The National Selections Of Eurovision 2022 (Albania - Portugal)

So here's the long-awaited video that took so long that I had to turn it into a blog post. Let's not waffle around, this post will also act as my 2023 wishlist, as well as my thoughts on the OGAE Second Chance contest. But before all that, my top 20 from the entire season:

1. Death Of Us - Elsie Bay (Melodi Grand Prix)

2. Jezinky - Giudi (Eurovision Song CZ)

3. Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors - Alina Pash (Vidbir)

4. Ram Pam Pam - Bess (Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu)

5. Kuuma Jäbä - Isaac Sene (UMK)

6. What To Make Of This - Minimal Wind ft. Elisabeth Tiffany (Eesti Laul)

7. Sun Numero - Younghearted (UMK)

8. Calle De La Lloreria - Rayden (Benidorm Fest)

9. Terra - Tanxugueiras (BF)

10. Thank God I'm An Atheist - Olivera (UMK)

11. Girls Can Do Anything - July Jones (EMA)

12. Muškarčina - Sara Jo (Pesma Za Evroviziju '22)

13. Ciao Ciao - La Rappresentante Di Lista (Sanremo)

14. Heaven Is Sin - good job nicky

15. Call Me From The Cold - Rūta Loop (Pabandom Iš Naujo)

16. Raffaella - Varry Brava (BF)

17. I Suck At Being Lonely - Charley (Australia Decides)

18. Secreto De Agua - Blanca Paloma (BF)

19. Anxiety - Felicia Lu (Germany 12 Points)

20. Regret - Jessie (Selecţia Natională)

Haven't figured out how to put .5s on these numbered lists without splitting them yet (or maybe that feature just doesn't exist here), but in terms of the songs that actually went to Eurovision, I'd put Hold Me Closer at 2.5, Fulenn at 4.5, Saudade Saudade at 13.5, Slomo at 15.5, Lights Off at 16.5, and Stefania at 19.5.

You'll note on this list that I don't just have national final songs. And in the title, I wrote national selections rather than finals. This is because I wanna include some internal selections in here as well. Not the completely-in-the-dark ones like Azerbaijan and Switzerland, but ones where we know at least a few of the confirmed candidates, like Greece. So get ready for those in this post.

Also there's gonna be no Hungary, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina in this post, since they're probably not coming back in the near future, and that's assuming I know any artists from these countries which I don't. Though there will be a handful of non-ESC2022 countries in here, so stay tuned for those. Also note that the OGAE Second Chance picks are often just whoever actually came second in the national final, rather than what fans thought should've come second. So let's just say some of the picks here are...choices to say the least. And excuse the poor graphic choices, I just ripped these off of Google. Right, with that, our first country in alphabetical order, Albania.

Albania

Selection method: Festivali I Këngës 60 (aka FIK60)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Theje - Alban Ramosaj

My pick: Theje - Alban Ramosaj

Wishlist: Evi Reçi, Arilena Ara

General thoughts: FIK is a prestigious music festival that had already been broadcasted in Albania for multiple decades, before Albania even debuted in Eurovision. And by the time that they did, it was decided that usually the winner of FIK would represent Albania in Eurovision.

Among Eurofans, it is generally known for two things: First, it is usually the earliest national final in the Eurovision season. That wasn't the case this year, but it was for many years, because it usually takes place around mid-to-late-December of the year before the actual year during which Eurovision is to take place. When it takes place before or after Christmas, that period also gets affectionately referred to as "FIKmas".

And second, it is usually rigged. Media might report on some big artist months in advance planning to send a song to FIK, and wahey, the jury is revealed and it's almost all friends and/or associates of that big artist. There's also no televote, at least not in recent years, so some have called this effectively a televised internal selection. For example, Ronela Hajati this year had Anxhela Peristeri (Albania 2021, one of her friends) as well as some of her previous songwriters in the jury. Also Anna Gjebrea (Albania JESC2021) sent a random postcard to Ronela wishing her luck in FIK, while she did not do so for the other big favourite which was Alban Ramosaj, our aforementioned OGAE Second Chance pick. And wouldn't you know it, the director of FIK60 is, wait for it, Ardit Gjebrea, Anna's father.

So not exactly a fair and balanced national final, is it.

Going back to OGAE Second Chance, their pick was Theje, which is also my pick. Truth be told, it was a two-horse race from the start, everyone saw it wide and clear. But there were videos going around on FIK week which showed Ronela and Alban in rehearsals, and while Ronela was a little shouty, she was still on pitch while Alban was visibly struggling and almost starting to yell a little bit. Ironically though, the tabloids were reporting heavily on Alban rather than Ronela. Either way, we know what happened in the end. Being the 60th edition of the festival and having Eurovision in Italy, a close friend of Albania's, RTSH was perhaps trying to make it a special occasion and send an upbeat song for once, but it just kinda fell apart. But Alban's probably the right choice for Second Chance, although I don't think he would've qualified either because his vocals were just not there. I did see a thing a few weeks earlier where he called the jury a "communist jury", and some Albanian folks explained it on Twitter as apparently a cultural thing in Albania but I still didn't entirely get it, but make of it what you will.

Moving onto the wishlist, my first name is Evi Reçi. She had a song this year, and while the song wasn't great, she's a good performer. Her outfit was also on point - someone on Twitter described it as a "dominatrix on a smoke break", which I think is quite accurate. Maybe if she comes up with a stronger song then we could see Albania take a more alternative route, and not just go back to ethnic ballads as they now seem inevitable to do. I will say, RTSH announced the directors and presenters for FIK61 just this month and judging by Eurofans' reactions on Twitter, it looks like the festival might be modernizing a little bit. But we'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, my second name on the wishlist is Arilena Ara, who of course was going to represent Albania in Eurovision 2020 because she won FIK59, but then the contest got cancelled. Her song was "Fall From The Sky", which was her FIK59 song "Shaj" translated into English. The chorus still rhymes with the original, I'll give them that; but the general consensus among Eurofans is that this translation was a downgrade, like most of their other translations. And indeed Arilena herself appears to agree (I don't know if she officially talked about it or not since I wasn't around in 2020), as since 2020 during concerts and such she pretty much exclusively performs Shaj. Also this year she released a collab with Gjon's Tears, who you might remember was born to Albanian parents (and therefore speaks fluent Albanian) albeit in Switzerland. Its title is Dance Me, and it's not what you'd expect from either of them, since it's a Katy Perry-type dance pop song, when both of them generally specialize in power ballads. Furthermore, Arilena Ara usually only sings in Albanian, but this track was mostly in English, and even had a bit of French when Gjon's Tears had his solo verse. So it's very out of character for both of them, but maybe they'll do another collab and do something closer to their individual styles. But anyways. Some are also speculating that she might return to FIK for "redemption", because within hours of the FIK61 producers announcement, she posted that she was in the studio working on songs. But like I wrote earlier, let's see what happens. For now, let's move on to...

Armenia

Selection method: internal

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: Ladaniva, Athena Manoukian?

General thoughts: With Armenia, we had an internal selection this year rather than the usual national final named Depi Evratesil (Դեպի Եվրատեսիլ), which had been held for Eurovision 2017, 2018 and 2020. Of course Armenia were not participating in Eurovision 2021 so the national final wasn't necessary; but for 2022 it appears that it had continued to be dropped, with the Armenian delegation opting for an ERT-style internal selection where interested candidates would send in their entries. There may be multiple reasons for this, but an educated guess would be that they have been, to a degree, economically limited due to 1. Covid and 2. the war with Azerbaijan. There also exists a variant of this national final, named Depi Mankakan Evratesil, which was used for selecting an act for Junior Eurovision. It was used in 2017 and 2018, and has since not been revived. From what I understand, they're seeking their JESC representative via auditions this year, despite a certain Nanul having been a hotly discussed favourite for Armenia JESC2022. But this is adult Eurovision, and I can write about JESC later, so let's get back on track.

Now, a lot of the information here I'm getting from Eurovisionfun, a Greek ESC news site with certain internal connections. They've gotten stuff right in the past, so I think it's fair to look at this news with reasonable certainty. In the selection, we know that other than Rosa Linn, there were several other candidates, such as Athena Manoukian, who you might recognize from Eurovision 2020 with Chains On You. But unlike 2020, this time she did not enter a song that was largely written by herself, but I'll get back to her later.

Other candidates in the selection included Kamil, who one may recognize from Depi Evratesil 2018 when they came 4th, as well as a certain Saro Gevorgyan, who is very close to the Armenian delegation, to the point where multiple of the delegation members congratulated him when it was his birthday. He also won a singing contest in Sochi, which made him very famous within both Armenians in Armenia proper as well as Armenian diaspora abroad, and as such some wanted him to succeed in the internal selection as well. I've talked about him at great length in many of my videos now, so I'm not gonna repeat it here. I reckon the "where we're at so far" video is a good place to start. But long story short, he obviously did not win the bid.

Back to Athena Manoukian now, she brought a song named "Purple Sky", which I've also talked about in-depth in an older video, specifically the bottom tier of part 1 of the iceberg video, so go check that out for more details, and in the description of that video I also posted a link where I found a video on Twitter of the performance of said song in San Marino. When I was recording the segment (I recorded this before I started writing), I mentioned that Athena would be releasing a new single "in the coming weeks", and I posited that if those couple weeks were late enough to reach September then perhaps it could mean the new single would be designated for Eurovision, but the single is out now and it's named "Bom Bom". I haven't listened to it, I frankly don't plan to, but if you do, let me know what you think of it. Regardless, she's still sharing Instagram posts from her fan pages asking her to go to Eurovision, so I think that's still an aspiration. I don't know necessarily for 2023, but of course we'll just have to wait and see. Regardless, obviously the non-self-written song named Purple Sky didn't turn out so well for her in the selection this year.

Another name I've heard many Armenians bring up potentially for Eurovision is Ladaniva. It's not entirely certain whether they submitted a song to the Armenian delegation or not - Eurovisionfun only knew about Rosa Linn, Kamil, Saro Gevorgyan and Athena Manoukian - but basically they're a duo that make ethnic-sounding music, and a lot of people have been wanting them to do Eurovision for Armenia for quite a while now. I should check them out myself sometime, but I guess that's a name you can look out for.

Final thing I will say is that I don't think they're gonna do Depi Evratesil again this year. They're hosting JESC2022 in December, and that is rather costly, so it's obviously cheaper to just pick someone via some sort of committee or jury. Likewise, don't expect their entry next year to be particularly strong; they'll probably qualify, and judging by their staging this year I think that's their short-term goal, but don't expect them to go for the trophy or anything. In David Tserunyan (head of delegation)'s words, it's too expensive. With that, let's move onto our next country.

Australia

Selection method: Eurovision: Australia Decides

OGAE Second Chance pick: Dreamer - Voyager

My pick: I Suck At Being Lonely - Charley

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: with Australia, we had the usual national final named Eurovision: Australia Decides - I say usual but it only started in 2019 and didn't even happen in 2021 - and as we now know, the winner was Sheldon Riley with Not The Same.

I don't really have much to talk about with this one, because the whole selection was just kinda lukewarm to me, and there weren't too many things which stood out to me. People praised Jaguar Jonze to heaven and back, but while I can get why they would praise the message of the song, musically it just didn't really stand out to me. The staging was certainly creative, burning dress and all that, but the song itself I don't think was all that special. Don't get me wrong, it's still in my top 3 of the national final so I still like it, but even then it really wasn't that special and definitely nowhere near my overall season top 20, so imagine how I feel about the rest of the songs!

The OGAE Second Chance pick was Dreamer by Voyager, and personally I don't really like the song, and I don't see the merit that apparently everyone else saw in it, like everyone was also praising this as well in addition to Little Fires. I just didn't like it at all - the lyrics were repetitive, the instrumentals weren't too special, and the melody was weird. By all means, if you're a fan of Dreamer, do get in touch and let me know why you think the song is good, because I am just not seeing it.

So instead my pick for second chance, and indeed my winner of the national final, would be I Suck At Being Lonely by Charley. Though I must say the song has grown off me VERY quickly, and my main issue with it is that the lyrics are way too simplistic. Even if we put aside the fact that she knowingly put the word "suck" into a dramatic orchestral ballad, the rest of the lyrics are all very grammatically simple and really unfitting for this kind of song. The instrumental is excellent, but the lyrics are just really lacking to me. Like, you can't tell me with a straight face that "I have some pictures / and I hate all your pictures" is good songwriting.

I don't really have a wishlist, because I don't know any Australian artists. Maybe Charley could come back? With more sophisticated lyrics and better staging of course, I think she started her performance sitting on a sofa or something? But anyways, this is nominally their last year as a pre-invited country at Eurovision, let's see whether they'll do well enough to continue to get invited.

With that, let's move onto Austria.

Austria

Selection method: internal

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: something (even just partly) in German?

General thoughts: with Austria, a lot of the process had been kept in the dark so we don't know much, but the ÖRF Eurovision scout did tag most of them in a Facebook post at the end of the selection, so we know that there were names in the selection such as Candlelight Ficus and DELADAP, but our main attention here is drawn to what we could consider the runner-up in this selection.

Their name is ANGER, and they are a duo who come from the Tyrol region which borders Italy, although they work in Vienna now. They entered a song into the selection and had been rumoured to have done so for quite a while, but it was not until after the announcement of LUMIX and Pia Maria that the duo released their song, named "Das Meer", or German for 'the sea'.

Despite their English name, they usually sing in German. But Das Meer is special in this regard, in that it has lyrics in English, German, AND Italian, the latter of which is perhaps due to the fact that they hail from Italy-bordering-Tyrol, and this is an application to go to Eurovision in Italy. And had it been selected, Das Meer would've been the only trilingual Eurovision 2022 song. You can check out the song if you want to - I only listened to a little bit of it because people were sharing it around on Twitter, and it fits their normal style, which is to say I don't like it because it's very heavily autotuned. But maybe you'd like it, since autotune is all the rage these days, a rage that I personally don't get. Go check it out if you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS90G2CwAAU

I don't have a specific artist on my wishlist, because as you might expect, I don't know a whole lot of Austrian singers. I just wish that ÖRF would be more bold in their choices, and choose something in their native language for once, just like the Netherlands did this year. Of course language doesn't necessarily dictate results at Eurovision, though in recent years there is an increasing positive correlation. But still, some sort of song in German would be nice, Austrian German or otherwise. With that, let's move on to our next country.

Edit: I've been informed that Felicia Lu was born and raised in Austria. But at least for the time being she seems more interested in Germany. Though anything is possible.

Belgium

Selection method: internal (RTBF)

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist (VRT): Hadise, Luka Cruysberghs, Camille?

General thoughts: with Belgium, we had an internal selection which resulted in the selection of Jeremie Makiese. There's really not much to say here; Jeremie may have been one of the only known candidates, if not just outright the only one. But what we do know is that Belgium at Eurovision runs on a two-broadcaster system: one year you have RTBF, the French-speaking broadcaster, do Eurovision; and the year after that you have VRT, the Dutch-speaking broadcaster. There have been a few exceptions to this, the most recent being in 2020 when obviously VRT couldn't do Eurovision with Hooverphonic, so they kept Hooverphonic for a year and as such VRT also picked up 2021 instead of RTBF. But otherwise this scheme runs as usual, and for 2022 we got RTBF, who selected Jérémie Makiese.

This came as little surprise to anyone because RTBF had historically been notorious for selecting their acts from The Voice Belgique - quite literally, *every single RTBF act* from 2013 onwards has taken part in The Voice Belgique:

- Roberto Bellarosa (2013): winner of TVB season 1

- Loïc Nottet (2015): runner-up in TVB season 3

- Blanche (2017): participant in TVB season 5 (eliminated on week 2) - Eliot (2019): participant in TVB season 7 - Jérémie Makiese (2022): winner of TVB season 9

So yeah, RTBF loves their The Voice Belgique singers, and Jérémie Makiese had declared that he wanted to do Eurovision shortly after winning TVB, so it made RTBF's job all the more easier in singer selection. So there really isn't a whole lot to say about this.

But what I do have a whole lot to talk about is my wishlist. Now, as of writing this segment, quite literally yesterday it was announced that VRT would be returning to their national final named Eurosong, and I'll get back to that in a bit, but let's go through our three names first.

The first one is Hadise. One may be surprised to see that name here, considering she represented *Turkey* in 2009 with Düm Tek Tek, but in reality Hadise is a Belgian-born Turk. In addition to Turkish, she also speaks fluent Dutch and I believe French as well. And recently in a radio interview (in Dutch), she said that if the broadcaster approached her, she would consider representing Belgium at Eurovision. So a lot of people, especially Turks, were very excited at this prospect. While researching this, I found that this news had been revealed by Hadise on a talk show hosted by Peter van de Veire, the resident Eurovision commentator for VRT. Now why do I mention that? Because as of writing this, it was none other than Peter van de Veire who announced yesterday the return of the national final for selecting a Flemish entry to represent Belgium at Eurovision. Now, someone pointed out on Twitter that this kind of second-class national final (unlike Benidorm Fest which is practically a national phenomenon now) is unlikely to attract big-name singers, that which most likely includes Hadise. And she had specifically mentioned too that she would only consider it if approached by VRT, which they definitely haven't done, unless a huge revamp of Eurosong is coming which I doubt. But in the unlikely event that Hadise does enter a song into Eurosong 2023, we could be seeing Hadise represent her other nationality 14 years on from her previous effort at Eurovision.

