WILDERNESS YEARS

“The ‘Blue Forest’ idea has to do with something we feel we’re about to lose, or have lost already. It’s not an actual forest, but also, it kind of is.”

For more than two decades Mikko Von Hertzen has spent part of the year at his apartment in Kerala, on the southwest coast of India. When the pandemic kicked off in 2020, most commercial airlines were grounded, and he was stranded. His usual seven-week stay turned into five months, so he wiled away the time writing songs.

Meanwhile, back in the Von Hertzens’ native Finland, his elder brother Kie did some hardcore social distancing of his own. He threw his acoustic guitar into his canoe and paddled over to the island of Söderskär in the Finnish Gulf, south of Helsinki. There he camped out, took stock of things, and also wrote.

“When you’re in that mindset,” Mikko tells , “and in that space, you don’t feel like writing rock songs. The mood around you dictates the energy of what you want to write. And the energy is very