A faint ray of hopeful news coming from Iceland in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis: Daði Freyr, Iceland’s Eurovision 2020 entrant and widely considered one of the frontrunners in this year’s now-cancelled song contest, has confirmed that he would be happy to represent Iceland in 2021, Vísir reports. He does, however, have one proviso – he doesn’t want to go through Iceland’s Söngvakeppnin selection process again.
Daði Freyr set off a flurry of chatter in the Eurovision-sphere yesterday when he told Vísir that he was sad “to have missed the opportunity to…take part in the madness that is Eurovision,” but would nevertheless opt out of the Icelandic song competition next year. “We won the competition once and if I entered it again, I’d feel like people were just voting for me because we’d won once and didn’t go to [Eurovision],” he explained. Likewise, re-entering Söngvakeppnin and not winning didn’t seem like any better an outcome, Daði concluded, although he said that he might be willing to compose a song for another competitor to perform.
Dadi Freyr and Gagnamagnið’s Eurovision entry, “Think About Things,” was already a viral sensation, so popular that it inspired conspiracy theories that Netflix was secretly championing the song to win in order to boost the popularity of its forthcoming Eurovision movie, starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as Icelandic singers. When organisers decided to cancel the song competition this year, petitions went around the internet to “Give the Eurovision 2020 Title to Iceland by Default.”
As such, Eurovision fans were understandably heartened by Daði’s tweet on Thursday, which clarified: “I would be honoured and proud to represent Iceland with a new Gagnamagnið song in Eurovision if @RUVohf wants to invite us. It would just feel weird to me to compete in #Söngvakeppnin again. Either way I will keep making more music, that’s not going to change. <3.” The tweet had over 2,100 likes at the time of writing.
No word yet if RÚV will decide to skip next year’s song contest and elect Daði Freyr and Gagnamagnið as Iceland’s de facto representatives. In the meantime, however, Daði Freyr is thinking positively. “This has been a great springboard for my career, so I can’t complain much.”