The second name on this wishlist is Luka Cruysberghs. If you don't know who she is, basically she's the former lead singer of Hooverphonic (Belgium 2021). Hooverphonic in 2021 differed from Hooverphonic in 2020 in that the lead singer changed from Luka to Geike Arnaert. Apparently Geike had been a vocalist for the band a long time ago, but then dropped out, with Luka taking her place. But in 2020 after the cancellation of ESC2020, Geike suddenly decided to return to the band, and Luka was simply kicked out of the band over a Zoom call, and all the tracks that were planned to be released as an album that had been recorded with Luka were simply discarded. Since then, she's been trying to establish a career as a solo artist, and has released three singles so far, the most recent of which was released just two months ago as of writing this (August '22). I've listened to them, and one thing's for sure: they're very different in style compared to Hooverphonic. It's more pop-like, more dance-y. She also appears to go by the mononym of Luka now on her songs, although she still retains the surname on her YouTube channel name. In an interview in September of 2021, she said, and I quote: "If Belgium ever asked me to do it (Eurovision), I would do it in a heartbeat." So it's very much possible that she will submit a song to the national final, though whether she would be greeted with The Roop PIN2021-level support is yet to be seen. Combing through Twitter, there seems to be a general perception that Luka will eventually get to go to Eurovision at some point, but of course right now it's hard to tell.

Our final name officially on the wishlist is Camille, not to be confused with the aforementioned Kamil from Armenia. Her style is very much late 2000s pop girly - think of pre-Wrecking Ball Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears in the 2000s, that kinda stuff. But here's the twist: she only sings in Dutch, which is very interesting. So perhaps there's another name to look out for.

Actually, one more name to mention is Angele. She's a famous Belgian singer, though she only sings in French. And given that VRT is a Dutch-speaking broadcaster, and also that Angele is a big name, we can pretty much count her out of the national final. But it's a name Eurofans have been wanting for Belgium at ESC for a while now.

When I originally recorded the segment, neither the host country nor host city shortlist had been revealed, and as such I put forward my reasons why I thought Belgium would definitely not host Eurovision 2023. But of course now we know there's only seven cities in the running in the UK that can host the show next May. So as expected, Brussels was nowhere near hosting Eurovision 2023, despite a mention of its possibility in The Guardian.

And finally, the national final. It has been confirmed that it will take the same name as all the recent Belgian national finals, that being Eurosong. The same name as the Irish, Slovak, and technically the Macedonian ones. The host will be Peter van de Veire, who also hosted the national final in 2014 and 2016, which was the most recent year the national final was held at all. Nominally anyone from any region of Belgium can apply regardless of language, but I think it's safe to assume most of the applicants will be Dutch speakers. If we go by precedent that was set in 2014 and 2016, then the national final will be a relatively small one, only featuring maybe 5 or 6 participants at the most. The dates have not been announced, nor were they consistent between 2014 and 2016, but one would assume it would take place between January and March of 2023, rather than December this year, with some evidence pointing at the Belgian Eurosong being hosted in March. But of course we're still in early stages, and it should be noted that results-wise, the national final method actually hasn't been too bad for VRT. The most recent top 10 result for VRT came from 2016, whose entry had been selected via Eurosong. So let's just see what happens, and this is incidentally my first time experiencing a Belgian national final as a Eurofan, since I only started watching Eurovision in 2021. So, exciting times ahead.

Update 22/8/22: literally one day after I wrote the segment on Belgium, Songfestival.be reports on an article by Het Laatste Nieuws, who reports a few key things about Eurosong 2023, and I'll save you the time of Google translating it:

- show will take part between five to seven weeks (noting that Eurosong 2016 lasted three weeks, while 2014 lasted seven weeks)

- Peter Van de Veire will be the sole host of the show, as in 2016

- VRT aims for a "series of top artists" to participate, including: The Starlings (lead singer Tom Dice did Belgium 2010, 6th place), Natalia (runner-up in 2004 national final), Regi, Laura Tesoro (winner of Eurosong 2016, 10th at ESC), Niels Destadsbader (previously rumoured presenter of Eurosong 2023), and Camille (yes, THE ONE I was just writing about)

So if what is written in the article is true, and if she's willing to take it up, we could genuinely be seeing Camille do Eurosong 2023 and potentially represent Belgium in May next year. That would be awesome. If you still wanna read and translate the article by yourself, here it is: https://songfestival.be/eurosong-2023/vrt-wil-topartiesten-strikken-voor-eurosong-2023/

Let's move on now to Croatia.

Croatia

Selection method: Dora

OGAE Second Chance pick: Moli Za Nas - Marko Bošnjak

My pick: Moli Za Nas - Marko Bošnjak / Forgive Me (Oprosti) - Mia Negovetić

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: with Croatia, we had the national final Dora, which is set to take place in the city of Opatija until 2024.

This year I don't think it was very strong at all to be honest; there were a few interesting songs in there, like "Here For Love" by Bernarda, but I think the live performance was kind of a flop. The OGAE Second Chance choice was "Moli Za Nas" by Marko Bošnjak which came second in the actual national final, and I think my pick would either also be Moli Za Nas, or it might be "Forgive Me (Oprosti)" sung by Mia Negovetić.

It's a kinda Disney-sounding ballad, which was co-written by Laurell Barker who also wrote Eurovision songs such as She Got Me (Switzerland 2019). And because Forgive Me (Oprosti) didn't win Dora, this year was a very interesting year in the sense that it's the first year in a while where we haven't had any songs that involved Laurell Barker. But of course this Mia gave way to the other Mia in the national final, Mia Dimšić, who of course didn't qualify, but ended up 11th in the semi-final much like Albina did, albeit with a greater point margin. Might it be the curse of the Croatian verse? Who knows.

Back to the national final though, again I didn't find it very strong at all, and I don't think I saw a single qualifier in there. I don't really have a wishlist because I don't know any Croatian artists at all. Albina could return but maybe it's too soon. Let's move on now, to our next country.

Cyprus

Selection method: internal

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: Evangelia, Josephine Wendel?

General thoughts: with Cyprus this year, we had an internal selection which resulted in the selection of Andromache. However this year, as I understand it, it was actually quite unusual for CyBC, the Cypriot broadcaster. Their usual approach, and indeed the approach adopted this year, is to separate the song and the singer. Find people to write the song, and then give that song to some Greek singer to sing it. I think this separation is a TERRIBLE idea, but I digress. But what was unusual this year, is that while normally they'd be able to find a singer by January or even December, according to various rumours Andromache had only been officially selected in late February or something. And of course then she was basically assigned the song, she sang it in Turin with a "go girl give us nothing" attitude, and look what happened.

Now, there were two other names who were also interested in doing Eurovision for Cyprus this year. The first one is Evangelia, a Greek-American artist who writes ethnic-sounding music not too dissimilar to Ela in style, and who had been on many Eurofans' wishlists after she released her first two such songs of this genre, those being Fotia and Pame Pame. For this selection, she had confirmed on a Cypriot talk show (she speaks fluent Greek) that she had submitted multiple songs to both Cyprus AND Greece, one of which was "Onira", available now on all streaming platforms. No really, go listen to it! I know summer's almost over (it might very well be over as this post finally comes out) but it is *the* bop of the summer, I've been listening to it over and over. But like I said earlier, she confirmed on multiple occasions that she submitted several songs to both the Greek and Cypriot broadcasters, which may have actually ironically been her downfall. I'll touch on it a little bit more in the Greece segment, but even just with Cyprus, she co-wrote Onira as well as her other submitted songs, and CyBC obviously doesn't like that. She's on my wishlist here, as well as the wishlists of many other Eurofans, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up, nor would I hype her up and claim that she could win Eurovision, because let's be honest here, she can't. Great commercial pop music, but she did a "collab" with Eleni Foureira on a full-Greek version of Fotia and even in the music video alone - never mind the MAD Walk performance - you can clearly tell that Evangelia wasn't really cut out to dance. There's also been people saying she can't sing live either, but I've never seen her sing so I have no idea.

The second name is Tania Breazou, a Greek-Romanian singer who is also under Panik Records, the record label with which CyBC has a cooperation agreement and who produced Eleni Foureira, Tamta and Elena Tsagrinou. There were a lot of rumours that she was working with the resident CyBC songwriters like Alex P to write a song, but then all that turned into nothing. I don't know what was up with that honestly, but I do know that despite allegedly going for a slower song, she performed Mata Hari at MAD Walk, which was weird.

Another person who performed Mata Hari (albeit elsewhere) was a certain Josephine Wendel, yet another Greek singer who had expressed interest to do Eurovision for Cyprus as well as my second name on this wishlist. This rendition of Mata Hari is especially weird because they decided to only replace a handful of English lines with Greek-language ones, and it all created this weird fusion which I believe is (for better or worse) not on Spotify. But in the end, I believe she didn't actually submit any songs this year, despite declaring an interest to do so in 2021? So that was weird. Anyways, there are hints that she might try to go for Cyprus 2023 already as expressed on her Instagram stories, so let's see what happens with that.

So, what are Cyprus' plans for 2023? Well, the original plan was to select the representative through a show named All Together Now, which is a show where basically contestants have to go through several heats singing to 100 judges, and at the end whoever gets the most judges' approval wins the show. The original plan was to import the format over to Cyprus, and then whoever won ATN would represent Cyprus at ESC2023. But then Eurofans remembered that Michael Rice represented the UK in 2019, and the only reason he was able to do that was because he got relevant enough from winning All Together Now to then win the British national final in 2019, and look where he ended up on the scoreboard. So it seemed like a big relief when all mentions of Eurovision on the producers' site regarding All Together Now were removed, but then it was reported by OGAE Greece that this was not permanently discarding ATN as a Eurovision selection, but rather just delaying it to 2024. So if we're being honest, 2023 isn't looking great either if they are so adamant to keep ATN.

Though we do know also via OGAE Greece that CyBC is looking for an actual Cypriot-born singer for 2023. For many years, some locals in Cyprus had been complaining that the entries were effectively written by Greeks and Swedes, and then given to a Greek singer, with zero Cypriot involvement. Well, for 2022 they tried to change that up a bit: one of the songwriters for Ela was actually from Cyprus proper. But it seems that was not enough for Cypriot locals, and so for 2023 they'll be looking for a singer from Cyprus, although I think they said something similar in 2022 and look how that went. Either way, this spells bad news for both Evangelia and Josephine if they were to enter the selection (which the former has already confirmed that she will do). But it means good news for a somewhat unexpected name, halfway across the planet.

Now, these are rumours, so as usual take them with a pinch of salt. But according to Eurovisionfun, our aforementioned Greek Eurovision news outlet, Andrew Lambrou and his team, when responding to a request for an interview, implied that they are apparently, and I quote, "in discussions for Eurovision 2023". What that means is not certain; of course it could just mean he is considering to return to Australia Decides, saying stuff about respecting his heritage and then going onstage to sing a dance-pop song with partial Spanish lyrics, but Eurovisionfun posits that he and his team could be in discussions with Cyprus. This isn't actually all that strange if you think about it; they did essentially the same thing in 2020 with Sandro. Sandro is actually German, with slight Greek heritage. He was not signed with Panik Records either, but he still nominally got to represent Cyprus in 2020. A similar scenario could be occurring with Andrew Lambrou here. That said, Sandro was pretty much the definition of "mid" in 2020, and if Andrew Lambrou is coming with a song similar in style to his AD2022 song, then he might be even more mid than Sandro. When did Cyprus suddenly start to love getting abused? Anyways, it's all up in the air right now, and/or behind closed doors, so who knows what's happening for now. Let's move on now to a country with a much clearer selection.

Czech Republic

Selection method: Eurovision Song CZ (aka ESCZ)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Jezinky - Giudi

My pick: Jezinky - Giudi

Wishlist: Giudi, Barbora Mochowa, Pam Rabbit?

General thoughts: with the Czech Republic, we had the usual national final Eurovision Song CZ, aka ESCZ, which has been running since 2018. One key difference this time around compared to previous editions though was that instead of just submitting a music video, artists now have to physically go to the ČT studios and actually record a live performance of the song. I presume this is because Benny Cristo, who won ESCZ2020, actually outright didn't sing a bunch of his lyrics onstage in Rotterdam, leading to the first Czech non-qualification since 2017. This new strategy from the Czech delegation actually worked out quite well - you can tell that Dominika from We Are Domi had pretty good vocals, certainly better than that of Benny Cristo, which earned them a very handsome 4th place qualification and the first Czech qualification since 2019. Another key change for ESCZ was that it was moved forward quite a bit. ESCZ would traditionally happen either in late January or early February, but this year it was moved all the way to mid-December, becoming the first national final to start and end in the season, ahead of FIK. (Scroll down two countries to see why I mentioned start and end.)

Onto the national final itself, although it only had 7 songs, I think it was actually one of the stronger national finals of the season; quality over quantity and all that. I think it's far better for there to be just a handful of really good songs in a national final, rather than a big national final with some 50 songs with maybe a few gems in there, partly because it means I don't have to trawl through all these songs to find the good ones. I think most of the songs in ESCZ2022 could've earned the Czech Republic a pretty good position in the final, or at the very least a good qualifying position.

And speaking of good positions, the OGAE Second Chance pick from OGAE Czech Republic was Jezinky by Giudi. Now, if you remember from my top 20 that I posted above, you'll know that Jezinky is one of my favourite songs this whole season, my 2nd favourite in fact. I could spend all day and night going on about why I love the song so much, but this blog post is already long enough, and you could always just ask me if you're interested. I actually wrote a little essay about why I loved Jezinky; though I never released it because I recognized that it would be kinda pointless to do so, and Jezinky didn't seem very likely to win ESCZ anyway, so I just binned it and I don't remember where it is now, if it even still exists. And this might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I actually prefer the acapella version to the symphonic version. I think it's a little more haunting, and fits the vibe a little more. We saw the great staging that the Czechs did with Lights Off - imagine what they could've done with Jezinky!

Now, I'm actually in a Twitter group chat with Giudi, and she's said that she has considered returning to ESCZ. And in response to a question asking about Eurovision in a recent Instagram Q&A, she posted four selfies with a weird nosebleed-monster-ears filter, two of which had her in a pondering expression and then two smiling. Who knows what that means, but people have taken it as a yes. And whether she comes back or not, she's on my wishlist for pretty obvious reasons. Just 4 months now, as of writing this, until we find out whether she's doing it again. Time really does fly.

Another name on my wishlist is Barbora Mochowa, who had previously entered ESCZ2019 and 2020. Some have described her as a kinda Czech Lana Del Rey, which I think is a pretty appropriate description. I really liked both of her submissions in 2019 and 2020, especially her 2020 song named "White and Black Holes", I highly recommend you check it out. Some people would call her music boring but I find it to be quite mystical and mysterious, and I greatly enjoy listening to it. So I do hope she returns to ESCZ in the near future.

The final name on my wishlist is Pam Rabbit, although I do have some doubts about this one because her style has changed quite a bit these past few years. Fun fact: she was the backing vocalist for Mikolas Josef in 2018. Her 2019 song was nice, but I think especially her 2020 song was magnificent. It's named "Get Up", and is this great empowerment anthem. Though in recent years she's moved more to just commercial pop, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your taste, but I don't know if a 2022 Pam Rabbit is necessarily the best thing to send to Eurovision. She had teased about possibly sending in a song for ESCZ2022 actually, again on Instagram stories, but she either never did, or she got rejected, we'll never know.

But what we do know is that Giudi released a new single named "TASTE!", and it's not really my cup of tea. The chord progressions are too weird. But maybe you'll like it, you can go check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRBHiLz9bzA

Speaking of Czech artists related to Eurovision releasing new singles: during Eurovision pre-season, Lake Malawi (CZ 2019) posted a collab with We Are Domi (CZ 2022) named "High-Speed Kissing". It's a fun little nostalgic tune, which vocals aside is much more Lake Malawi than We Are Domi. I like this one, so you should check it out as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77G16OB9fzg

If you read a little further, you'll find that I took the time to review every single song in another NF. I don't have the time now to do it here, but I will say this: By Now really isn't that bad. Jordan Haj has a weird voice, sure, but that aside honestly the song progresses rather nicely. Starts off rather bare, but ends with this full string ensemble, and honestly that's pretty damn good. The only song that I really actively disliked was "Way Down" by Skywalker. I've seen fans for it, so you're not alone if you like the song; I'm just not a fan unfortunately.

Right, moving from one of the best national finals to one of the worst now.

Denmark

Selection method: Dansk Melodi Grand Prix

OGAE Second Chance pick: Rave Med De Hårde Drenge - Fuld Effekt

My pick: Hallelujah - Conf3ssions?

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: Now, with Denmark we had the very old and very traditional Dansk Melodi Grand Prix. This national final was actually started in *1957*. Just one year after the first ever Eurovision Song Contest in Lugano, Switzerland, we had the Dansk Melodi Grand Prix as a pre-selection show for Denmark at Eurovision, and it's been running continuously ever since. Now obviously the "Dansk" part means Danish, and the reason that's there is to differentiate itself from the Norwegian national final, which just goes by the name of Melodi Grand Prix. The ironic thing about this, is that the Norwegian MGP actually started later than the Danish MGP, in 1960 as opposed to 1957 for DMGP, but then it's the Danish one that has had to rename itself for differentiation.

