Refreshing! Problems of the mind and drug addiction in the music world are told directly

Nonfiction book

Mikko Kangasjärvi and Jukka Poijärvi: I stayed for the night. Docendo. 306 pp.

Mikko Kangasjärvi is perhaps not a “celebrity of the entire nation”, but almost the entire nation has heard his production.

The musical director, pianist and longest-standing member of the Yö band has been composing and arranging a significant part of the Pori-Tampere-based band’s late-season production.

Kangasjärvi is also partly responsible for what the future of the Yö group will be like without its frontman and singer Olli Lindholm.

Lindholm passed away in 2019. The soon-to-be corona pandemic gave much-needed extra time to think about the band’s future, but derailed its employees into financial uncertainty.

Last years the adversities have not been the worst of Kangasjärvi’s life’s nightmares.

Kangasjärvi doesn’t hide from irony or indulge in jokes when he talks about the feelings caused by his mother’s suicide, his anxiety and his alcoholism.

In psychiatry, depersonalization is characterized as “a non-specific stress reaction that can be triggered by almost any external or internal, physical or psychological factor that breaks the routine of life”.

Kangasjärvi has his first bad attack even before his mother’s death, shortly after moving out of the house. He has just moved in with a new love.

Something in the exposure of this setting is still skewed, as it often seems to be in Kangasjärvi’s life. While falling in love with his future wife, she is still the girlfriend of Kangasjärvi’s best friend.

First the bad episode lasts for days, when the “lump in the bottom of the stomach” is accompanied by obsessive thoughts and eventually the environment with objects and people starts to feel foreign.

Soon, scenes that distort the essence of reality become an almost permanent element in Kangasjärvi’s life, which he tries to cure with alcohol.

The alcohol-introverted music digger, on the other hand, has fallen passionately in love already after high school.

The home of a friend who went to a parallel class in Huikkaa, Tampere is turned into a kind of free-form youth space, from where we go to the city on weekends to “show off our hops”. Unlike his friends, Kangasjärvi soon finds himself sipping a medium beer at his friend’s house even on weeknights.

In the last grade of high school, he spends an entire math course instead of in the classroom in a cabin near his school.

Kangasjärvi talks directly about his mental health problems and drug addiction. Among the hero stories of the music world, this is heartening.

Although the problem of depersonalization that breaks out at regular intervals sometimes severely disrupts life, work does not suffer much because of it.

Kangasjärvi as a music maker – composer, producer, performer and session musician – is almost like Kalle Päätalon builders or Väinö Linnan farm workers and crofters. A quiet professional who is proud of his handprint and know-how, who does not make himself a number.

Creative industry it’s easy for freelancers to get engrossed in Kangasjärvi’s story about how he has to stop in the middle of a trip around the world to prepare a report for the Finnish taxman about what a mixing desk is – only to hear from Olli Lindholm that the Yö band’s tour, which took place just before the keyboard player’s vacation trip, has yielded considerably less than previously estimated.

Of course, Kangasjärvi has prepared its travel budget according to preliminary estimates.

Kangasjärvi, who plays a key role in the popular band, has of course been in a privileged position as a Finnish freelancer in the creative field. Kangasjärvi says that he has visited London alone, which he loves, 65 times.

Kangasjärvi competence covers technique and production in addition to mastering several different instruments. In Suomirock circles, such an ability to jump from one genre to another can be considered rare.

This makes me think that if Kangasjärvi had made his career in Sweden, the exceptionally wide-ranging know-how would have been seen as an export product that would have been loaded onto ships and planes days ago.

In Finland, Kangasjärvi has had to fight and work like crazy to get to the green branch.

On the other hand, Kangasjärvi, who confesses to be an introvert, is committed to his native Tampere.

Even in the defiant phase of adolescence, Kangasjärvi doesn’t dream of “leaving everything behind”, but rides the city’s bus lines from end to end in order to get to know every corner of the Tampere he loves.

Kangasjärvi friend and fellow songwriter Jukka Poijärvi has written a fictional mood description at the beginning of each chapter, the task of which is to accompany the reader to the right state of mind for the upcoming events.

The solution is daring. This time it turns out to work, when the sometimes unnecessarily straightforward narration gets color and one more level.

Kangasjärvi is mostly kind to its fellow travellers. Maybe Tampereness includes humility in the face of facts. When you’re really pissed off, irony won’t save you.

Because I stayed the night is almost as much a story about the band Yö, which operated out of Tampere for most of its existence, as it is about its musical leader from Tampere, a question arises that Kangasjärvik briefly ponders: is Yö manse rock?

Kangasjärvi offers the answer as if from a pharmacy shelf:

“Manserock includes humor, it has to be either in the music, lyrics or even in the mood of the band. Thus, gravely grave Night is by no means manse rock.”