By Isabella Schroeter
In April, Danish singer-songwriter Tina Dico played to 15,000 people at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena. On October 22, she brings her music to Red Bird, an intimate, 80-seat venue in Old Ottawa South. The contrast is striking: Dico is an established star in Denmark yet remains relatively unknown to Canadian audiences. For her, however, the smaller stage offers something a packed arena cannot.
At home, Dico, who performs in Denmark as Tina Dickow, has topped the Danish album charts five times, according to her label. Born in Aarhus in 1977, she released her debut, Fuel, in 2001 and moved to England the following year. There, an acoustic EP called Notes spread by word of mouth and won her Danish awards. She worked and toured with the British duo Zero 7, and In the Red went to No. 1 in Denmark in 2006. Fastland repeated the feat in 2018.
Her career has taken her from Denmark’s biggest festival stages to Glastonbury. She was invited to perform at the Danish Crown Prince’s fiftieth birthday celebration. Her own favourite memory is Roskilde, Denmark’s biggest festival, where she played the main stage to 40,000 or 50,000 people and thought, “I’ve reached everything that I could have ever dreamt of.” Her audience extends across Europe too: this November she tours Germany, Amsterdam and Vienna with a band.
Canada, though, has been part of her story longer than most Canadians realize. She counts Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell among the singer-songwriters she grew up on. Her label says she met her husband and musical partner, Helgi Jonsson, while both were performing here more than 14 years ago. She appeared on the same bill as KT Tunstall at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 2024 and, according to her Ottawa promoter, was a standout at this year’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Now comes her first release on a Canadian label, DMP/Fontana North/Universal: Balancing Small Things on Sharp Edges, due October 23, led by the single “Surfing.”
Dico and Jonsson, who now live in Iceland, co-produced the record at Big Spring Studio in Seltjarnarnes. She says she set out to find “something original” again, asking how you write a love song “in the middle of a crisis.” She grew up on protest songs and assumed she would become a protest singer; this time she gave up, worn out by a mind spending “way too much time in Washington and in Moscow and Beijing.” What she found instead is that the small things, the beauty, the hope, the trust, the fragility, “are the big things.” The sound is stripped to match: acoustic guitar, voice, drums, and a prominent violin presence. And in “Surfing,” she says, we are “not islands anymore” but “an ocean.”
That is why Ottawa appeals to her. Alone with a guitar and a bass drum and snare at her feet, she says, “you can’t hide behind anything. I would almost say that I need exactly this right now.” For an artist this direct on record, she is careful about where she draws the line: “a very clear distinction between being personal and being private.” “I’m very aware that I am not interesting as a person,” she says. “It’s only whatever I can produce in the music that is interesting to people.” Without a song between her and the audience, “suddenly I feel like, whoa, what am I doing here?”
Parenthood has reshaped her perspective. She wasn’t sure touring would survive the arrival of her first child; instead, she says, bringing the kids along has been “magical,” a constant reminder that “life is bigger than music.” One new song, “So Incredibly Real,” is written to them, mainly her eldest son, about experiencing the world for real rather than “from behind a screen.”
What does she hope Canadians take from the record? Less a message than a place to stand. “I would love to be somewhat of an anchor,” she says, something that can “stand still when everything else is moving at the speed of light around us,” “timeless and not shouting.” Her invitation is simple: “It’s here for you. Please dive in if you want.”
Photo: by James Hole, courtesy Diesel Management