Anyways, this year I don't think it was very strong, and like with Croatia I didn't see a single qualifier in there to be quite honest. The OGAE Second Chance pick is Rave Med De Hårde Drenge by Fuld Effekt, which was a rather bizarre thing to see at DMGP, something that went drastically against the recent style of Denmark at Eurovision. In the last decade, most Danish Eurovision songs could be branded as 'vanilla' or perhaps 'cutesy' and usually in English; meanwhile RMDHD is 4 white guys in Squid Game outfits dancing to rave music singing in the Danish language, so clearly a bit of deviation there from the norm. I like how it deviates from the tradition in that sense, but I don't really like the song. With as much respect as I can muster for this, the four guys really did sound like clucking chickens when they sang.

My pick for second chance would instead be Hallelujah by Conf3ssions, though you can see the question mark there in the "my pick" section because I didn't think it was a particularly good song either. The standard for this national final was just really low, I think. At least RMDHD stood out; whether it would've qualified at Eurovision is another question. Hallelujah was the pre-show odds favourite, but in the end of course we know it lost out to The Show by Reddi in the superfinal, that which RMDHD didn't even make. I did see some people comment on Twitter though that it's mostly just boomers now who watch DR, so there's fewer young people to vote for trendier stuff, which could explain why RMDHD didn't make the superfinal. We don't know this for sure, but I do know that one of my followers likes RMDHD a lot. I don't know what he sees in it, but hey, different kicks for different licks or however the saying goes.

But yeah, the word to summarize Denmark at Eurovision is "vanilla". That's what you associate Denmark with when it comes to their Eurovision songs. Even their winning song in 2013 by Emmelie De Forrest was relatively vanilla, if you compare it to the other winners of the decade. And as a result of this 'vanilla-ness', it makes them much less competitive compared to their Nordic neighbours. They may have been more competitive than Iceland and Finland in the 2010s, but even they are rapidly catching up and some might even say are shaping up to be some of the new powerhouses, which was especially the case in 2021. And in either decade, it was clear that Denmark rarely stood a chance against Norway and Sweden. So perhaps they need to revamp their selection criteria in order to regain some competitiveness at Eurovision. Or maybe they don't want to because they went bankrupt from hosting 2014, who knows. But either way, I hope they send more songs in the Danish language. It can sound nice when used right, for example in 2021. I really liked Øve Os På Hinanden, and wanted them to qualify, but alas it wasn't to be.

No names on the wishlist because I don't know any Danish artists, much less Danish artists that would be willing to go to Eurovision. So let's move on to Estonia.

Estonia

Selection method: Eesti Laul

OGAE Second Chance pick: Champion - Anna Sahlene

My pick: What To Make Of This - Minimal Wind

Wishlist: Minimal Wind

General thoughts: With Estonia, we had the usual national final Eesti Laul, which in Estonian translates to Estonian Song. It's a kinda weird national final, because sometimes you can just see the green room host do random stuff with the singers, such as eating weird-smelling food, or getting Elina Nechayeva to break a glass by singing a high note. That's just two of the examples i could think of off the top of my head from this year's Eesti Laul alone. it's a bit chaotic, but not in an Eastern European sense. Even endearing in a way.

Anyways, some would argue that Eesti Laul this year was the earliest national final, because the newly introduced quarterfinals started in November of 2021, where songs would be showcased solely in the form of music videos, and qualifiers would be judged solely based off of that. Now i haven't watched previous editions of Eesti Laul (obviously), but as i understand it, in the quarterfinals, there would be 3 televote qualifiers and 2 jury qualifiers from each quarter of 10 songs. this whittles the 40 songs down to 20, and those go to the semifinals. and in each semifinal, you'd have four qualifiers based on the total points given by the televote and jury, and then one more qualifier that is decided via an extra round of only televote. The 2 semifinals then make one final, with 10 songs in it. from there, the three songs most voted by the televote and jury go on to a 100% televote superfinal, and whoever wins that wins Eesti Laul. An overly complicated system for a national final that gets a couple thousand of votes at best. Regardless, that's how it works, and i suppose to an extent it makes good TV.

Now, onto the songs. my overwhelming favourite from the 40 songs, and indeed the only one that makes my top 20 of the whole season, is What To Make Of This by Minimal Wind ft. Elisabeth Tiffany. or actually we can drop the "ft. Elisabeth Tiffany" part, because she's officially part of Minimal Wind now! so that's wonderful. Anyways, What To Make Of This was always my favourite in the selection, but I was kinda scared to say it because the odds weren't a fan, nor did I see a whole lot of people on Twitter raving about it.

In case you haven't heard the song, I saw someone describe it as something you'd hear in a bar in Tallinn at late night. And I suppose it does; it's this really chill tune with a charismatic singer with a unique vocal quality, a wonderful guitar solo, and a nice calm drumbeat to follow the whole thing along. the music video was also quite unique, describing a story where Elisabeth meets Paula (the guitarist) by chance in a bar, and they play this board game all night until sunrise. Some have therefore interpreted the video as having lesbian undertones, and I can see where they're coming from, but I wouldn't necessarily agree? Just great BFFs is how I look at it. Either way, this song I think really stood out in the selection which was full of pop songs and ballads. This offered something really unique and fresh. If you think it's boring, then I think YOU'RE boring and don't know how to appreciate the finer things in life.

Another song that i had initially liked was Mis Nüüd Saab by Andrei Zevakin ft. Grete Paia - it's a somewhat radio-friendly little pop song in the Estonian language. I still have it in my playlist, but my impression of it will forever be tainted by the live performance. For some reason Grete Paia looked really tan in the performance? Maybe it's the lighting or something, no idea. And the concept of starting the performance with Zevakin in the corridor was creative, but i can't see how they'd transpose that onto the Eurovision stage. and either way neither of them sung like the studio cut - Andrei Zevakin was too quiet (perhaps amplified by his lower register) and Grete Paia wasn't really able to hold too firm of a tone I think. So the song i think is still nice, but the live performance less so.

What To Make Of This had a nice performance; there wasn't a whole lot going on with the LEDs and such, and at the end Elisabeth kinda missed a small vocal run, but the overall package was very well put together I think. It created a very cosy mood which suits the song, and either way it'd stand out a lot in the running order.

Like I said earlier, the odds weren't so keen on the song, perhaps because it was a slower song that might not attract as much attention? No idea, but imagine my reaction, when the odds said this would tank, when it qualified first from the quarterfinals, then the semifinals (also with the music video instead of an actual live performance because some of the group got Covid), and then WON THE JURY IN THE FINAL, making it to the superfinal and getting almost a third of the total televote in the superfinal, giving them an overall 2nd place. THAT is insane. Sometimes i go back to watch the jury voting sequence of Eesti Laul 2022 just to feel happy. The jurors often like to make comments on why they gave a song 8, 10, or 12 points, and What To Make Of This has been variously described as: authentic, catchy and radio friendly. One of the jurors even said he wanted to work with the band! (or more precisely "the girl" which refers to Elisabeth but she's a part of the band now so i would paraphrase it as Minimal Wind rather than just Elisabeth.) I'm not sure this collaboration ever actually happened, but the fact that it's been offered at all was crazy. Aand it seemed like Minimal Wind couldn't believe that they were getting all these points either. Alright, enough raving over minimal wind for the time being, let's look at the other songs.

Other than What To Make Of This and the eventual Eesti Laul winner, that being Hope, we also got a song named Fire in the superfinal. I talked about this in the iceberg video, when the house of the singer of Fire, Elysa, ironically caught on fire and she had to go to hospital for a bit, but the song itself I didn't really find all that special. Eurofans on twitter were RAVING about it, saying stuff like "when did Estonia become Cyprus", but for me it was kinda just meh. And I identified the reason as being the lack of a key instrumental line in the chorus/drop. Fuego had one and as such it sounds consistent, but the chorus/drop of Fire just sounded kinda empty. The "go girl give us nothing" performance did nothing to improve matters, and some have suspected that some SIM card trickery may have been used to propel this to the superfinal.

I don't necessarily know about that, but what i do know is that both Meeletu by Maian and little girl by Merilin Mälk were overrated to hell and back. They're fine, easy-listening songs, but there were people even at the end of the national final season putting these two songs in their overall top 10s and i just simply do not get the hype?? This hype was largely on YouTube, less so on twitter, but there were still people raving about them on twitter, very few of which have made any noise ever since the conclusion of Eesti Laul. And to be honest the vast majority of the songs were not to my taste, and I can see why some people would like it, but saying BS like these songs can win Eurovision?? Hell no. Meeletu had a verse in Spanish and for some reason that drove the Spanish Eurofans crazy, and then the live performance was a flop. Little Girl wasn't ever even performed live because Merilin had Covid when the semis rolled around, and given that the music video was just Merilin doing various facial expressions out the top of a car, I'm not sure how it would've ever been staged.

Also worth mentioning I think is Lõpuks Muutub by An-Marlen, which is like a kinda future bass-y track with a very stylish drumbeat, but it got eliminated in the quarterfinals so that's a bit of a shame. That said I don't think the song is THAT good, nor a song named Shouldn't Be Friends by Ariadne, which was interesting but also gave me a bit of a weird vibe. So I don't really care about these songs too much.

But what i do care about is OGAE Estonia's pick for the second chance contest, and their pick is Champion by Anna Sahlene. Anna Sahlene, you may recall, represented Estonia in 2002 incidentally on "home" soil in Tallinn, which is kinda ironic since Anna sahlene is Swedish, not Estonian. Speaking of Swedish, her song this year named Champion was indeed Swedish-composed, and her performance also included The Mamas (from Sweden 2020 and John Lundvik's backing singer), who also acted as backing singers here for Anna Sahlene. Ultimately according to official data from ERT, she came 4th in the selection and just missed out on the superfinal. And as i understand it, this was a favourite among Twitter Eurofans, so I suppose it makes sense that they chose this rather than What To Make Of This which was the actual second place. That said, my pick would still be WTMOT. I love that song and I'm glad the jury saw the merit in it as well. Not sure how well it would've done at Eurovision given that televoters don't react very well to slow songs generally, but had I had the option to vote for them, I would.

My wishlist consists of just Minimal Wind. I don't know a whole lot of other Estonian artists and I think Minimal Wind will certainly be encouraged to return to Eesti Laul after their jury win this year, and i think if they do successfully represent Estonia in the near future, it would bring something fresh to the table for Estonia rather than just male singers singing pop songs with or without a guitar. And with that said, let's move on to our next country, which is Finland.

Edit: Minimal Wind have put out a new single, named Spacecraft. It's a bit more upbeat compared to WTMOT, but still pretty chill and fun. Some of the lyrics are kinda weird, such as "we're just like kids, but older", but I think it's still great. Go check it out!

Finland

Selection method: Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (aka UMK)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Ram Pam Pam - BESS

My pick: Ram Pam Pam - BESS

Wishlist: BESS, Vesala, Younghearted

General thoughts: With Finland, we had the national final UMK, or "Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu" is the full name, which translates to "contest for new music" in Finnish, which is rather ironic given the winner of UMK this year.

Usually the format involves a handful of Finnish artists with their own songs battling it out to represent Finland at Eurovision, but sometimes the Finnish broadcaster may internally select a big-name artist and then have UMK simply as a song selection rather than a song and artist selection. This happened in 2019, where Darude was internally selected, and then a series of songs were performed at UMK by him and Sebastian Rejman. I felt like I had to mention this, because recently a big-name artist in Finland has mentioned that he might be interested in doing Eurovision in the near future.

This artist is named Robin Packalen, and for the lack of a better descriptor, let's just say that he's a Finnish Justin Bieber with none of the drama. Anyways, he's huge in Finland, and he said in October last year in an interview that he might consider doing Eurovision. This could have been influenced by the participation of Norwegian best-selling pop singer TIX in Eurovision in 2021, but that's just speculation. Either way, some people are wanting him to send a song to UMK, but I think if he wants to do it then the Finnish broadcaster would've just internally selected him, and then announce that UMK would be a song selection. And that announcement has not happened; on the contrary, song submissions are already open as of writing this. To be fair, the announcement of the selection of Darude only took place in January, and Saara Aalto in November, but of course who knows what's gonna happen. Either way I don't think they'll make the same mistake as this year, where they put 5 really strong acts alongside a has-been band with a mediocre song. (Shoutout to Tommi Läntinen; i don't know how often the wholesome Finnish grandpas win UMK, but I imagine it's not very often.)

And with that, let's take a look at the songs in UMK this year. I think that UMK was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, national finals. As you saw in my top 20 list, 4 out of 7 of the UMK songs were in that list. By percentage, that's the highest number of songs from a singular national final in my top 20 ranking. And I think a lot of people would agree with me that UMK was just generally really strong this year. In all sorts of genres too; I'm personally not a huge fan of Hurricane by Cyan Kicks, but it's good for its genre, and rock fans have naturally gravitated towards it, as they rightly should.

Now let's go through all the songs one by one: Jezebel is a rock song by early 2000s European household name The Rasmus, who became huge with their song named in the shadows. And in the hint of artists that the Finnish broadcasters put out, the one corresponding to The Rasmus wrote simply in one bullet point: "you know them". Which sounds slightly threatening, but with the general UMK voting demographic, that's not really wrong. But of course us outside of Europe and North America and/or babies during The Rasmus' glory days won't have heard of them, as is my scenario. So I was kinda underwhelmed when this came out, especially when these songs were released day by day and Jezebel came rather late after some bangers. Not to mention some questionable lyrics like "a girl who looks like she's a boy", but let's move on. I think I've talked about my dislike of Jezebel sufficiently both on the channel and especially on Twitter.

Second in the running order was Kuuma Jäbä by Isaac Sene, who I think would be best described as an Oulu-dialect-Finnish-speaking Lil Nas X mixed with the Weeknd. The song and its lyric/music video felt very sensual, especially so in the lyrics (just go look them up), while the instrumentation felt very modern and fresh. Alesia Michelle who doesn't follow national finals too much, she specifically pointed this one out and said that it had winner potential. Do I agree? Not really. Had it been performed well in Turin I think a top 5 is reasonable, but a. it didn't win UMK, not even close, and b. it wasn't really performed all that well. His vocals were a little shaky, and very quiet especially around the lower registers. The studio cut is excellent, the music video is enticing, it's just the live performance wasn't quite it.

Moving on to song 3, which is Thank God I'm An Atheist by Olivera. Allegedly this was supposed to appear in UMK 2021, however Olivera was pregnant at the time and her baby was due right around Eurovision, so the Finnish broadcaster told her to wait a year, and that she did. Anyways, the song has raised huge contention on twitter, particularly with a certain Northern Irish devout Catholic unionist Eurofan. I'll leave it to you to figure out who that is, but if you don't know, he essentially wrote this thread on why he got offended by it. Obviously, as the title suggests, Thank God I'm An Atheist deals with religious themes in the lyrics, and this...Eurofan randomly just came up to say "hurr durr i am so offended by this song" and even claimed that Christianity is one of the most oppressed religions in the world??? No idea. Thankfully young conservative right-wing Christians are a dying species in most of Ireland and the UK, so I doubt this debate will resurface anytime soon. The song itself? It's kinda...somber pop might be one way to put it? Not entirely sure how to describe it, but if you were expecting some sort of jokey song, this ain't it. Tthe staging involved a lit match when she sang the line "I like to play with gasoline", so I liked that. But overall it is a good song, although there's a slight bitter taste in the mouth because of the controversy that happened on Twitter, and especially more so since I'm someone who went to 12 years of Catholic schools, and then near graduation I said to myself "screw this whole religion thing" and as far as I'm concerned, right now I'm somewhere between atheist and agnostic, not sure which. But definitely not christian.

Either way, moving on to song 4: Ram Pam Pam by Bess. It's a sassy, Finnish-language pop song that's very much in your face. The song itself talks about an estranged relationship; the first verse literally means "I want to go on a night flight to Paris, and you want a one-way ticket to get married". The rest of the song further elaborates the protagonist's thoughts and attitudes towards said relationship. That's not really all that important when it comes to Eurovision, let's be honest, since Bess has confirmed that not only is the story not about herself, but that in fact the original story was far more wholesome; apparently a friend of hers with their partner had won a dancing competition, whose prize was a trip to Paris, but one of them said that they wanted to get married instead, and in the end they did both from what I remember (as in get married and go to Paris) so that's nice. Anyways, the song, Bess has said to be strong and in-your-face, which is certainly correct. The lyric/music video was also displaying her in a very sassy manner, though I must say the live performance kinda lacked that. There was this motorcycle in the video, but at the live performance she was dressed in purple with fleeces, and her dancers ran around with fire sticks. She also sounded a little out of breath at times, but I don't know if that's her or the UMK microphones being quiet in general. Still, the song is good, the camera angles were alright for what it's worth (and there was one where she literally bent down to look backwards between her legs into a camera for like one second, and I don't know if anyone remembers that but I do), and I think given the barrage of ballads we had in Turin, it could've also gotten a top 5 placement or even a top 3. Plus we saw with The Rasmus that the staging does change from UMK to Eurovision. So who knows what would've happened.

What we do know that happened, is that Ram Pam Pam was number 1 in the Finnish Spotify charts for weeks, EVEN AFTER The Rasmus won UMK. It's been off the top for months now, but for a good, I wanna say, 7 or 8 weeks, you'd go to the Finnish top 50 charts on Spotify, and you'd only see Ram Pam Pam at the top, and Bess expressed gratitude for that in her interview. Sadly this did not translate very well into televote points, and both in the televote and overall score she came third after The Rasmus and Cyan Kicks. Either way, back to streams.

