who the listener should worry about? All the things Lena says here sound vaguely stalkerish: who on Earth would want to catalogue everything that they’ve done for their lover in such vapid detail? It is, if you stop to think about it, slightly creepy.

And yet Lena manages to make it sound absolutely not creepy. On the Eurovision stage itself, there’s only the sight of her grooving about and shaking her body, but it’s enough: you simply don’t believe that this wholesome teenager can be a stalker. What this says about our gender stereotypes is a story for another, better piece, but nevertheless we are fixated on the girl in the black dress and lipstick bouncing around the raised platform, and gradually we pick up little details. She closes her eyes when she says “wouldn’t have it any other way” — and yes she says it, in a happy little shout into the microphone that conveys all that exhilaration and bliss which she indisputably means every single word of. Then there’s the little bounce she does when she sings “I gotta tell you how I feel about you” in the chorus, bursting with energy and excitement. She lives out that character so well, toeing that very fine line between puppy love and psychotic obsession (as every commentator online seems to put it), and yet you can’t help but come down hard on the side of the former.

This wouldn’t be possible, however, if it weren’t for the staging, which nudges us towards that interpretation by giving us as little distraction from Lena as possible. I’ve said before that Eurovision staging tends to be all grandiose and majestic: if there is an explosion, death-defying stunt or epilepsy-causing light effect that can be made marginally relevant to the subject at hand, rest assured that Eurovision will milk the hell out of it. Yet we don’t see that here: the only other element we might pick out onstage is the backing singers somewhere through the soft blue lighting — but they’re simply swaying in the background and offering up the occasional harmony, not dancing around on rollerblades like some other Eurovision entries. But it’s difficult to pick them out mostly because, like Lena herself, they dress rather simply: gone are the flashy costumes, the folkish dresses that every country seems to enjoy wearing in a bid for attention and “authenticity”, just simple black dresses that wouldn’t look out of place at a nightclub. (My experience of nightclubs is practically nil, dork that I am, but I don’t think I’m too far off.) Elsewhere, the camera angles are beautifully chosen, yet they don’t seem to be overly showy either: the fanciest thing we ever get is the camera descending through the glass bead ceiling, a surprisingly beautiful shot that seems to place her at the centre of the universe. It’s just a clean, efficient piece of work through and through. You could almost call it modest. You could definitely call it relatable.

And that relatability is ultimately what seals the deal. You would not believe one iota of what is going on onstage if Lena wasn’t so goddamn relatable: from the way she pronounces her lyrics like a German trying to speak Cockney, to her natural grace as she sways about onstage, there is something that makes her totally believable as the lovelorn girl “Satellite” portrays. You buy her cuteness just as much as you buy her psychosis, but above all you buy that this is Lena Meyer-Landrut from Hannover, ingenue/teen simply having the time of her life onstage. My favourite part of the entire performance is that brief pause she does just before launching into the final chorus: a simple, slightly sexy jiggle of the hips. Although it can’t have been spontaneous, it feels so damn smooth that you just HAVE to root for her after that. It feels unpretentious and elegant, a classic display of Lena’s effortless showmanship — and perhaps that is the song’s greatest strength. As she finishes the song with a joyful whoop to her audience, there’s only one thing going through your mind: I have to see this girl again. Three minutes isn’t enough.

And as it turned out, Europe thought the same.

Chapter 4: Taken by A Stranger

Although Germany came out of the Contest with the third-highest score in Eurovision history at the time, time itself has kind of dimmed the impact of Lena’s victory. While it’s by no means denigrated in the pantheon of Eurovision winners — it recently scored ninth in a poll of 2010s Eurovision podium finishes — it has not managed to escape the wrath of certain Internet denizens. These days you cannot mention “Satellite” without also mentioning how it beat Turkey into second place, a fact which to this day still earns the ire of its countrymen (the official YouTube video for the winning song has a dislike rate of 45.3%, which considering the sea of Turkish in the comment section were all left by disgruntled Turks). For the record, there are days when I do think that “We Could Be the Same” just about edges out “Satellite” performance-wise. The lyrics are more poetic, and the band slightly more flamboyant (and therefore more suited to Eurovision). But then I watch Lena for comparison — just to make sure I haven’t got it wrong — and she blows them all out of the water.

