I became familiar with Astrid Swan’s music through her cover of The Killers’ “When You Were Young,” which is about as good as the original, in its own way. Her own compositions tend towards the odd and sometimes self-indulgent chick-piano genre, of which Tori Amos and Kate Bush are the standard bearers, which is to say that it is sometimes brilliant and other times maddeningly obtuse (“I have
to admit that I love potatoes,” is one particularly weird lyric), sometimes pop and other times marches
along the border of show tunes.