As of writing this, Ram Pam Pam remains the most streamed UMK 2022 song, *even ahead of the winning song* by just under a million. You know, Eurovision songs are supposed to get disproportionately more streams than their once fellow national final songs. But Jezebel *went to Eurovision*, got the exposure to the 200 million or however many people that watch the show, and it STILL couldn't beat Ram Pam Pam. And five months after the conclusion of UMK, as of writing this, Ram Pam Pam is *STILL* in the top 20 of the Finnish Spotify charts. Granted it only takes 16000 streams to get on the top 50, but for a national final song to have this much longevity and domestic support is insane. I'm not sure I've ever seen this kinda stuff before. Some have said it could win the televote if it went to Eurovision, but who knows. We'll never find out. That said, in my wishlist I put Bess, so let's hope she comes back with an even bigger banger than Ram Pam Pam, and get that Eurovision ticket that she so rightly deserved. And to no one's surprise, I also have Ram Pam Pam as my second chance pick, or Kuuma Jäbä, but I think Ram Pam Pam is probably it. And this got excellent reception on Twitter too, and usually Twitter Eurofans generally know their stuff as a whole.

In my wishlist I also have Vesala, whose full name is Paula Vesala, and she is a huge pop star in Finland and one of the hosts of UMK 2022. She herself performed in UMK as an interval act this year, with her songs Pulkka and Uu mama, both of which had really good staging, good live vocals and some have said outsold every one of the contestants. So if she herself signed up to UMK then I think it's gonna be a very good result for Finland at Eurovision. Anyways, we've only gone through 4 songs so far, so let's run through the rest.

Song 5: Sun Numero by Younghearted. Sun Numero translates to "your number", and is basically a sad little ballad in the Finnish language which details the protagonist's internal feelings towards the now-dead relationship, such as regret and just general sadness. The wording I think is excellent (go look it up yourself), and in the live performance it felt very intimate. No big vocal moments or anything, but there was one shot where the singer faced away from the audience and looked at the camera behind her, and all you could see was just her and all the flashlights in the audience, which was simply beautiful. Plus Maro this year has sufficiently proven that you don't need vocal moments to get good jury points, a good atmosphere can do that as well, and I think Sun Numero perfectly delivered in that regard. So that's why you see Younghearted in my wishlist as well - the lead singer sings very well live, unlike Isaac Sene, and I think it would be another really good result for Finland if Younghearted represented them, even with this "cutesier" tune. They also said in their pre-show interview that later they would release the original English version of the song, but as of writing this I haven't found it anywhere yet. Let me know if you do.

Song 5! Hurricane by Cyan Kicks. It's kinda your standard Evanescence-type rock song, with slightly edgy lyrics such as "don't try to shut us off, we will never shut up". I like it, but it doesn't deviate much from the usual formula. Plus the barcode-looking live staging was questionable at best. So it's not super high in my UMK top, but still a solid song. Fun fact: a couple weeks back Cyan Kicks did a songwriting session with Elsie Bay, yes, that one from MGP. I've gotten confirmation that unfortunately it's not a collab - Elsie was just writing songs with them - but still an unexpected crossover nonetheless.

And song 7! Elämä Kantaa Mua by Tommi Läntinen. The title translates to "life carries me", and the song has been described as kinda Bruce Springsteen-esque. Tommi Läntinen himself also appears to be older than all the others; in fact he's apparently 62 years old right now. And also apparently it's tradition for the Finnish broadcaster to put "wholesome Finnish grandpas" into UMK? No idea. But he got last place, which while unfortunate, was kinda expected. It's a very wholesome tune, check it out if you wanna.

Right, so that's all the songs, now I just wanna give some final thoughts on UMK. First off, i

don't get why the jury is only 25%. I think the ideal balance is 50/50 jury and televote, as it is in Eurovision. The jury is there to balance out the effects of fanaticism, as was what clearly happened with The Rasmus this year, who got an overwhelmingly large televote compared to everyone else. The UMK 2022 jury also gave more points to ram pam pam than hurricane, so they know what's up. That said, they also voted greatly for The Rasmus, so maybe they don't.

Second thing, I hope that the Finnish broadcaster learns from their mistake this year, of putting a huge name next to rising singers in a national final. Simply by name alone we kinda had a feeling that everyone else apart from The Rasmus were screwed. And what happened to The Rasmus in Turin? they qualified, but they flopped hard. *26* televote points for a band that has a 9-digit streams single. Big names never do well in Eurovision; see Darude, Flo Rida and 2018 Alexander Rybak. And remember, the full name of UMK literally translates to contest for new music! How are The Rasmus "new" in any way? By putting in such big names in UMK, it defeats the entire point of the national final. So let's hope the Finnish broadcaster learned their lesson, but judging by how they did this after Darude's catastrophic flop in 2019, I'm sadly gonna guess that they won't. But pick the right artist and song for once, and we could be going back to Finland the year after. Not Helsinki, because the 2006 arena is actually Russian-owned and it's kinda not cool to rely on Russian-owned infrastructure right now?

So, and I took a while to look this up, a great alternative would be a city named Tampere. it's a bit more inland than Helsinki, but it has one of the largest non-Helsinki metropolitan areas, an international airport, and a brand new arena was opened in 2021 which also happens to be Finland's new largest arena. So...Tampere 2024, anyone?

Edit: actually I found out shortly after finishing this script that Bess put out a new song earlier in July, named "Rakastan En Rakasta", go check it out! In terms of style and structure it's pretty similar to Ram Pam Pam, but it's certainly a different vibe in the music video and lyrics. Go check it out, it's a bop. It's also in the top 30 of the Finnish Spotify charts. Okay, onto France.

Update 4/9/2022: Ram Pam Pam has made Finnish history by being #1 on the Finnish Radio Airplay charts for *19 weeks in a row* and counting. Take that, Flopmus!

France

Selection method: Eurovision France: C'est Vous Qui Décidez ! (aka CVQD)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Nuit Pauline - Pauline Chagne

My pick: Seule - SOA?

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: With France, we had the national final named Eurovision France: C'est Vous Qui Décidez, which in French means "you decide". It's a relatively new national final, having only started in 2021. Of course in 2021 we know what happened with France in Rotterdam as a result of the national final - became a massive favourite to win the contest, and eventually wound up with their best result ranking-wise since, well, 1977, when they last won. So I think many people were hopeful that this year could bring similar success to France, who had usually been rather mediocre in the last decade or so.

The format itself is rather confusing; the songs are presented not as just simple MP3s online, but rather this pseudo-audition format where the participants had to sing(?) their songs in just this room, no staging or dancers or anything, just sing. I don't really get that? Either way, after that, the event just takes place on one night, where the 12 participants perform their songs, after which 5 songs are voted into the final by the public, and then the jury gives an extra song the so-called "Euro-ticket" which puts it in the final. Incidentally, both Euro-ticket songs so far in the national final have placed second to last in the final.

One thing that changed between 2021 and 22, is that this time, after each performance, some of the jury members would comment on the song and performance, and then each of the 10 jury members could press a button to kinda show their approval of the song. It may not surprise you to find out that the eventual top 2 in the final were the ones that got the largest number of jury favourites. Also, the jurors would give 12, 10, 8 etc. to each act, and perhaps most humiliatingly they would read out EVERY SINGLE vote they made and the camera would point at the contestant who got 2 points or 4 points or whatever. And the televote was equally weird, as they would be giving points in increments of 20; literally 20, 40, 60 and so on until we reach 120 points, which is the highest that can be awarded. Again, bizarre format.

Either way, the Euro-ticket song this year was "Ma Famille" by Cyprien Zeni, which ironically got into the final despite having fewer jury favourites than "Telephone" by Elia. And what's funny about Ma Famille by Cyprien Zeni, is that one of the jurors was kinda criticizing Cyprien's vocals I think, and then Yseult, who like Cyprien was also of African origin, stood up in a weird move to defend Cyprien...in broken English. And that's where we got the legendary Eurofan meme "it's a nope, I am not a Greek, at all". Also, Telephone by Elia was kinda a fan favourite before the show, but I think most of us agreed on the night that the performance really just wasn't it. I myself tweeted: "There's a right way to stage this song. This wasn't it". The studio cut is still kinda nice, even though the lyrics are gibberish.

Anyways, the rest is history, as they say. Alvan and Ahez got the highest points from both the jury and the televote, but proceeded to flop hard in Turin. so was their selection a mistake? Well, you have to consider that most locals watching national finals rarely, if ever, consider competitiveness at Eurovision. they vote, based on how much an act stands out *within* the context of THAT national final and the national final alone. I'll get back to this point when we reach Norway, but you have to consider that that's part of why Fulenn won the televote and jury vote to begin with. It was just a breath of fresh air among the various French AF ballads or regular pop songs. So I don't think they necessarily made the wrong choice (though of course I might be biased as someone who put Fulenn in their top 5) but this goes to show that the quality of a national final is really most dependent on the quality of songs that get sent in. I still think Fulenn is great, but among other things it just wasn't palatable enough for the public and commercially-oriented juries.

And with this, the C'est Vous Qui Décidez national final format has now produced a top 2 result,...and a bottom 2 result. and it has been confirmed that for 2023, CVQD will return for the selection of the french entry, which apparently marks the longest running French national final since the 1980s. Let's see what they come up with, or if they return to their mid-table days. No wishlist, because I don't particularly listen to French artists. and with that, let's move on to our next country, which is Germany.

Update: Not gonna write about Georgia since 2022 was entirely internal, but in case you missed the news, GPB is going back to talent shows to look for Eurovision singers for 2023. In 2019 and 2020 it was Georgian Idol, and now it's The Voice of Georgia. So make of that what you will. Alright, Germany. Though speaking of Georgia and Germany, our good friend Kjet can help us out a bit with the going-ons of The Voice of Georgia, so go look on his profile when TVG happens. I posted a tweet by him early on in the thoughts section.

Germany

Selection method: Germany 12 Points

OGAE Second Chance pick: Anxiety - Felicia Lu

My pick: Anxiety - Felicia Lu

Wishlist: Felicia Lu, Ben Dolic?

General thoughts: With Germany, we had the national final named Germany 12 Points. which, given the number of points they got in Turin, is rather hilarious. It's a "brand new" national final, because all their recent national finals have been named "Unser Lied Für" plus the name of the host city or country. Unser Lied Für Lissabon (Lisbon), Unser Lied Für Israel, so on and so forth. Though there was one year where it was simply called "Unser Song", where 'unser' means "our", and in previous years, they also had Unser Star, Unser Song Für (somewhere/someone), etc. And the inconsistency between choosing the city name or the country name (or even a person) is pointed out here in this tweet by Kjet, a German Eurofan:

But you get the idea; they renamed the national final. For the first time in ages, no "unser", just trying to get double-digit points for once.

The national final drew controversy, when a certain all-male group named Electric Callboy, who happens to be rather popular in Germany and beyond, announced their campaign to go to Eurovision. They made a song, it had this weird fitness-themed music video, and they didn't end up on the final shortlist of singers. Their fans were angry about this, and even set up a little petition - well I say little but it got more than 100k signatures - the fans set up a petition to have EC as a 'wildcard' in the national final, to which NDR, the German broadcaster responsible for Eurovision, responded publicly, and said no. So that's something that happened, and to be very honest I still have never listened to their song that they wanted to enter into the selection, and I frankly don't plan to do so.

Either way, onto the actual selection. One of the groups selected was Nico Suave and Team Liebe, and I can't confirm this because I wasn't bothered to find out, but apparently one of the members are racist and/or anti-Semitic? No idea, but apparently there was the option to change their song's lyrics, and when the invasion of Ukraine started, they changed their lyrics to generic sappy BS about peace and unity. Then Eurofans got scared, because allegedly the German public like this kinda stuff, and I don't know who'd want an anti-Semite to represent their country in Eurovision. Fortunately though, that didn't really come to be.

But quick little diversion to the voting system - there is no jury. it's 50% what I like to call pre-voting, which is basically that people can vote on the songs and music videos alone, and then 50% of the voting would take place during the show. But because the pre-voting went on for weeks and weeks, it eventually just stabilized and practically every regional broadcaster announced identical results. And those results were not very favourable for Nico Suave and Team Liebe, to Eurofans' relief. They still placed top 3 in the end, but to be fair that's top 3 out of 6 entries.

The OGAE second chance pick for this is Anxiety by Felicia Lu, which you might recall is near the bottom of my top 20 of all national final songs, but in my top 20 nonetheless, out of thousands of national final songs that were released this season. It's a pop song, and Felicia Lu had previously already appeared in one of the various Unser Lied national finals. The song is a little short, but I do believe it was extended exclusively for the performance at Germany 12 Points. And I do mean exclusively; there is only one version of Anxiety available on Spotify, and it's the short version. I was reading the hashtag during the show, and it appeared a lot of people negatively associated her and her performance with Lena from 2010 and 2011, and I mean come on. Move on, it's been more than a decade now. She was the bookmakers' overwhelming favourite actually, But she didn't even come top 3. She got 4th. Instead, some random duo named Maël and Jonas came second. They even bizarrely won the pre-voting. Eh, what can we do. Germany is weird like that. And I didn't really mind that Malik Harris won the selection, just as long as Nico Suave and Team Liebe didn't, I was fine with anything (except for that Emily Roberts singer who forgot her lyrics for like 16 seconds).

Anyways, my second chance pick is also Anxiety, for pretty obvious reasons. I like the song, and it's also the OGAE Second Chance pick. I also have Felicia Lu on my wishlist, though maybe she can experiment with a more impactful staging? Who knows. Ben Dolic is also on there, but I just have to point out that he didn't actually write Violent Thing. That was the good work of Borislav Milanov, who wrote other songs such as Truth by Chingiz, Tears Getting Sober by Victoria and All Of My Love by Destiny. Ben Dolic's self-written music is kinda cute, but I wouldn't say it's anything like Violent Thing. He actually entered the so-called "Free Eurovision Song Contest" in 2021, which is this mostly-German spinoff of Eurovision that started in 2020. He represented Slovenia, because indeed he is Slovene, and apparently even entered EMA once. Unfortunately he didn't do so well with his self-written song, and came 3rd to last.

That said, a few weeks ago he did tweet that he wrote a song together with, wait for it, Felicia Lu. So let's see what happens with that, and let's see whether Germany 12 Points remains the selection for 2023. Maybe next year they'll actually get 12 points in the grand final, who knows. With that, let's move on to Greece.

Edit 17/8/22: there are some signs that indicate Germany might be able to get 2nd place next year. Kjet finds that laughable, but the entire Big Five bar Germany has gotten podium positions in the past three contests now. Furthermore, Kjet himself observed that in between 2015-2017, Germany got bottom 2 thrice in a row, and then got top 5 in 2018. And with ESC2022 now concluded, Germany has once again gotten three bottom 2 results in a row. Maybe it's Germany's turn to glow up. But like I said in a tweet thread with Kjet:

Update: I'm pretty sure I've copy-pasted this a million times by now, but Felicia Lu has announced that she will no longer enter any more preliminaries, but Eurovision remains one of her dreams. Whether this means she is applying for Austria (where she was born) is yet to be seen.

Okay, Greece.

Greece

Selection method: internal

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: good job nicky (+ Stefania?), Evangelia?, Tamta?

General thoughts: with Greece, we had just an internal selection, albeit with clearly announced candidates, which they had five. I'll be honest, I can't remember most of them. the only two of note are Amanda Tenfjord, who we know was eventually selected, as well as good job nicky (that's genuinely how he styles his artist name). I only mention these two, because they were the only ones that had the backing of the Dream Team. I shouldn't need to introduce the Dream Team, but long story short they're a group of songwriters and staging directors who do stuff mostly for Greece and Russia, but sometimes also Moldova (as in 2021), and Azerbaijan (as in 2013 and 2018). Anyways, they were backing the two main candidates, Amanda Tenfjord and good job nicky, with more or less fleshed out staging plans. That said, Dream Team members were allegedly speaking more positively of Amanda than good job nicky, so Amanda got picked in the end.

Now, all of the candidates' songs have now been released I do believe, but I don't know any songs from the other 3 candidates. I only know that good job nicky's song is named "Heaven Is Sin", as I had mentioned in a previous video. Go listen to it, it's very indie I think. Certainly not something you'd expect from Greece at Eurovision. Might not be to everyone's taste, and I certainly think mass appeal was one of the main factors at work during the selection which actually took place in December of last year. Bonus minigame: try to listen to the dance rework of the song, and try not to cringe.

Anyways, good job nicky actually "performed" the song in public, at the MAD VMAs back in late June. I used quotations there because as far as I could tell, it was a pre-recorded studio cut, and by as far as I could tell I mean I literally saw him miss an entire vocal cue so his voice was just playing while he stood there and smiled. Anyways, there were dancers, LEDs and lights at the MAD VMAs as well, so I guess there's kind of a staging concept there, kinda how the staging would've looked like had he been chosen over Amanda Tenfjord.

Also at the MAD VMAs was Stefania, the Greek representative from last year. It's quite interesting, because back in December she declared that out of the 5 candidates her favourite was good job nicky, and at the MAD VMAs after he "performed" Heaven Is Sin, he then sang his most popular song, named "January 8th". But he didn't do it alone, he performed it as a duet with Stefania. She sang a verse and then the last chorus alongside him. And shortly after the MAD VMAs, she declared that if she were to return to Eurovision, she'd want to do it with good job nicky. Is someone having a little crush or something? Who knows. Here's the video of them performing the two songs if you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-gWywGIde4

Anyways, you can see in the wishlist section that I indeed have good job nicky, mainly because I think his songs are pretty cool and very much off the beaten track for a country like Greece. Maybe he'll do a duet with Stefania, maybe not, who knows. I will say, it does feel weird for someone who sang such a standard pop song at Eurovision to be into this more indie-type music, but anyways.

