Ida Maria: Live at Rolling Stone

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Norway's hottest punk-rock export and Breaking artist Ida Maria recently popped by the Rolling Stone studios to perform four songs and tell Rock Daily about the stories behind a handful of tracks off her acclaimed debut, Fortress Round My Heart. In our first installment of Ida, she presents stripped-down, acoustic versions of two of her biggest singles, "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked" (above) and "Keep Me Warm" (below).

" 'Keep Me Warm' and 'Naked' are both about love," Maria tells Rolling Stone. "But 'Keep Me Warm' is more about friendship." But even love songs sound tough in Maria's Nico-meets-Chrissie Hynde voice, and tales of drunken nights and one-night stands pepper her lyrics. "I had been writing songs for three days and I didn't bother to get dressed or shower, I was just sitting there in my underwear with a guitar. That was how I came up with it," she says of writing "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked. (Watch the song's official video here.)

Now that she's found success in Europe and is cracking the States, Maria finds it difficult to pen songs in her native tongue. "I've been writing a couple songs in Norwegian, but I've been writing in English most of the time, so it's very hard. I have English rhymes in my head but not rhymes in Norwegian," Maria says.

(Check out part two of Ida Maria's RS set here.)

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Song Stories

“Karma Chameleon”

Culture Club | 1983

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."

More Song Stories entries »

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