I am playing music because I want to see fire in peoples eyes!
My musical history spans the gamut from singer/songwriter to funk to jazz and it is now circling back again to singer/songwriter. My premiere release was the jazz album entitled Scuba (2001), which was recorded in New York City in the year 2000 with three brilliant musicians - including bassist Ben Street and saxophonist Seamus Blake, who are presently writing their own chapters in jazz history. The completion of Scuba marked the final culmination of two very intense years spent in New York City, a period of time where moving around among the musical elite on a daily basis left its distinctive mark and etched within me an ingrained intuition about what it takes to commit oneself - a special admixture of humility and faith in ones own musical project, among other things.
This same inspiration was subsequently put to good use - and extrapolated further - in my follow-up release, entitled Music Beats Jungle Law (2003) , recorded with my Danish band and exclusively containing my own compositions. Here, my aspiration to make the complex sound simple and comprehensible attained new heights of fulfillment. It is this vision that constitutes my heartfelt response to what I perceive as an essential musical and a human challenge, and it has served as a unifying principle running through my work during my jazz period.
During the summer of 2004 , there was an urgent impulse of necessity germinating inside me to make the most of my powers and forge a new and different kind of expression a satisfying albeit fragile expression - with an eye toward inspiring and bringing about a sense of mutual interconnectedness. For this reason, the quantum leap to singer/songwriter music transpired as an utterly natural choice.
With the production of the E.P. entitled Nothing is as it seems being brought to completion in January 2006, I have accordingly fired off the starting signal for my new career. I feel at home and I am ready for action. It has been a pleasure to work together with my old friend, Bastian Sjelberg, who has been a most inspiring partner and producer. At the same time, it has come as a delight for me to realize that the fingerpicking technique I am employing on Troubled (Link to the song) was something I learned from my first guitar teacher, Carton Sndermark, when I was seven years old.
But the most important awakening for me in connection with this change in musical genre has been the realization that the circle is about to be closed: at the present time, after many years of making experiments, I do not feel any need for the challenge - the challenge to prove anything to myself or to others. Instead, I am now using my energy solely on mobilizing my own strengths, like songwriting, and on following my own intuition and working on the basis of wider perspectives. When I say that the circle is being closed, this is not tantamount to declaring that my story is on the verge of being finished. On the contrary, Ive got a feeling that right now, my story is really beginning!