On the wishlist, I also have Evangelia, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up because in Greece and Cyprus she's represented by Panik Records, and ERT, the Greek broadcaster, has historically not been friendly with Panik Records, unlike CyBC which just recently signed another 2 year contract with Panik Records regarding Eurovision. And as of recording this, Evangelia's just released a new song named Paradise, though she says it's actually old (specifically from 2019) and you can tell by the genre - it's kinda trappy, I guess, I don't really know how to describe it, as opposed to her more ethnic Greek style as of late, with the likes of Fotia, Pame Pame and as previously mentioned Onira. But do check out Paradise if you want to; it's gotten good reception on Twitter, I'm just personally not into it. Anyways I don't think Evangelia has much of a chance at all with Greece, given that her sound matches that of recent Cypriot entries more so than Greek ones, but she's already confirmed on a recent Instagram livestream that she's planning to send songs to Greece and Cyprus anyway for 2023. Though as much as I like her music, I don't think it'd do that well in Eurovision, given the significant increase in quality over even just the past few years.

But anyway, I'm getting off track. My final name on this wishlist is Tamta, who you might recognize from Cyprus 2019 with Replay. I *think* she said somewhere that she wants to do Eurovision again? I can't say for sure, but I think I read about it somewhere. Incidentally I also found out just these few weeks that Tamta is *41* years old. What the hell?? She looks nowhere near that when she did Eurovision, which was only 3 years ago. Anyways, I've heard that she wants to do Eurovision again, but it should be noted that she's actually 0% Greek by ethnicity, as far as the public is concerned, and she actually comes from Georgia. so some people have been positing Tamta actually doing Eurovision for Georgia instead, where she might have greater artistic freedom as compared to if she had represented Cyprus or Greece. It's all a mystery at this point, but from reading her history on Wikipedia it seems like she didn't have the best time in Georgia to put it lightly, so I don't know if she'd be willing to do it. Plus she's very much naturalized in Greece now, sings in Greek quite often, and only released an English EP in 2020. Again, a lot of unknowns.

The final name I wanna mention, but that I didn't put on my wishlist due to my lack of knowledge on this singer, is a certain Katerina Stikoudi. A Greek singer, and apparently recently followed a bunch of Eurovision-related accounts on Instagram, not least ERT and CyBC. So she might be interested in sending a song to try and participate in Eurovision 2023? Who knows. A lot of names, but with that, let's move onto our next country, which is Iceland.

27/8 Update: ERT has released guidelines for their 2023 internal selection submissions. Largely the same as the rules from last year, but they added a very specific paragraph, and I can't help but feel that it was targeted at a specific artist. I quote:

"Until the completion of their evaluation, they (the artist) may not have submitted simultaneously to a corresponding procedure of another body participating in the Eurovision Song Contest."

If this was not aimed at Evangelia, I don't know who it would be for. As you may recall (and as I wrote earlier), Evangelia submitted songs to both ERT and CyBC. One wonders, if she had only submitted to Greece, then would she have been on that final 5-person shortlist at the very least? Who knows. Either way, I guess she'll have to make a choice now. Submit to a broadcaster which likes choosing diaspora but doesn't like her label, or to a broadcaster that likes her label but are looking for home-grown talent. I suppose only time will tell which one she chooses.

Iceland

Selection method: Söngvakeppnin

OGAE Second Chance pick: Turn This Around / Tökum Af Stað - Daughters Of Reykjavik / Reykjavíkurdætur

My pick: Þaðan Af - Katla

Wishlist: Katla, more crazy stuff

General thoughts: With Iceland, we had the usual national final named Söngvakeppnin, which in Icelandic literally just means song contest. it started in 1981, but Iceland only debuted in Eurovision in 1986, so ever since then, most Icelandic entries have come from that national final, with a recent exception being 2021, when Daði Og Gagnamagnið were re-selected, having won Söngvakeppnin in 2020 but of course, despite having a potential winning song, they weren't able to go to Eurovision at all. Fortunately they were at least able to rehearse in Rotterdam in 2021, and they got a very respectable 4th place while sitting on a sofa in a hotel room. Well this year was rather different. For all the hype that was generated around the national final by Twitter Eurofans, I actually found Söngvakeppnin kinda weak. Maybe the stuff is just too indie for my taste, or maybe it is weak, I don't know.

There were two main standouts, both of which we expected in the superfinal, but one of them didn't. We'll get to these two songs in a bit, but a brief look at the other ones - Marketa Irglova's song was nice, but the performance was too bland and had too little focus on the singer. I was gonna say I liked that she kept it in the Icelandic language, but I forgot to mention that - at least this year, I don't know about other years - all contestants had to send in an Icelandic version of their song, regardless of whether they had a version in another language, i.e. English. Then if they qualify to the final, then they have the choice of singing it in the intended language. Anyways, back to the songs. There was also a kinda cool dance-pop song called "Hækkum Í Botn", or the English name is "Keep It Cool", which I think was quite nice in the studio cut, but the live vocal was abysmal. So understandably it didn't qualify, but there was a meme song this year that got quite a bit of attention. Its name in Icelandic is "Gía", which by itself I'm pretty sure is just a female name, but the intended English name of the song was "Volcano". It already sounds a little weird, but wait, there's more! There's an entire hummus recipe in the lyrics of both versions of the song, go check it out, it's by this singer named Haffi Haff. That said, the live performance was all over the place.

But speaking of live performances being all over the place, let's talk about the two main favourites pre-show. The first one is Tökum Af Stað, or Turn This Around by the Daughters Of Reykjavik, or Reykjavíkurdætur. It's the OGAE second chance pick, because it was the actual second place in the superfinal. The English version, named "Turn This Around", still had a lot of Icelandic in it (and also swear words in English so I don't know how that would've worked if they had won Söngvakeppnin?), but anyways, the live performance, wow. I can't describe it as anything other than "all over the place". From what I remember, there was this kinda flower crown thing in the middle which some of the members of the group would step out of, and then one of them I think quite literally entered the stage on a *motorcycle*. Is that even allowed at Eurovision? But yeah, really wild performance, I think the song sounds like a bunch of English schoolgirls shouting (which is to say, I'm not really a fan of it), but there is the other song which I did like, which is Þaðan Af by Katla.

It's my pick for second chance, and it's a kinda cool ballad. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but it sounds kinda mystic? It's honestly not like god-tier stuff, I just don't really know how to describe it, but I do think (and a lot of people thought) that it was above at least most if not all of the songs this year. The staging was kinda cool, they used some mirrors for interesting effects, and Katla's live vocals were great; held the high note really well. Incidentally, Katla's day job is actually a dentist. So had she won Söngvakeppnin, we would've had two dentists at Eurovision over just the past 5 years, the previous one of course being the iconic Serhat for San Marino. But not only did Katla not win Söngvakeppnin, she didn't even make the superfinal, and when the full results were later posted, it was revealed that she was dead last in the grand final. A bit robbed if you ask me, but hey, what can we do.

On my wishlist I don't have a whole lot - I think Katla has good potential, and also there's a certain endearment to the chaotic stuff that Iceland sometimes sends, and I think they should send more of it. But with that said, let's move onto the other country which starts with I and ends with land, and that is of course Ireland.

Ireland

Selection method: Eurosong (The Late Late Show)

OGAE Second Chance pick: I'm Loving Me - Rachel Goode

My pick: don't care

Wishlist: honestly, Brooke

General thoughts: with Ireland, we had a national final named Eurosong on the Late Late Show. The last Eurosong before this was held in 2015, and it had started actually in 2008. It retained the usual format of having very few songs, although it was increased from 5 in 2015 to 6.

Now I don't know how the songs were revealed in previous years, but this year, they were first premiered on a certain radio show. Over the course of three days spread over a week, that radio show (which I can't remember the name of) would play two of the songs, and by the end of the week we'd have all the songs. Now, Brooke was actually already getting hyped up before the song reveal - Anglophone Eurofans were already taking notice of her, and she said that she had sent in a song to RTÉ. And sure enough, on what I believe was a Wednesday, along with some other song, we got "That's Rich", which as we all know would eventually win Eurosong, and represented Ireland in Turin.

I'll be honest, I don't have a whole lot to say about most of the songs, partly because I don't remember most of them, and partly because they really were just straight up bad. I will note the song named "Yeah, We're Going To Get Out Of It" (yes that's the full name of the song) by Miles Graham. As I mentioned in my iceberg video, the lyric video for the song was first posted with a George Floyd graphic on it, which was rather insensitive to say the least, so it was re-released later with that bit hastily blurred out. Frankly the song is terrible, and I don't know how it got joint 2nd place with another song, but to be fair the standard for this particular Eurosong was in hell.

Moving on though, the other song that got joint 2nd place was "Ashes Of Yesterday" by Janet Grogan, which again I can't remember much of, but I do remember it sounding very dated. I do think OGAE Ireland is pretty starved for choice here in this national final, and I certainly don't anticipate this song getting too many votes from fellow OGAE members, if any.

Also there was another song named "I'm Loving Me" by Rachel Goode, which was written by the same people who wrote "The Ride" by Rafał (Poland 2021), and you can tell. It's almost identical in structure, with just some changes in key signature and obviously the singer. But it very much sounded like the female version of The Ride. Fortunately it only came 5th out of 6, which is still above former Irish eurovision representative Brendan Murray.

But yeah, Eurosong wasn't great this year, to the point where I literally can't pick a song for 2nd choice because the non-winning songs were THAT terrible.

On my wishlist, I have Brooke. For one because I don't know any Irish singers other than Orla Gartland and I highly doubt she cares for Eurovision, and secondly because Brooke is great! I think I lamented about this enough in my afterthoughts video, but Brooke put on the show of a lifetime, only to get a measly 15th place. She said after the show that she thought she deserved a place in the final, and I agree! I was able to rationalize the other fan favourites not qualifying, like Ronela and Andromache, but I still can't make sense of Brooke not even being close to qualification.

Fortunately Brooke is only 23, and as we learned from Chanel and Eleni Foureira, Eurovision divas tend to peak at 30 years of age. So I really do fully anticipate Brooke returning to eurovision. Y'know, they don't call her Derry Lipa for nothing. So maybe not 2023, but in the near-ish future I really do wanna see Brooke do Eurovision again, I think she really deserves a qualification at the very least. Also, she released a new single named Tongues, which I think I already mentioned in a previous video, but go stream it anyway. Also at the point of writing this, Brooke's releasing a new single named "Heartbreaker", and it's coming out next week. If this writing speed continues, the song will probably be out by the time I publish this blog post. So go check it out, in addition to Tongues. Update: Heartbreaker is out, but I'm not a huge fan. You might like it, but it's missing a zing for me. Cool music video though.

But with that, let's move onto our next country, which is...rael. Get it? Israel? Okay, whatever.

Israel

Selection method: X Factor Israel => Hashir Shelanu L'Eurovizion

OGAE Second Chance pick: Blinded Dreamers - Eli Huli

My pick: Marionette - Inbal Bibi

Wishlist: well!

General thoughts: with Israel, we had X Factor Israel as the initial selection, then the 4 finalists of that went into Hashir Shelanu L'Eurovizion, where they each got 2 songs composed for them. I didn't follow X Factor at all, but I did see on Twitter that one fan favourite was Linet, a Turkish-Israeli with good vocals apparently? No idea, I never heard her sing, but as we now know, she did not make it into the final 4.

And as such the final 4 consisted of Michael Ben David of course, the eventual winner; Eli Huli, the OGAE Second Chance pick; Inbal Bibi, the fan favourite of Eurofans; and Sapir Saban, who was also a partial fan favourite, but was eliminated pretty early on. I don't remember some of the songs, but I do remember that the consensus was that Michael Ben David's songs were the worst ones. And well, he won the selection, and a slight revamp and good camera angles and staging were not able to save them from their first NQ in years, but hey, how often does a voting audience choose correctly.

Anyways, as I mentioned earlier, the OGAE Second Chance pick was Blinded Dreamers by Eli Huli, which is this Drum And Bass pop song, although I don't think it was a very interesting one compared to other DnB songs I've listened to.

As such, my pick is Marionette by Inbal Bibi. Inbal Bibi was pretty much the overwhelming fan favourite from what I remember. Both of her songs were rated very highly by the community. Her other song is named Zaza, which is kinda interesting because it's partly in Hebrew, but the rest is in English and the lyrics are kinda trashy, at least I think. And the instrumental sounded VERY unfinished. There's one bit in the song where it's just this horn/trombone-type instrument blurting out a few notes with awkward silence between each note. I'm sure it would've been improved had it actually gone to Eurovision, but at least this version sounded very unfinished.

So my preference would be Inbal Bibi's other song, Marionette, which you could kinda describe as a nerfed Attention, as in Attention by Ulrikke (Norway 2020). It's this power ballad in F minor, although for the live performance it was pitched down to E minor, which I think kinda made it lose some of its sharpness? I don't really know how to describe it. But I think it was pretty good, and it definitely would've qualified I think. Maybe not from the death slot, but the running order would've been different anyway.

There were rumours that KAN, the Israeli broadcaster, was trying to rig it for Eli Huli, but Michael Ben David won out by just one point in Hashir Shelanu L'eurovizion, resulting in the ensuing conflict between his label and KAN which almost led to withdrawal from Eurovision 2022, but all's well that ends well. Or as well as a non-qualification can be, but the Tel Aviv gays asked for it, what can you do.

Anyways, you can see that I don't really have a wishlist for Israel in Eurovision 2023. Partly because I don't know any Israeli artists, but partly because we already have the 2023 artist. Her name is Noa Kirel. Not sure how to pronounce her surname, but some Hebrew transcriptions leave out the E, so I'm gonna assume the E isn't stressed and it's KEE-rel, not kee-REL. She's part Austrian-Jewish and Mmoroccan-Jewish, and is pretty much one of if not THE biggest pop stars in Israel right now. She's been on a lot of Eurofans' wishlists over the years, and well, she just got selected. A Eurovision artist announced in July and confirmed in August, how often do we get 'em THAT early?

Though I have to say the "selection process" was kinda funny. It's like KAN was doing a fan contest and just drew up their own list of artists without informing the artists, but instead of a fan contest, this is actual Eurovision. At first when Noa Kirel was announced, she didn't even know that she had been shortlisted to begin with. Nor did I think anyone on the shortlist know, because by their rules, if the chosen one rejects the offer, it then goes to second place, which in this case was, ironically enough, Noa Kirel's ex, a singer named Mergui, who some may recognize from the Israeli selection in 2018, and ALSO came second, but after eventual Eurovision winner Netta. But when approached for comment, Mergui said that the selection of Noa Kirel was a good one, and if it went to him then he would reject it.

Fortunately, after about a month of deliberations, Noa Kirel has announced during a press conference that she has accepted the offer to represent Israel at Eurovision 2023. And as of writing this segment, Noa's just uploaded a little clip onto the official Eurovision Instagram page telling people to wish her good luck. Her main consideration was apparently artistic freedom rather than economic concerns. And speaking of that, we can speculate a little bit on what her song for 2023 is gonna be like. She's released several hit songs, some of them in English, such as "Killer" or "Thought About That". I actually just listened to Thought About That right before writing this script, and I have to say, the song doesn't really do much to me. She's a great dancer, but the song just feels like regular old pop to me. You can listen to her other songs too, and it seems pretty clear that her main genre is dance-pop, or as Eurofan Twitter might put it, slut bops.

She's also assembling a pretty strong team for the song, as local reports have stated that her team has contacted Doron Medalie, who was one of the songwriters of Toy, which of course won Eurovision. Medalie is also reportedly in talks to join the Israeli delegation, and was previously also Noa Kirel's artistic director. So I think it's safe to say that Medalie is gonna be involved with Noa Kirel's song one way or another.

And it seems clear that Israel was PISSED at their non-qualification, and they aren't just looking to qualify next year, but also maybe go for the win. But only time will tell, of course. We can start speculating on her potential final result at Eurovision when we get closer to the event, but for now all we have is the name. No song, no nothing. I will say, this is not the most sustainable selection method - y'know, picking a big name and praying that they accept. Regardless, let's move onto our next country, which is Italy.

Italy

Selection method: Festival Della Canzone Italiana (aka (Festival Di) Sanremo)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Ciao Ciao - La Rappresentante Di Lista

My pick: Ciao Ciao - La Rappresentante Di Lista

Wishlist: LRDL?

General thoughts: with Italy, we had the very prestigious long-standing music festival named the Festival Di Sanremo, or Sanremo for short. It was actually what inspired the concept of Eurovision to begin with, and has been running continuously for over half a century.

Now, I'm not really into Italian music, so I didn't watch a whole lot of Sanremo, but there are a few names that I did pick up on, and I'll go through those in order. Not gonna talk about Tananai, Emma, Francesca or Achille lauro since I already touched on them in the iceberg video. My main focuses here are Ana Mena, La Rappresentante Di Lista, and of course the eventual winners, Mahmood and Blanco. so let's go through these one by one.