Let me rewind a bit to explain. I had heard of Eurovision even before Lena lifted the trophy back in 2010: my housing estate liked to distribute free English newspapers, and from around 2008 I was already aware that there was this European song contest every May, one which already had a very long history, and which always seemed to be the biggest party on Earth. But pop music did not appeal to me at the time — my emotional awakening hadn’t happened yet — so every year, when I saw that article in the culture column, I would file it into the backwaters of my mind and go about my business, which in those days mainly consisted of memorising metro systems around the world. That included Lena’s win: here was this pretty young German woman smiling at me from the ink-stained paper, and, well, that was it.

Almost two whole years passed before I decided to check it out. I don’t really know why I went on YouTube to look for Lena, actually: a couple more Contests had come and gone, and there were far more interesting winners to watch online. Perhaps I just loved the sound and the mystery of a song called “Satellite”. Perhaps it was hormones. Anyway, I clicked on the link out of curiosity, and that was it. I was completely blown away. Here was a girl, roughly my age, who seemed to embody multiple extremes at the same time: stunning and ordinary, feisty and cute, casual and classy. (I was in a boys’ school, mind, and knew next to nothing about girls.) The song, too, was extraordinarily wonderful: never mind that the lyrics didn’t make sense and I didn’t yet know what it was like to actually be obsessed with someone: there was just something so indelibly romantic about how “I would fall out into the night”, something about that turn of phrase and the indescribably seductive way Lena sung it, that I just couldn’t stop replaying it. It was so good, I listened to it non-stop for a whole hour. From then the damage was done: not only was I hooked on Eurovision, I was hooked on pop music too — no song had floored me as much as this one had. In a sense, you have Lena Meyer-Landrut to blame for this entire series.

I’ve already dealt with popular music’s impact on my life, though, so instead I want to ponder about something more topical: could the Contest have held as dear a place in my heart these days if I’d clicked on a more typical Eurovision song? The mere fact that I took the time to write this thinkpiece obviously suggests yes, but it’s easy for me to think of the alternative: a few days later, when the 2012 Contest was over, I went online to check out the winning entry, Sweden’s triumphant “Euphoria”, and I remember looking at it and being utterly, utterly confused. What on Earth was this performance, where a woman could scuttle about like a crab onstage while snow-like dandruff (or maybe the other way round) dropped limply from the ceiling? This was loud, brash and utterly incomprehensible, and I could not for the life of me work out why Europe had gone for such an over-the-top pick.

Of course, over the years I’ve realised that the extravagance was the point, that my first experience of the Eurovision Song Contest had been the exception and not the norm. My thoughts on Loreen’s performance have since mellowed — obviously she sings better than Lena Meyer-Landrut — but to this day I am still unable to drum up the same enthusiasm for “Euphoria” that other Eurovision enthusiasts seem to have. I’d probably have gotten round to Eurovision sometime or other (as regular readers will know, I’m a stickler for all things cheesy), but would I have been so enthusiastic about it? Would I have bothered to write (counts on fingers) 4500 words about the song that brought me onboard? I seriously doubt it. And yes, I cannot possibly be objective with “Satellite”. But I cannot imagine a scenario where I am writing so much about a more archetypal Eurovision song.

