Stranger things are starting to begin

Perhaps this is the time of year that I always think this, but I'm beginning to seriously despair of the 2011 Eurovision crop. Of the songs I've heard from the national selections so far, a mere three have really reached out and grabbed me (although there may be some good ones I haven't caught up with yet), and of those, two failed to win the ticket to Düsseldorf. Admittedly there were special circumstances - a sympathy vote following the death of another song's original performer - that partly explain Jóhanna's failure in Iceland, but the overlooking of Nicki Ponte's I Don't Wanna Dance in this evening's Greek final is utterly beyond me.

The one gem that has made it through comes from that unlikeliest of sources - the hosts Germany. Much as I never found Lena Meyer-Landrut half as irritating last year as some people seemed to, I was still slightly dubious about the wisdom of allowing her to 'defend her title'. However, with a brave choice of song that once again suits her quirkiness down to the ground, it looks like it might just pay off - at least to some extent. Taken By a Stranger is probably a bit too low-key to win outright, but the way things are going it may well deserve to.

One thing that occurred to me when I was listening to it the first time round was that, just like Satellite, the lyrics seemed a bit too offbeat and intricate to have been written by a non-native speaker of English. Sure enough, they appear to have been penned by an American. That's surely one of the biggest downsides of the scrapping of the language restrictions twelve years ago - now that Germany have established it can be an advantage, we'll probably see more and more songwriters from English-speaking countries being drafted in, narrowing the contest's 'gene pool' considerably.

On a Nótt like this...

I just had a little frisson of excitement (OK, I'm easily pleased) when I spotted on Esctoday that Jóhanna Guðrún Jónsdóttir - singer of my all-time favourite Eurovision entry - participated in the semi-final stage of the Icelandic national selection last night. That rang a bell from somewhere - I must have read the news of her return a while back but forgot all about it. Anyway, having had a quick listen to the new song Nótt, while it inevitably doesn't scale the heights of Is It True?, it's probably the best of the handful of prospective entries I've got round to checking out so far this year. Refreshingly, it's sung in Icelandic, although reading between the lines of Jóhanna's interview, there's probably a less-than-even chance it'll stay that way if it makes it through to Eurovision.

It's also worth bearing in mind that Iceland have foolishly discarded some real gems in their national selections in the past (not least in 2006), but this one is over the first hurdle at least.