Description

1. Prologue (Lytomt) 0:19
2. Kingdom of Nothing (Nordberg) 5:58
3. Mutual Attraction (Lytomt) 3:26
4. Magic Mary (Hansen) 4:57
5. Journey (Hansen / Lytomt) 2:59
6. Act of Appearing (Lytomt / Nordberg) 5:17
7. The Village (Lytomt) 1:44
8. The Voice Inside Your Heart (Lytomt / Nordberg) 2:07
9. The Initiator (Johansen) 4:08
10. Downtown Happy-Go-Lucky Bunch (Nordberg) 3:23
11. The Sorcerer (Nordberg) 6:02
12. Time for Thought (Lytomt) 1:24
13. Showdown (Nordberg) 5:33
14. The Merger (Nordberg) 1:08
15. The Prisoner (Lytomt) 3:49
16. Rubicon (Lytomt / Nordberg) 10:45
17. Delirious (Nordberg) 5:13
18. Epilogue (Lytomt) 3:09

Lineup:
Harald Lytomt: guitars and flute
Per Oyvind Nordberg: lead vocals, keyboards and bass
Jostein Hansen: bass, 12 strings acoustic guitar and vocals
Tore Johansen: guitars and tin whistles
Tore Fundingsrud: drums

“A Journey on the Inside”

Kerrs Pink’s third album took more than three years in the making.

It is our also first album created wholly around onec oncept; a short story written by Per Oyvind Nordberg.

Below follows the short story upon which the concept abum is based. Written by Per Oyvind Nordberg

This is the story of Roy, ayoung man who realizes that so far in life he has achieved very little. He is fully aware of hisc apacity, but something inside him prevents him from achieving it. This leads him into a vacuum, he feels like a king in a no man’s land; he lives in “The Kingdom of Nothing”.
One day at a bar, while drowning his soul and thoughts in a bottle, Mary, a young, mysterious woman comes up to him. Roy has never seen her previously, but before he knows it, he has told her everything about himself. She says that he obviously has got a a mental block, but she knows a cure. She invites him on a mental journey, a journey on the inside, if he is willing to take a risk, and Roy is more than willing.
Mary takes him home to her place where she provides candles, wine, oriental music and a pot of indefinable contents. They lay down on a bearskin rug on the floor, giving in to their emotions and the atmosphere. After an hour or two Mary tells Roy to close his eyes and just relax. With a soft, hypnotic voice she lulls him into a trance. Her voice, his mood, them usic, everything makes him feel like floating. He is flying over fields and mountains, over the ocean, out into the universe and into the bluest blue, the greenest green and the highest high. And all the time Mary is next to him.

After a while they land in a place light years away, but still oddly familiar. They are just outside a village. “This ist he mirror of your mind,” Mary says, “you must enter this village, and there you will meet lots of amusing people. But each and every one of these individuals represents a part of your personality. You will meet Indifference, Justice, Conscience, Aggressiveness etc, but in your case the most important task is to meet your mental block; the Sorcerer. You must arrange a showdown with this sorcerer. It may be dangerous. He is surely evil, so you’d betterd efeat him. How and when, is for you to decide. I will be waiting here, outside the village, to take you back home again. You’re on your own now!”
Puzzled, Roy wanders into the the village where he actually meets all the people, even the sorcerer who is, in fact, Roy’s double! After meeting and talking to most of the inhabitants Roy makes a plan. He believes that the sorcerer must have appeared sometime in his childhood when he was about twelve years old and rejected parts of himself in order to conform and be accepted by the other boys. He finds out that, byu nifying the village against the sorcerer, he can regain himself as at welve-year-old kid, but then the sorcerer must die. And this happens, thes orcerer disappears and only a little boy remains; himself.

They merge, and now Roy finally feels like a whole person. But alas, it does not last very long. He is arrested by the police,c harged with the murder of one of the citizens; the sorcerer. The feelings of the village turn against him, and at the trial he is found guilty and sentenced to death by crucifixion.
Roy is taken to a heath outside the village and nailed to a cross, mocked by the the village people. He desperately cries for Mary, but she does not come. After a while he becomes quite delirious ande xhausted, but manages in a way to think about what he has done and what went wrong. Has he been too selfish? Should he have tried to live with evil? Can you kill evil? Do we have the right to? Are there better ways of defeatingi t?

Roy concludes that he has been too self-absorbed. If he had been more involved in the world and the people around him this situation would never have occurred. And his mental block would probably have had no influence upon him.

“Roy”! He opens his eyes and there Mary is standing in front of him. “We must go home now,” she says. He tries to see her properly, but she has got at least fifty blue eyes floating around in her face. In every one of them he thinks he can see the very beginning of time. “Comeo n,”she says, and Roy goes with her. Suddenly he realizes that they are flying again. He looks down, and is terrified when he sees his own body nailed to the cross.

And again they fly into the bluest blue, the greenest green and the highest high.

The Making of The Story

I’m forever grateful to the members of Kerrs Pink to be assigned with the task of writing the underlying story for A Journey on The Inside.
The story is not very well written and it’s not intended to be. The music and the lyrics are the stories for your ears, while the written story is meant to be a “road map” for travelling listeners. It also became very helpful to us while writing the songs.
I wrote the story over quite a long period of time, and of course I had to live the story my self, to see if it made sense. It was an exciting period, and, I must confess, a quite dangerous period. I mean, I didn’t quite know if I was going to be OK at the other end of the story. Well, we don’t really know what happened to Roy. So what happened to me? I’m better than ever! Writing this story really changed my life! It made me go through my inner emotions and forced me to look in every corner of my soul. When the story and the album was finished, I quit my old job, went back to school, moved to Oslo, I met a girl (not Mary) who is now my wife and the mother to my wonderful children. And, last but not least: I made peace with my maker. All this happened within a period of just a few months.
I know that a few people are wondering what this story means. I am not going to tell you that. I will only say this: It is about becoming the person that you were meant to be. Not the person others want you to be or think you that you are. Being the real you, makes you become more valuable in your own eyes and to others. I would challenge anyone who has the urge to make a similar journey: Go on and do it!

Per Oyvind Nordberg, February 2001

PS During the writing period I had a great companion in my good friend Robert Herland (Doctor Robert), who always was willing to hear me out (could take hours) and discuss philosophical matters with me. Robert is also a songwriter. We have now started working together on a new project picking up a few pieces from Journey. We don’t know yet where this project is going to end up, but maybe I will get the chance to take you on another journey?