First off, Ana Mena. She's not actually Italian, but rather Spanish, from the city of Malaga. The reason she's entering Sanremo is not because she wants to represent another country in Eurovision, but rather because her following in Italy is ironically larger than that in Spain. I don't know how exactly this came about, but that's the case now and she regularly puts out music in the Italian language. Another way you can tell she's not vying to do Eurovision for Italy is her live performance. Her song this year was named "Duecentomila Ore", which means 'two hundred thousand hours'. I don't know what the song is about, but what I do know is that her live performance was DISASTROUS. I'm not sure she ever sang on key, and as such it wasn't really surprising when she ended up at the bottom of the Sanremo 2022 final scoreboard. Again, not really vying to win the festival here. If you ask me, the song isn't that good either, but it does feel kinda like stereotypical mediterranean Italian-type music, with accordions and stuff. I'm not into it, but some Eurofans love it for some reason. But yeah, the live performance was a trainwreck to put it nicely, and I think she entered Sanremo only to further promote her music to the Italian audience, and I think Amadeus (the current host/director of Sanremo) gets that, hence her inclusion and subsequent low placement also in Sanremo 2021. I'll mention her briefly again when we get to Spain, but let's just get it out of the way - she's already confirmed that she won't be entering a song into Benidorm Fest 2023.

Next, La Rappresentante Di Lista. For the most part, they are a duo made up of lead vocalist Veronica, and guitarist Dario. Their band name translates to "list representative", and it is because one of them had to stand for local elections one time I think. I believe they were also in Sanremo 2021, but it could've been 2020, I don't really remember. Obviously I don't know their previous song, and I haven't really bothered to check, but their song this time is a song named "Ciao Ciao". They say that the song is about having fun even though the world is crashing and burning, or something to that effect. It's a catchy little tune, and it's also the OGAE Italy pick for the Second Choice contest, even though in real terms they only came 7th in the final ranking. It was a favourite to win Sanremo this year actually - the pre-show listens by the media rated the song very positively - but of course we now know that they didn't even crack the top 5. It's also a huge fan favourite on Twitter. I use the present tense, because there are still a lot of people genuinely enjoying the song and tweeting about it, months after the conclusion of Sanremo. Hell, even one of my active followers has a shot from the Ciao Ciao music video as his profile picture. I do like it more than the other Sanremo songs that I've listened to, it's my pick for second chance as well, and I think it's even in my overall season top 20, but would I really call it the best song ever? Nah. Regardless, Eurofans absolutely love this song, and at least to me it looks like a favourite to win Second Chance. I reckon Ram Pam Pam from UMK also has a pretty good shot.

Finally, the eventual Sanremo 2022 winners, Mahmood and Blanco. Both massive names in Italy, which perhaps explains why Brividi is the only Eurovision 2022 song to surpass 100 MILLION streams on Spotify, though perhaps as you read this Snap might've done that as well. It's a nice little orchestral pop ballad in G major, with notable usage of strings. The weird thing about all this is that by nature, Blanco is less a singer and more a rapper. So the rap part in the second half makes a bit more sense that way, but to me it still felt really out of place. And if you're wondering, no, it's not a love song towards each other. Blanco is straight and has a girlfriend. Mahmood is gay, but apparently this song is about them separately expressing their feelings on relationships and how they work. Or something to that effect. Either way, it's not really visible in the final product in Turin. And like I said in my after-thoughts video, I suspect Blanco may have been given a direct order to "mess this up", because Rai has very much had enough of trying to host Eurovision, and despite having a winner potential song (apparently) they just wanted to throw the ball to someone else. Spain, UK, Sweden, doesn't matter, as long as it's not them. And like Alesia Michelle (or someone else, I honestly don't remember) said, the camera angles and such failed to reflect the intimacy of the song. And of course Blanco running around New York in sponsored underwear when he's supposed to be doing rehearsals doesn't really help. His stalker-like walk in the final performance has become something of a meme on Twitter now. But the funniest thing I found from their whole shabang was when Mahmood was sleep-deprived in one of the rehearsals, and had to wear Tron-like sunglasses. I was like "I will laugh my ass off if he dares to wear that in the final performance". Thankfully(?), he didn't, and looked a bit more graceful that way. Still not really sure about the rap in the middle of Brividi. It just feels like it disrupts the whole flow of the song to me. The rest is a standard ballad structure, I don't think any middle 8s were really necessary. But honestly I'm glad they didn't make the top 5, and Konstrakta did, even though ironically I placed Serbia lower in my top 40 than Italy. But still, I don't think their performance were at all deserving of a top 10 placement, never mind top 5.

On my wishlist I have LRDL. Again, I'm not into Italian music, so I don't really know any Italian artists; but LRDL does bring a much fresher and younger sound compared to a lot of the other ones. I don't know if we'll ever see the young side of Italy at Eurovision, but we can hope. With that, let's move onto our second Baltic country.

Latvia

Selection method: Supernova

OGAE Second Chance pick: Bad - Bermudu Divstūris

My pick: I'm Letting You Go - Aminata

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: With Latvia, we had the national final Supernova, which has been running continuously since 2015, except for a pause in 2021 for obvious reasons. Of course in 2015, Aminata had been very successful in Vienna with Love Injected, so it made sense for them to continue using this format.

I don't know exactly how the previous editions worked, but in 2022, basically there was a total of 17 songs. 16 of which were just selected by a jury appointed by LTV, and the last one was basically an online wildcard where people could vote online for their favourite from 10 songs that didn't make the 16-song "short"list. I don't remember anymore, but I think consensus at the time among Eurofans was that many of the songs among the 10 online vote songs were better than a lot of the actually LTV-selected 16 songs. I voted too I think, but can't for the life of me remember for which song. Either way, the wildcarding didn't stop there, because even though the online vote winner didn't qualify, apparently one of the songs had experienced technical difficulties at the performance and was given a wildcard for the final of Supernova. Supernova, more like super messy.

Anyways, there was a semi-final, and a final. At the semi-final, 10 songs would be selected out of 17 via a 50-50 jury-televote split. There were several favourites in the selection, including a kinda chill song named "Es Pabiju Tur", but I think virtually everyone recognized that it was a two-horse race.

Remember Aminata? She's back! With a dramatic ballad named "I'm Letting You Go". She had announced initially that the version uploaded to the LTV website was only a demo, and that the final performed version would be better, but in the end there wasn't really a big difference so I was rather disappointed. There's not really much to describe about the song; it's just a ballad. I liked it a lot initially, but even I, Mr. Ballad Enjoyer, think it's too dull now. Probably would not have qualified either. And I think most people agreed that this was worse than Love Injected anyway.

The other horse in the race was obviously Citi Zēni with "Eat Your Salad". It went viral on TikTok when it first came out, but obviously now the hype is all around Snap. And I think partly because of this short-lived internet hype, and partly because it stood out, it resoundingly won the national final, getting 12 points from both the jury and the televote. It went to Eurovision, with many (at one point including myself) hoping that they would qualify, but alas the death slot worked its magic and Latvia remained out of the final for another year. (Of course there was more to it than just the death slot but you get it.)

The OGAE Second Choice pick is a rather bizarre one. Instead of going for the fan favourite, or the second place in the actual national final (both of which in this case meant Aminata), OGAE Latvia opted to pick the act that came in *seventh place* in the final, which was "Bad" by Bermudu Divstūris. It's this kinda chill pop song in F minor, with the main singer and all the dancers dressed up in black tuxedos and wearing pixel sunglasses resembling those in early 2010s MLG compilations. I really do wanna know who made that decision, because 7th is a very weird position to pick. Bermudu Divstūris were neither close to winning the televote or jury vote. Maybe someone just really doesn't like Aminata? No idea.

My pick would be Aminata, for pretty obvious reasons, but like I said earlier I don't think she would've qualified either. Supernova this year was just really weak in general I think. Like Croatia and Denmark, I saw no qualifiers in here, at least not solid ones. Perhaps they should shake up their selection a little bit, and do more than just rename it. Otherwise, I'm not really sure how to turn Latvia's fortunes around at Eurovision. No names on the wishlist because I don't know any Latvian artists. I had Aminata on there briefly, but I think Latvia's had enough of Aminata for a bit frankly.

Final little fun side note about simultaneously watching several national finals: this year I was watching Alina Pash get announced as the winner of Vidbir, all while Aminata was singing I'm Letting You Go. It was a very messy experience, having to try to tune into two tracks at the same time. Let's see how chaotic it will be next February. Vidbir's in December rather than February now, but rest assured that there will still be several overlapping national finals in February. Latvia, San Marino, Estonia, Lithuania, you name it.

And speaking of Lithuania, that's our next country to talk about!

Lithuania

Selection method: Pabandom Iš Naujo (aka PIN)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Not Your Mother - Lolita Zero

My pick: Call Me From The Cold - Rūta Loop

Wishlist: Rūta Loop, Gebrasy?

General thoughts: with Lithuania, we had the national final Pabandom Iš Naujo, which in Lithuanian means "let's try again". For simplicity I'll just be calling this PIN from now on. It's been running since 2020, and clearly results wise this has been great for them. I don't know how the old Lithuanian national final worked, but I think a lot of us can agree that the Eurovision entries they produced were simply not standout enough. I haven't even rewatched every single year of the 2010s yet, but even just from 2018 and 2019 I could tell that the Lithuanian entries from this old NF were nice but not different enough to make them stand firm on their own two feet in the final. And of course I haven't watched PIN2020 or 2021 either, but whatever the process was, and like in 2022, it created a much more unique product for Lithuania at Eurovision giving them comfortable qualifications and results that made their Baltic neighbour, Latvia, jealous.

For this year in particular, there were three heats, 2 semi-finals, and a final. I honestly can't remember most of the songs in the NF anymore, so I'd say the format is still a little too convoluted. But you can really tell that the Lithuanian broadcaster is really trying now. The stage for PIN looks super cool, and the staging while simple was quite appropriate for most songs.

In terms of the non-finalist songs, I don't think there's really much to talk about except two of them. Moosu X's "Love That Hurts" was a big fan favourite before the live shows, but it appears the live performance just kinda fell apart. I honestly don't remember what it looks like now, but I remember not being entirely convinced with the song either, so whatever. No harm done for me. The other act to talk about is "Back To Myself" by Erica Jennings. A very English-sounding name, and apparently she's an Irish singer who works in Lithuania now, which is quite interesting. I think she was involved with Eurovision in the 2000s as well somehow? Not sure in what way, but you can tell she's not exactly young by her PIN2022 performance. Somewhat MILFy if you really wanna put it like that. Her dress showed a LOT of boob and it genuinely looked like it was gonna pop out at any moment. Oh and the song had this really weird key change sequence. But all jokes aside it stayed in the semis, so who cares.

Right, onto the finalists. Some of them I genuinely don't remember very well, so I'll skip them. But I'll go from bottom to top, intentionally avoiding the main topic I wanna talk about for now. Oh, and tiebreakers are determined by whoever gets the higher jury score.

In last place we had "Washing Machine" by Queens Of Roses. Not much to say except it's a disaster bop to the T. It apparently also got a revamp between the semi and the final or something like that? Can't remember exactly, but yeah from what I remember the performance was rather lacklustre.

In second to last we had Ieva Zasimauskaitė with "I'll Be There". You read that right, the very same Ieva Zasimauskaitė that represented Lithuania in Eurovision 2018 and got 12th place. Having only recently watched the first semi-final of Eurovision 2018, I'd say that I'll Be There is pretty similar to When We're Old. Ballads in major key involving a piano somewhere, though if I remember correctly the piano was ditched in the final performance of I'll Be There. The song was also pitched either down or up. It was Bb major before, but I think it was performed in C major at the end? Can't remember. Anyways, people were really hyped about Ieva returning to the Lithuanian NF, Eurovisionfun included who had apparently gotten to listen to I'll Be There before everyone else and said that it was better than When We're Old. I was kinda hyped too, but at that point I had not heard of her 2018 song. So when this came out I was kinda disappointed. Didn't really like When We're Old either to be honest. Maybe it's the major key. I don't know. Anyways, it appears she didn't do so well. I guess the Lithuanian public does not treat their returnees very nicely. I have no real opinion one way or the other.

I literally do not remember how "How To Get My Life Back" by Justė Kraujelytė goes, so I'm just gonna skip this one. Apparently on my initial listen I said that it was a "boring and formulaic ballad", so make of that what you will.

Next up is Gebrasy with "Into Your Arms". I think this was some people's favourite. It's special because Gebrasy actually came second in PIN2021 after The Roop. (Though it has to be noted that The Roop won the televote with a MASSIVE margin. Like 78% or something IIRC?) I don't know exactly how Gebrasy's 2021 and 2022 songs were compared, but I did hear that genre-wise they were different. I thought it was kinda cool, but in hindsight I don't think it would've done anywhere near as well as Sentimentai did. The song features some falsetto in the chorus, and I suppose my search for a male singer with a good falsetto continues. (This includes Sam Ryder.) But the song was cool, even though the execution was lacklustre.

Skipping the next one for...reasons, let's move into 3rd place (or technically a tied 2nd place but this act got fewer jury points), as well as the OGAE Second Chance choice, which is "Not Your Mother" by Lolita Zero. Just parroting what I said in my Twitter review thread of OGAE Second Chance, I don't remember much of the song. I clearly remember the aesthetic, and it was very white. The instrumental of the song was rather...disconcerting, let's say? At least from what I remember anyway. Since the singer is a drag queen, her somewhat deep voice combined with the sharp shrill synths created an interesting contrast, although in this case I think it kinda put me off the whole thing. Others love it. So not exactly my cup of tea, but you know, each to their own.

Now, the actual second place, or at least the second place that got a higher jury score, was "Before You're 6ft Under" by Augustė Vedrickaitė. I don't remember much now other than the title being sung, but in my initial review I described it as "edgy girl pop rock". I didn't and still don't really like that genre, but in the review I did note that the singer had a good voice. Otherwise, I can't remember a damn thing from it, and it does rather puzzle me on how it came second.

And then of course we had the winner, Monika Liu with "Sentimentai". I think there were several signs that she was gonna win PIN; the odds were EXTREMELY in favour of her, and while I think the splits weren't revealed until after the show, Monika had achieved the highest score possible in first her heat, then her semi-final, and then her final - getting a perfect 24 every time, with 12 both from the jury and the televote. And if you think about it, it's actually quite amazing that amongst 9 other songs in English, the ONE song that won the selection was in the Lithuanian language. Finland could never. Anyways, even without checking official records, Sentimentai is probably now the most-streamed Lithuanian-language song ever on Spotify. Love that for ar Monika. I think one thing that aided her in PIN, and later at Eurovision, was just how much of a standout she was, both as a personality and with the song. It's fun, it's light, it's mischievous even. There's really nothing quite like it, and I absolutely LOVE that she got televote top 5 in SF1, only coming one point behind Sub "televote magnet" Woolfer. But yeah, Sentimentai was excellent in hindsight, and I do wonder what turned me off from it initially. But it's great now, absolutely.

Now, you'll obviously notice by this point that I had skipped a song, even going so far as to not mention it. That's because this song is my favourite from PIN2022, and the only one to make it into my season overall top 20. It is "Call Me From The Cold" by Rūta Loop. She's no stranger to Eurovision, because in 2015 she had travelled to Vienna alongside Monika Linkytė and Vaidas Baumila to sing as a backing vocalist. Then she entered a song into PIN2020 named "We Came From The Sun", which our local Eurofan from Lithuania and also my oomf that I don't follow, Svai, says is her favourite entry from Rūta Loop. I promised her I'd listen to WCFTS at some point, and I have still yet to do it. Svai, if you're reading this for whatever reason, I'll get to it at some point when I remember.

In January this year, Rūta Loop did an interview with Eurovisionfun. And speaking there, she said that WCFTS was kinda the first time that she'd really discovered her style, while with CMFTC it was actually a somewhat spontaneous decision to enter PIN because she felt that the song had something special to it. She also said that her favourite in PIN this year was, hey-ho, Monika Liu.

Onto my rating of the song. Honestly, while I love the song, I do feel like something is missing. I saw a British Eurofan YouTuber named Luke react to it, and he said the song takes too long to build up, and I think I'd agree with that. But otherwise, I really liked the vibe of the song. And the performance! Oh my gosh. She sings very well live, and she is one HELL of a performer. Someone tweeted during the show: "it's giving Euphoria", and I can see it. She's amazing at finding the right gestures and such to compliment the vibe of the song. At one point she gets onto this platform which spins around, which she used to have to spin by herself in the semi-final and I think the heat as well, but it was motorized in the final. It looks better on camera than I just described, because the whole stage is covered in smoke, creating a very mystical feeling akin to Saudade Saudade in Turin.

After each song, or maybe just after all the songs are performed, the jury panel gives their comments on the songs. Of course it's in Lithuanian, but thankfully Svai has translated them. Vaidotas, the lead singer of The Roop, noted: "Rūta's performance was the most completely finished out performance and she's the owner of the most unique vocal timbre, she has a velvety voice" and that is absolutely true. A silky smooth voice that melds well with the song, and her stage presence is very much felt as well.

To me, the standard of Eurovision is now really high, and across this Eurovision season I have found very few artists that I think can live up to this standard and take the trophy. Finland has a few good names I reckon, and I think, given the right song, Rūta Loop can be one of these artists. She comes up with the right song, and it's over for everyone else. See you guys in Vilnius or Kaunas next year. A Lithuanian-Scottish Eurofan named Chrysalis wrote on Twitter that this year feels like Rūta Loop's "Loreen 2011 Melfest moment" and that she is "pure talent". Nothing but agreement there. Watch out for her.