A huge part of this is BECAUSE “Satellite” bucks the trend. This is a song that makes it easier for people to love Eurovision. Don’t get me wrong, that audacity and drama the Contest offers is undeniably brilliant, but sometimes it can feel a bit too much for me: everyone is so busy being fabulous all the time that it sometimes feels alienating, or even tacky. The 2010 German entry, on the other hand, is so simple and accessible that it’s still a delight regardless of how many times you listen to it: essentially, it’s a palate cleanser for those who (heaven forbid!) tire of the Contest’s overpowering glamour. I feel things about “Satellite” that I don’t with any other Eurovision winner: every time I feel that an entry seems to be losing the plot, I come back here and think about how you don’t need much to get a successful Eurovision entry, or indeed a good song. Just an everyday scenario, and a singer with a bit of personality. It might not have been the winner all of Europe wanted, but take it from a fan that it was what Eurovision needed. And that, I think, is the real value of “Satellite”.

Conclusion: Because the Night Is Ours

As I write these words, the odds to win Saturday’s Contest are on France’s Barbara Pravi, with her defiant chanson “Voila”; in fourth place is Switzerland’s entry “Tout l’univers”, a similarly passionate howler from a singer who styles himself “Gjon’s Tears”. (Kids these days.) Both of these songs are deeply introspective tunes that, while not exactly a huge deviation from what we normally consider Eurovision, still doesn’t fit into the classic stereotype: loud and unapologetically brash, with more special effects crammed into it than a Star Wars movie. Those two are more delicate and intimate, a purging of emotions that rightfully earn their wings while feeling just slightly out of place.

For a shallow person like me, those two songs aren’t my cup of tea (Bulgaria for the win!) but it does make me think about how far we’ve come since “Satellite” snatched the trophy all those years ago. I know it’s practically risible to compare the upbeat “Satellite” with these more intense entries — after all, Eurovision had a long tradition of ballads winning before Lena Meyer-Landrut came along, and even I would admit that these are (probably) much better songs than “Satellite”. But I find it fascinating that, less than a decade after jets of fire and erratic dancing across the stage were still the norm, depth and intimacy are now the preferred ways to win Eurovision. If you went back 15 years and told viewers that they’d be listening to singers unfold their existential crises onstage, they’d beat you half to death before bemoaning the “depressing” state of the future. And you know what? Those viewers would be completely justified in doing that (at least the bemoaning the future part) — because Eurovision, in our minds, is supposed to be about fun and games; an escape, if you like, from the bleak realities of the world. Having these morose ballads appear, and appear frequently, can feel like too far a reinvention.

That brings us to the question we’ve been trying to ask all along: what makes a good Eurovision song? Or perhaps, what does Europe want? The trends these days seem to point towards two different extremes: either it’s melodious tunes that restrain themselves and aim for deeper themes, or it’s songs that are fun from beginning to end, providing viewers with a sugar rush (or should that be a rush of “adrenalina”?) — while also trying to give us a message. The difference is almost schizophrenic, yet the winners all have one thing in common: they made Europe feel things. They gave people the time of their life. And the best of them did so without recourse to dramatics and fancy LED: Portugal’s 2017 winner also featured a singer who just sunk himself into the moment, and tried to empathise with his audience using a simple love story. The result was a whopping 758 points, a record unlikely to be beaten anytime — proof, if it were needed, that just passing yourself off as human works.

And so having written almost 5300 words on a competition that prides itself on its ferocious energy, I have come to a most antithetical conclusion. Perhaps what “Satellite” ultimately shows is that at the end of the day, overwhelming colours and elaborate staging aren’t what Europe desires. Maybe what matters more to them is simply the chance to sit down, to see yourself in the person singing out their hopes and dreams, and to be able to let their feelings wash over you and call them your own. Call it emotional manipulation or whatever you will: as Lena Meyer-Landrut and those of her ilk have demonstrated, it’s that connection through the TV screen that matters most onstage. After all, the Eurovision Song Contest is all about building connections between peoples, isn’t it?

Well, I’ve rambled on for long enough. May the best song win on Saturday. Whoever it is (come ON, Bulgaria), it’s definitely gonna give us a ride to remember. 🙂

(Cover copyrighted to Universal Music. “Satellite” by Lena Meyer-Landrut utilized for purposes of criticism and review.)