Jennie Abrahamson

La Paranthèse - Nyon:
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Jennie Abrahamson resides in Stockholm, Sweden, but is originally from further up north, a tiny place called Sävar just outside of the coastal town of Umeå. A place known for breeding bands and artists in the line of "northern melancholy", Jennie only kept a slight tint of that moodiness in her richly coloured and playful pop tunes. Critics have called her a "younger, more accessible Kate Bush" or "the perfect threesome marriage of Glasser, Lykke Li and Robyn", but Jennies quirky yet straight-forward music is very much her own.

After a career in different bands (Heed released two albums on Swedish EMI) and as a multi musician with other artists, she decided to go solo in 2006. Since then, she has released three well praised solo albums and widened the release territory for every record. The firstling “Lights” was released in 2007, and reflected growing up and leaving friends, family and the vast expanses of snow to go south. Her sophomore album was written during an autumn’s hide away in New York. A big city love story with asian influences, “While the sun’s sti! up and the sky is bright” (2009) and it’s stick-like-glue- single “Late night show” got massive airplay not only in Sweden, but also in France and Germany, making it on to the top list over most played records on the German college radio jahrecharts. Her latest album “The Sound of Your Beating Heart” was widely critically acclaimed at it’s release in the Nordic countries, and singles “Hard to come by” and “Wolf Hour” stirred up press- and blogloving and stayed on the radio playlists for a long time.

The making of “The Sound of Your Beating Heart” was a quick story. The recording was scheduled since long, but extensive touring got in the way of writing new songs. By the end of summer 2010 she had only two months to go before entering the studio, but nothing written. She hibernated in her Södermalm apartment and brought out sketches and notes she’d collected. As the songs evolved she recorded them on a 4-track application on her cell phone, keeping it strict with melody, rhythms and piano. She wanted to find the strenght of the songs with as few parts as possible. If it if sounded ok on a crappy phone, it could probably just get better when recorded “for real”. Thematically the songs revolved around events in her friends lives, a lot of people around her experienced 2010 as a very rough year and she aimed to write their stories.

First song written for the album also came to be first single. “Hard to come by” is a playful pop tune loaded with rhythm and a melody so irritatingly catchy that once you’ve heard it, you wont forget it. Upon release, it was immediately added to the playlists for Swedish national radio P3 and pretty soon scored #1 as the most featured song on the Swedish Student Radio collected playlist. Guests on the album includes Adam Olenius from Shout Out Louds who’s singing in the duet ”Hole in you”, and songstress/celloplayer Linnea Olsson who contributed with both strings and vocals.

Inspired and encouraged by her friends in Friska Viljor and Ane Brun, Jennie founded her own record label in 2007. Today she works with different distributors, licensees and promoters throughout the world. She runs her own music studio in Stockholm where she records and produces her albums, together with long time work partner and sound magician Johannes Berglund. Occasionally, when there’s time, you can still see Jennie “incognito” on stage as a musician with Ane Brun’s tour band, a job she’s kept as she says “for the pure fun and musical love of it”.


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