A while back Svai made a tweet half-mocking me thinking that "a random backing vocalist" can win Eurovision. Well, just wait and see I think. I don't know if it's necessarily gonna be 2023, but she is COMING.

Right, moving on to one of the big disasters of the season.

Malta

Selection method: Malta Eurovision Song Contest (aka MESC)

OGAE Second Chance pick: BOY - Denise

My pick: Ritmu - Aidan

Wishlist: ...maybe go back to X Factor?

General thoughts: with Malta this year, we had Malta Eurovision Song Contest, or MESC for short. The format had been used between 2011 and 2018, after which they turned to selecting names from X Factor Malta for two years, giving us Michela and Destiny. I'm not entirely sure why they stopped doing that. We could tell with Michela and Destiny that Malta's results were on the up - even going so far as becoming a winner alert ahead of the show in Rotterdam. Either way, this year saw the return of MESC, perhaps for the ad revenue. Maltese television is NOTORIOUS for having a crazy amount of ads, and I certainly felt that when watching MESC back in February.

I don't know necessarily how the format has changed since 2018, but this MESC was nonetheless wacky. The semi-final had 22 songs, but instead of separating them into two groups and having about half qualify or something, they just put them all together, and had *17* qualifiers, one of which was a wildcard. If you're gonna have 77% of the total songs qualify to the final, ...why setup a qualifier round to begin with? (Oh. Ad revenue. Right.) And in the final, there were six jury members who could each give 12, 10, 8 points, and then the televote only had the weighting of one juror. So it was effectively the jury's game. Even more puzzling was when TVM decided that they would divvy up the 58 points in the televote, and apply them proportionally. As a result, 9 out of 17 of the acts got an entire *1* point in the televote, while Aidan, the runner-up, got 12, and Emma Muscat, the winner, got 20. I have no idea why they went for this system, but hey-ho. Maybe it's always been like this, I wouldn't know.

Right, onto the songs. One thing that was particularly noted this year about the songs were the rather strange lyrics in some of them; nothing vulgar or anything, just plain-old nonsensical. Robyn Gallagher from Wiwibloggs wrote a nice article counting just 9 of such occurrences here: https://wiwibloggs.com/2022/01/18/9-memorable-lyrics-from-the-malta-eurovision-song-contest-2022/268601/

Now, I don't really remember most of the songs, but it was funny to see that there were 5 songs, including his own, that were co-written by Aidan; and that there were also 5 songs co-written by a certain Cyprian Cassar. There's quite a few songs there, so I'm not gonna go through every one of them, but our attention for now is particularly drawn to six of the songs, which I'll talk about one by one in ascending order of ranking.

The lowest-placing one is "Electric Indigo" by Baklava ft. Nicole. When it came out, or at least its initial snippet, people were very interested because the song featured a violin in the main melody, which is relatively rare in modern pop music. But once we got the full thing, the song kinda petered out, and I don't even remember the performance. So it was rather a flop.

Next, we have "Come Around" by Matt Blxck. Intentional misspelling of his surname aside, the song was...interesting to say the least. His laugh at the beginning of the song went around Eurofan Twitter for weeks and figuratively scarred Eurofans. I don't actually remember much of the song, I don't think I even watched the performance to be honest, But it certainly stood out from the pack, that's for sure.

After that, we have "Boy" by Denise. This is the OGAE Malta pick for Second Chance, which is rather confusing. Not only did they not choose Ritmu by Aidan, who as the runner-up had practically showed up at more pre-parties than the actual MESC winner, but they picked a song that was written by, wait for it, Aidan. I don't remember the performance though. I'd check it out again but I can't bear to read the cringey Youtube video titles again.

Then we had "Into The Fire" by Nicole Azzopardi. Again, I don't remember the song or performance. But it turns out she represented Malta at Junior Eurovision in 2010 in Minsk, where she came, uh, 2nd to last, but she managed to get 3rd place in this selection. Maybe in the near future we'll get another Maltese JESC representative sing at adult Eurovision, after the footsteps of Destiny.

Finally getting into the 2 songs anyone actually cares about: our first one is "Ritmu" by Aidan. As you may imagine, Ritmu means "rhythm" in Maltese. And indeed the song is fully in Maltese. Many Eurofans wanted him to go to Eurovision, after he released a Maltese-language single named "Nahseb Fik" in the summer. And both in the music video and performance, he had this kinda cowboy aesthetic. A lot of people liked this song, but I think retrospectively this probably wouldn't have qualified either. It's cheap pop, with a not particularly impressive performance, packaged in the Maltese language to bait native language advocating Eurofans. Even with Nahseb Fik there were allegations of plagiarism. He's my pick for Second Chance, but like with Dora I didn't see a single qualifier in the selection.

And the final song to be discussed is of course the winner of the selection, which was "Out Of Sight" by Emma Muscat. She's quite the hot shot in Malta, and is also relatively well-known in their neighbouring Italy. The song itself I don't particularly care about, but of course as we now know she didn't go to Turin with Out Of Sight. This isn't really the first time TVM has done this; I believe this was done in 2016 with Ira Losco as well, but I wouldn't know, I wasn't in the community at that time. Either way, after being considered a candidate for victory in Rotterdam, Malta crashed out in the semi-finals in Turin in a tragic fashion, with staging being compared to that of Australia at Junior Eurovision. I will say I dislike IAWIA more than OOS. This type of "trite message" song, as Alesia Michelle puts it, is utterly unbearable to me. It's such a shame too, because she has some great songs in her self-written discography, but decided to accept a literal Melfest reject for Eurovision. There had been rumours going around that Boris Milanov (songwriter of Violent Thing, Tears Getting Sober, All Of My Love, Bones, Beautiful Mess, etc) would be responsible for Emma's new song, but of course that didn't come to be, and I think given Milanov's 2020 efforts, it probably would've been WAY better than IAWIA. Though I think she has said that she might enter Sanremo one day, so let's see what happens there. Either way, back to MESC. She won both the televote and the jury vote. Televote because, like I mentioned earlier, she's pretty damn popular in Malta; and jury vote possibly also due to popularity, but possibly also due to TVM just wanting to make a quick buck by bombarding viewers with ads during the show and just rig the show for whoever they want. A televised internal selection, if you will.

I don't really have a wishlist. Not even Aidan, because he is but an overhyped writer of cheap, possibly-plagiarized pop, but maybe they can go back to X Factor. That clearly produced better results for them. Let's see what happens for them, but my instincts are telling me they aren't having their first victory any time soon. Let's move on now, to our first non-ESC2022 country in this post.

Monaco

Selection method: internal (read: steal some artist from France)

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: just return pls

General thoughts: Now, obviously Monaco isn't doing Eurovision 2023. There were speculations that they would, when Monegasque media outlets reported that 100,000 euros were allocated to participation of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023. In addition, a new Monegasque public broadcaster is set to be opened by the Monegasque government, named Monte Carlo Riviera TV, replacing the previous broadcaster Tele Monte Carlo, which has now been subsumed by a private French broadcaster. Originally MCRTV (I'm calling it that for now) was set to launch in 2023, however there are now delays which means that the new Monegasque public broadcaster is no longer able to launch in time for Eurovision 2023. But apparently Prince Albert of Monaco is interested in Eurovision (according to the same media outlets), so the new broadcaster will seek to join the EBU and subsequently take part in Eurovision on behalf of Monaco, marking a return of the principality to the contest for the first time since 2006. Such a return would most likely take place in 2024.

Some Eurovision news site had apparently reported that there is a Monegasque artist who was actually born in Glasgow, so if the host city is eventually revealed to be Glasgow then that artist would be nothing short of fitting; but if we go by Monaco's precedent in artist selection, what they'd most likely do is steal some artist from France. Hell, even the singer with which they won in 1971 came from France and had barely even visited Monte Carlo. But it would be cool to see them invent their own UVPSM, however unlikely it may be. Regardless, it would just be cool to see Monaco return to Eurovision, so that San Marino doesn't continue to be the sole active microstate in the contest, since Andorra is out for the near future. We might even get Scotland to debut alongside the return of Monaco, but of course only time will tell. I've never myself seen an actual Monesgasque entry in the contest (since I obviously only started watching in 2021), so I'm excited to see where Monte Carlo Riviera takes Monaco. Plus it would probably mean an extra 12 points to France which they certainly won't mind. But again let's just see what happens. Returning to ESC2022 now.

Netherlands

Selection method: internal

OGAE Second Chance pick: N/A

My pick: N/A

Wishlist: Froukje...

General thoughts: With the Netherlands, we had the usual internal selection. I'm not exactly sure when the last time they had a national final was, but I would guess that they've gone internal since Anouk, since that was more or less their popping off era. Their internal selection in principle works much the same as that of say Greece or Armenia, in that there is a committee that will review songs and proposals, though I would say AVROTROS probably prioritizes the song more than the general package, at least in early stages.

For the Netherlands, the process is rather secretive, although aside from S10 we do know about two other names, which are Maan and Lakshmi. Now I don't know whether the latter actually submitted a song at all, but I saw on Twitter that Dutch Eurofans were mentioning her as a rumoured name, so let's go with it.

Maan, on the other hand, we do know that she submitted a song to the AVROTROS committee, because there were rumours of S10 and Maan feuding before S10 came out victorious in the selection. I talked about it a bit in the iceberg video, but truth be told I'm not super in on the situation so if you're Dutch and you know a bit more about the situation other than them throwing insults at one another, do get in touch.

And that's really all there is to it with the Netherlands. I put Froukje in the wishlist, not because I've actually heard her music (because I haven't), but because she's a good friend of S10 and is also a Dutch-language artist. However, in a recent interview that she did alongside S10, she said that she was not ready for Eurovision. So we can cross her off the list for 2023 at the very least.

In the meantime, Cornald Maas (a member of the selection committee) has said recently that they hope to elect the new Dutch representative for 2023 during November. Let's see how that goes, and whether they will continue with this unique linguistic streak. In any case, I think the Netherlands are gonna give us something good and authentic for next year, as they have done now for many years. For now, let's move on to a country that I think might actually see some sort of glow-up for 2023.

North Macedonia

Selection method: За Евросонг (Za Evrosong)

OGAE Second Chance pick: Superman - Viktor Apostolovski

My pick: Flower Of Sorrow - Lara Ivanova

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: with North Macedonia, we had the selection named Za Evrosong, which translates to "For Eurovision". (North Macedonia and apparently some other Balkan countries like to refer to Eurovision in their native language as some variant of Eurosong.)

Quite the disaster national final if you ask me. With the Czech Republic and Finland, we had quality over quantity. With Romania and Serbia, we had quantity over quality. With North Macedonia, we had neither quality nor quantity. 6 songs I think it was, and frankly even my winner of it was a snoozefest to put it lightly. I can't remember half the songs (quite literally), so let's look at the remaining half, which is to say 3 songs.

First off, Superman by Viktor Apostolovski. This was kinda the meme of the season. It's the OGAE North Macedonia pick for Second Chance, I speculate possibly because it was the loser in the winner tiebreaker. (By the way, show hosts, THANK YOU for deciding that the jury vote prevailed over the online vote.) I'd describe Superman as something like a watered-down Gangnam Style, with none of the catchy dancing. This won the online vote by a MILE, but there are accusations of bots being used both by Viktor and also by some other contestant whose song and name I can't remember. Thankfully, this didn't get as high of a jury score (which I believe was entirely an international jury involving the likes of Felix Bergsson, the Icelandic head of delegation), and in what felt like a snap decision, the hosts decided that the song that got the higher jury score would be the winner of the national final, which was obviously Circles by Andrea.

Quick tangent to describe the format of the national final: this, like ESCZ, did not involve any live performances. Essentially the singers just stood in front of a camera at weirdly close proximity, and then would lipsync their song and do what few poses they find appropriate at the time. No dancers, not even live vocals, no nothing. And when Andrea had been announced the winner, she essentially lipsynced it again in the little hall they used for the results announcement as a kind of "winner's reprise". Fortunately it turns out Andrea does have good live vocals, saving them from a last-place non-qualification, but I don't know if they'll be as lucky next time.

Next song is my pick for second chance, which would be Flower Of Sorrow by Lara Ivanova. Lara had been rumoured for the selection for some time actually, and of course we were delighted to see that she actually did get on the shortlist. However, her song was a letdown. Weird lyrics (I mean, what does "love has a terrible, terrible sound" even mean?), and the English lyrics felt very much forced and rigid, not to mention the outdated ballad structures with nothing in the middle to at least make it a little bit less monotonous. Shortly before the conclusion of the selection, she released a Macedonian-language version, and I feel like it was better though I wonder if that's because I don't know what the lyrics mean this time. I originally had Lara Ivanova on my wishlist, although if she can't return with anything better than this, it's probably better just not to bother.

The final song is of course the winner of the selection, Circles by Andrea. I've talked about my thoughts on this in detail on Twitter, but the long and short of it is that I'm not very interested in it. There are stans for the song, sure, but I don't really get the appeal, much less how it managed to get 11th in semi-final 2. It's super flat to me, and just doesn't feel very special to me. I have nothing to say about it because it's so repetitive and boring. I do of course prefer it to Superman, but this selection might've been the actual worst one this season, at least in my eyes. Denmark or Malta are probably close seconds. And I'm glad that at least so far nothing too bad has happened to Andrea regarding the flag throwing incident, or at least that we as outsiders know of. I don't get this kind of vitriol over alleged mistreatment of a flag. She wasn't stomping on it or anything, just passing it to someone else so she could take photos without holding it. But I suppose due to my personal circumstances I will never understand nationalism. But I digress.

Anyways, the reason I mentioned that North Macedonia might get a bit of a glow-up next year is because Meri Popova, the Macedonian head of delegation, recently produced a report detailing how to improve North Macedonia's results at the contest. This included such things as increasing funding, and starting preparations earlier than usual. The report was unanimously accepted by MRT, the broadcaster, though of course whether it will be set into action is yet to be seen. And even after the publication of this detailed report, there were comments within MRT that the report "didn't go far enough". So it appears there might be a real interest from MRT to really get a grip and take the contest more seriously. And if all these proposals are implemented, we could be seeing more sophisticated staging from North Macedonia, an earlier selection leading to a more fleshed-out staging plan, and more adventurous song choices beyond the basic pop song or ballad. And perhaps this is wishful thinking, but if they hit the right notes (no pun intended) then we could see a repeat of 2019 for them, where North Macedonia cracks the top 10 and becomes the best-ranked Balkan nation of the year. I don't think they want to win necessarily, because let's face it, North Macedonia isn't exactly the richest place in the world, but I do think that there is an aspiration within the Macedonian delegation to actually do well now. Only time will tell of course whether this effort pays off, but it sure did for Spain. Let's see what happens, and in the meantime, let's move on to the other ESC2022 country that starts with "Nor".

Norway

Selection method: Melodi Grand Prix

OGAE Second Chance pick: Someone - NorthKid

My pick: Death Of Us - Elsie Bay

Wishlist: Elsie Bay (either as songwriter or singer), Ulrikke?

General thoughts: with Norway, we had the usual national final Melodi Grand Prix, which, like I mentioned in the Denmark segment, was started in 1960, making it one of the oldest still-running Eurovision national finals. This year, like many of the previous years, we had a handful of automatic qualifiers, 4 semi-finals, and a wildcard round akin to Andra Chansen (or what they now call it, semi-final) in Melodifestivalen. Most importantly, this year, and for a few years running now, there was no jury vote. This is what I think is one of the biggest problems with MGP, but I'll get back onto this issue later. There are also duels in MGP, which I suspect is more or less just there to build tension and raise TV ratings.

For now, let's go through the songs that I can remember. Starting with a song that didn't make it out of its semi-final: Kvelertak by Daniel Lukas. This was one of only two (among 21) songs at MGP this year that were in the Norwegian language. At least with Eesti Laul, ERR pretended to care about their native language by selecting English and Estonian songs in a 1:1 ratio (i.e. 20 songs in Estonian and 20 in English) even though only 2 Estonian songs made it to the final and the entire superfinal was composed of English songs. NRK outright just didn't even select very many Norwegian-language songs at all. One could argue that it's about song quality above all, and perhaps they didn't receive too many good Norwegian-language proposals, and despite the Twitter Eurofans' creaming language really doesn't matter that much in terms of Eurovision results, it still would have been nice to see more Norwegian language (or even Sámi à la KEiiNO) representation at MGP. Though of course one could argue that NRK aren't doing enough to promote the composition of more native language tracks, but perhaps that was never their aim to begin with. But I'm getting slightly off track here.

Kvelertak. I can't remember the other Norwegian-language song, so this is the one I'll review because it probably is the more memorable one. Daniel and his two dancers were dressed in these kinda purple dress suits, and the whole staging was very purple as well. The track itself was just regular dance-ish pop, and as far as I'm concerned the lyrics didn't really mean a whole lot. I remember a certain Northern Irish Unionist Eurofan who inexplicably got official Eurovision accreditation was obsessed with the song and was (and possibly still is) playing it over and over. I don't really see what's so special about it, but at least it doesn't include explicitly religious theming I guess. The performance was fine, but the choreography felt very rigid and forced. Do I think it should've gone to the final? No, but to be fair I think 4/5 of the auto-qualifiers didn't deserve to go to the final anyway. For a country with such a cool music scene MGP was hilariously weak.

