I released “Fall” as a single in May 2023, the week before The Island – Part One came out, and it ended up as the album’s third track because it feels like a threshold—where the outside world and the inside world briefly overlap.

The song is rooted in a real place: an oak tree in the woods behind the house I grew up in, on a tiny spot called Hovda in Lyngdal, Agder—about as far south as you can get in Norway. Back then Hovda was basically a handful of life around a small bay, five inhabited houses and not much else, and that tree was part of the landscape in the way only childhood landmarks can be. People always said it was the biggest tree in all of Hovda, like it was an agreed-upon fact, a local truth.

I wrote the lyric from a very quiet place. I went there looking for a last goodbye, and instead I found something that felt like a reply. In the song, the leaves form a familiar face—maybe a trick of the light, maybe my mind trying to survive, maybe something else. Either way, the world shifts a little, and that oak becomes a witness. It’s the only thing that “sees” me cry, so I stay there for a while.

The chorus is a simple promise that changes shape as the song goes on. First it’s I will call on you—something I want to believe. Then it becomes I can call on you—like admitting that this connection still exists, even if it’s only through memory, place, or ritual. By the end, “fall” becomes personal as well as seasonal: when I lose my footing, when I fall apart, I know who I reach for.

Stian