But speaking of the auto-qualifiers, one of them was Queen Bees by Anna-Lisa Kumoji. Unsurprisingly, she and her dancers were dressed in bee outfits for the performance. It can really only be described as aggressively camp, but honestly I thought the song was pretty cool. Especially the bit at the end where the song sped up after a brief pause. Doesn't make great pop but it makes great camp. I have ZERO idea how it had been classified as an auto-qualifier to begin with but the inner machinations of Stig Karlsen's mind are an enigma. But if nothing else at least I remember the song and performance, almost 7 months on from the NF.

I'll get to the songs in the final in a bit, but a special shoutout to one more song that didn't make it to the final: Ecstasy by Eline Noelia. For what it's worth, it was rather different from what we're used to in MGP. Not necessarily genre-wise - it's just pop - but the vocal range on her. There's a G6 in the chorus, and at the final refrain she belts a long G6 which even goes up to Ab6 for a little bit. PERFECTLY as well. There was no sign of fatigue or shortness of breath. There's also a bit where she sings "I can make you" and then what sounds like a retuned train horn comes in and then her and her dancers lean back a bit. Very unique experience to be sure. Apparently Eline has received very good feedback on Ecstasy and another new single that she released recently, and I think I read somewhere that she's considering to return to MGP? No idea. But to think that Ecstasy was her debut single! A shame she didn't qualify, but to be fair the song that beat her was quite nice as well, at least I think.

Right, onto the songs in the final. I'm not gonna go through every single song, but it's probably worth noting that Give That Wolf A Banana was my 40th of the year, and yet in MGP it was only 3rd to last. This goes to show how much disdain I have for some of these MGP songs. FYI, those two bottom 2 songs are Black Flower and Wonder Of The World. I'm not even gonna mention them beyond naming them.

So, quick little thing on GTWAB while we're here then. I've already made clear my apparent dislike of the song on here, so I won't bother you with that anymore, especially if you do like the song. But I will say this: resuming a point from the France segment, the biggest reason I think that this won MGP and not some other song is genre standout. Not necessarily at Eurovision - after all NF voters wouldn't know the full roster of the songs that the winner would be going up against - but more so just within the context and confines of the national final. Whether it works out at Eurovision is another question entirely; voters just noticed this song right off the bat, and voted for it because it stood out amongst a sea of ballads and cheap pop songs. So yes, sometimes national final voters do make questionable decisions, but I think it's best to look at it from a purely national final point of view, rather than trusting locals to actually know what is competitive at Eurovision and what isn't. Right, that's enough of a thought that I've given to the wretched song for the whole month. Moving on to some better songs.

Although the bar is dead low, because the next song I wanna talk about is Someone by NorthKid, which happens to be the OGAE Second Chance pick. Oh my god. Could you get more "atrocious boyband" than this? I'm not sure it's possible. The lyrics are so incredibly basic - "I was someone you loved / but now I'm someone you hate" is possibly the single worst line that I've seen come out of this entire season, and believe me there were a lot of shallow songs. Supporters of the song might then butt in: "if it's so bad, then how did it make the superfinal?".

How? Because MGP is a 100% televote national final, and I firmly believe that this is one of NRK's biggest mistakes when setting up the pre-selection. With a televote-heavy or televote-exclusive national final, the show effectively becomes a popularity and PR contest. Pour money into advertising and PR, and/or be a domestically renowned name, and you win. We saw this with Alexander Rybak in 2018, we saw this with TIX in 2021. And now we've seen it with both superfinalists of MGP 2022. Both Subwoolfer and NorthKid put massive amounts of effort into their PR campaign, but not their song. "Someone" is an incredibly cliche and outdated track, but because of a carefully constructed music video, massive amounts of promotion and apparently the north of Norway being very united in voting for themselves, it was them who became one of the two superfinalists, instead of big fan favourite Elsie Bay. But I'll get onto Elsie Bay later. Point being, if you make a national final 100% televote (or even just 75% in the case of UMK), it just becomes a popularity contest and any notion of judging songs by their objective quality and/or name-unrelated mass appeal is just totally lost.

Next up, Hammer Of Thor by Oda Gondrosen. (And incidentally, also by Elsie Bay.) It's a REALLY unique song for MGP, because it employs Norse themes, both in the lyrics and instrumental. Unfortunately, the lyrics are pretty nonsensical. Literally three-fourths of the chorus contains the exact line "I stole the hammer of Thor". Over and over. I suppose if you really read deep into it, you can probably say that it's a song about female empowerment? No idea. But I will say that the aesthetic of the performance was cool as hell. (I also saw this meme of Elsie Bay herself holding a Thor hammer, which was quite funny.) But yeah, at least points for uniqueness there, and if it were up to me then I would've had this song in the top 4.

After that, Made Of Glass by Sofie Fjellvang. Not really much to say about this - it's a standard ballad, with glass boards next to her as she sang. The only thing I remember from it is the line "you said, it would never be over" because that was the part that was repeatedly played in recaps and such. It's fine, but fine is more than enough for this NF, which is why it's my 3rd place.

And my runner-up for MGP 2022 is Dangerous by Farida. A REALLY cool performance, featuring a burning piano, a two-sided suit jacket, among other things. If I'm being honest, the song isn't anything groundbreaking either, but I think I like it more than Made Of Glass because MOG was in C major, while Dangerous was in G minor, and I generally tend towards songs in minor key. Plus Farida is super cool on social media and such. So I like this one. Unfortunately for me and other likers of Dangerous, Farida will not be returning to MGP for 2023 as confirmed by herself on Twitter, but she says that, and I quote, "it will be worth it". I sure hope so.

Finally, my winner of MGP 2022, and also my winner for the entire season. Death Of Us, by Elsie Bay. Oh man. Where do I start with this. Actually I won't. I've talked about how much I like the song at length on Twitter, but to sum it up: I love songs with sophisticated lyrics, and I love orchestral ballads. Death Of Us is an orchestral ballad whose lyrics are literal POETRY. "Now I cannot listen to your heart because I'm afraid it'll stop". COME ON. THAT'S SO GOOD. And that's just ONE line in the song. Even many other commentators said that this could have won Eurovision, and I strongly agree. Problem of course being the staging. Honestly for what it's worth Elsie's vocals held up to the song pretty well, so that's far from my biggest concern. My concern is that they had literal musical gold on their hands but didn't know how to stage it. The "preview" performance staging was frankly terrible; but after Twitter Eurofans gave some ideas, Elsie and her team took some of them in, and the final performance looked MUCH better. Certainly worthy of the superfinal at least, but again MGP is a popularity contest, and no one knows Elsie Bay. In the final we saw dancers pretending to play the violin, a mic stand which allowed Elsie to make more drastic movements with her arms, a bit of pyro too I think, and even a cape which I'll be honest was probably unnecessary. But again, certainly a much more convincing performance than the one she did for the preview at the semi-final. Fix up the camera angles and honestly we could've had something fighting for the win in Turin, or at least become one of the 400-pointers. But performance aside, the song is amazing. It's far from your standard ballad - a bit more indie I would say - yet it's still entirely coherent and mainstream. I'm not a streaming person to be honest, but I absolutely adore this song and I do listen to it from time to time.

As per usual, we're getting rumours that Stig Karlsen wants to reform MGP. But like I wrote in the What We Know So Far blog post, there's already a bunch of songwriting camps that happened over the summer for MGP. Good news: Elsie Bay was there, so she might return to MGP. Bad news: the very fact that the songwriting camps happened at all means that the songs that come out of it are likely to be inauthentic. It would be lovely if they added a 50% jury, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it, and certainly not for the superfinal - after all, they need to make TV money from this and get their ratings up! How would you do that without a televote-only elimination round, right? (Sarcasm, obviously.) But still, the point is I don't think anyone should be waiting with baited breath for anything massive happening to MGP in 2023.

With that, let's move to the most last-minute national final of the season, and also the one with by far the longest name.

Poland

Selection method: Tu bije serce Europy! Wybieramy hity na Eurowizję

OGAE Second Chance pick: Lovesick - Kuba Szmajkowski

My pick: Paranoia - Daria

Wishlist: maybe someone from JESC?

General thoughts: with Poland this year, we had the national final named "Tu bije serce Europy! Wybieramy hity na Eurowizję", which translates to "The heart of Europe beats here! We choose hits for Eurovision". It's possibly the longest national final name ever, but beyond that, this NF really wasn't all that special to me. I'll go through a few songs but I didn't really even watch the show to be quite honest with you.

The first one is "Głośniej niż decybele" by Unmute, which translates to "Louder than decibels". Initially there were people talking about this song, because it's performed only in sign language with a backing track(??) by deaf people. But the backing track was kinda disappointing to me and wasn't really a genre that I fancied much. So it was a flop, at least to me. Nonetheless, it made the top 3.

The second one is "Lovesick" by Kuba Szmajkowski, which is the OGAE Second Chance pick. It's a rather bizarre pick, considering there was another major fan favourite that actually landed second, and this didn't even make the top 3. In fact, it was 4th. It's made even more puzzling by the fact that according to the Wikipedia article on the NF, OGAE Poland also voted Lovesick as their fourth favourite. So no idea what's going on there, but regardless, it's an English-language pop song with Eastern Europe-typical bass. All I remember from the song are two things: 1. In the studio cut, he mispronounces "lovesick", as in when the song goes "lo-lo-lo, lo-lo-lo-lo-lovesick", he pronounces the initial "lo"s more like the English word "law". Luckily he fixed that in the live performance and it became more like a "la" (which is still not correct, but let's give him a break). The second thing is him leaning back while singing in the live performance, with some red lighting. That's all I remember. Fairly certain this wouldn't have qualified, if River was such a fan favourite and couldn't even pull top 10.

And the third one is "Paranoia" by Daria, which is yet another pop song with Eastern Europe-typical bass. Or I suppose Eastern house might be a better way to describe the genre, I'm no expert at these things. Daria is a pretty big name in Poland so there was a lot of hype around this song, but according to some stuff I saw on Twitter (can't find the exact tweet now), allegedly the entire reason TBSEWHNE was set up at all was that TVP people had initially already internally selected Paranoia, but then saw Daria's live vocals and then decided to hold the NF, which she of course lost. For what it's worth, and from what little I can remember, her live vocals weren't terrible. Especially since the song wasn't very vocally challenging, where the highest note was like A5 and most of the main melody hovered around B4 and E5. Regardless this was still a fan favourite on Twitter. I'm not really the biggest fan, but the rest of the songs aren't really much better if at all, so there we go. That's my pick for Second Chance.

There was also some drama around "Why Does It Hurt" by Lidia Kopania, where allegedly she sang very poorly and even misremembered some of the lyrics causing the songwriters to lash out at her on Facebook, but believe it or not I've never actually listened to the song or watched the performance. Or maybe I have, but then cringed so hard that I forgot about it. I don't know. But it's not really something that I can remember, so no comment.

Apparently there was also some hype around a certain song named "Czysta Woda", and according to my tweets, I was confused at the song. I can't remember what it sounds like now, but some Twitter Eurofans were raving about it.

Anyways, that's Poland. Apparently next year they're going back to Krajowe Eliminacje. I guess we'll see what happens.

Portugal

Selection method: Festival Da Canção

OGAE Second Chance pick: Ainda Nos Temos - SYRO

My pick: Ainda Nos Temos - SYRO / Why - Aurea

Wishlist: none

General thoughts: with Portugal, we had the usual and prestigious Festival Da Canção as the national final. It started in 1964, so along with DMGP, MGP and Sanremo, it is one of the oldest continuous national finals. The format is rather simple; 20 artists take part in two semi-finals, where both the public and the jury get to vote, giving us 10 songs in the final. I will say, the show goes on for REALLY long. Like this year, it took place on the same day as Songvakeppnin and Melodifestivalen, and it continued for many more hours after the other two had concluded and we had gotten Systur (then known as Sigga, Beta og Elin) and Cornelia Jakobs.

In terms of the songs, again I can't really say all that much because I didn't really watch most of it aside from my favourites, but I will point out a few here. Actually, I will point out now that Saudade Saudade was not actually one of my favourites. I saw that it did well in streaming and such, but I was initially kinda confused by the song. Eventually of course it grew on me, and is currently 3rd in my post-show 2022 ranking. But back to FdC.

Also another thing I should mention is that the vast majority of the songs this year were solely in Portuguese. In fact, Saudade Saudade, despite having a Portuguese title, might be one of the only English songs. I think there was this other song called Calisun which was a kinda rap-type thing? Can't remember exactly now, but another song I wanted to talk about is "Ginger Ale" by Diana Castro. Like I wrote earlier, the vast majority of the songs were in Portuguese, and this was no exception, despite the title. In fact, "ginger ale" were probably the only two words in the whole song that were not in Portuguese. But I think the song is fine. Chill vibes, but sadly doesn't stand out too much, at least I think. Not my favourite, but it was nice. And also nice that she got to be one of the backing vocalists for Maro in Turin.

The second song is "Mar No Fim" by Blacci. This song stood out among the bunch because unlike all the other songs which were sung in European Portuguese, this was sung in Brazilian Portuguese. Unfortunately, I don't really like Brazilian Portuguese. Too many Dzh and Ch sounds. The song is this grand ballad, at least from what I remember. It was quite nice, but I think it was probably too slow. It nonetheless made it into the top three of my FdC 2022 ranking, but unfortunately it didn't make it into the final, but rather 3rd to last in the semi. I remember a bunch of people calling it robbed, but I didn't really care. A standout nonetheless, and her live vocals were certainly good.

Another song I wanna talk about is "Dégrá.dê" by Pongo and Tristany. This was a BIG favourite on Twitter. Me? Ehh, not so much. Points for uniqueness, 100%, but this genre just isn't for me. My brain is kinda hardwired to analyze all music I listen to in a classical way. As such, all pop music sounds repetitive to me, but I've come to accept it. With Dégrá.dê, for me it just sounded like incoherent noise. I fully understand that traditional Angolan motifs were what inspired the track, but much of it was dissonant and off-beat. You could call it "crazy syncopation", but for me it just didn't sound like anything coherent. I'm sorry to disappoint you if you really like the song - and I know a good bunch of people who do - but I've never been able to get the appeal myself. Again, respect to Pongo and Tristany for bringing something VERY MUCH off the beaten track, but at least for me it didn't quite work out, but I respect your opinion if you find it to be a masterpiece. You might also wanna know that I'm not a particular fan of Telemoveis either. I 100% get why it didn't qualify in 2019, and even I myself couldn't really justify putting it as a personal qualifier. But back to Dégrá.dê, yeah, it's just not for me I'm afraid. Call me a basic bitch all you want, but the dissonance and "polytone" of the track just...turned me off, frankly. But again, if you like it, good on you.

There is another song that I did find quite interesting, and it was "Fome De Viagem" by Inês Homem de Melo. In a nutshell, multilingual Portuguese Mary Poppins. I really do wonder how it would've done had it gone to Eurovision. From what I remember, there was Portuguese (obviously), English, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and I think German and Swedish as well? Very bizarre track, but I think I liked it. Also I think there were suitcases in the live performance? Yeah, very unique, though it didn't do so well in the final, only getting 9 points and ending in 8th place out of 10 songs.

But speaking of getting 9 points, the next song I wanna talk about is "Ainda Nos Temos" by SYRO. It's your classic male Portuguese-language fado ballad. I liked it, and it could be one of my choices for second chance. But it certainly is the OGAE Portugal's choice for Second Chance, even though Syro came second to last, losing the tiebreaker against Inês Homem de Melo. Opinions from Portuguese Eurofans were divided. @esc_bruno, a Portuguese Eurofan and statistics nerd who managed to correct erroneous results in 2019, really liked Ainda Nos Temos; but another Portuguese Eurofan Youtuber named Pablo was sick of the song, and called it generic. So make up your own mind. I used to think it was the greatest thing ever, but it has since grow off me a bit, especially the second half was quite weak. But in general the song is nice. In fact it was actually one of the favourites to win FdC before the show, alongside another song that I'll mention in a minute. But of course, Ainda Nos Temos flopped HARD in the final, and it was revealed that it only qualified in 4th from the second semi-final of FdC, out of 5 qualifiers. So yeah, a bit of a flop. The performance wasn't too special either. I think he was barefoot and wearing some dark blue cloth? No idea, can't remember anymore. But it's alright, at least I think.

And the final song I wanna talk about is "Why" by Aurea. And lemme tell ya, for all the hype generated around Aurea, Why by Malena outsold this by MILES. Granted they're of different genres, but Why by Aurea is a SNOOZEFEST. So why is it one of my potential picks for second chance? Because in general I just wasn't a big fan of FdC this year. I've not watched other years but maybe FdC in general just isn't for me. And in the end, despite being a domestic big name, Aurea ended up 5th, below Diana Castro interestingly enough. The staging had a piano, and I think one of those wooden pony toy thingies? I don't know what they're called since I never played with one as a kid. This was another one of the non-Portuguese-language songs, and I suppose it didn't really matter in the end.

So that was FdC 2022. Perhaps to the chagrin of Twitter Eurofans, I would probably view this as one of the worse national finals of the season. Not the worst - that's probably either Ireland or North Macedonia - but it certainly didn't cater much to my personal taste. Maybe that'll change next year, maybe it won't. For the time being, let's move on to our next country.

...That is, of course, if Wix could load the whole damn thing! But I think I hit a word limit somewhere. So that's this blog post done, and I'll start on Romania in a separate post. See you there.