My mother told me recently that some of my first "words" weren't words at all; she told me that I sung instead. So one of my first words was "lalalalalaaampa" (lampa is Swedish for "lamp"). During my early years I was extremely addicted to listening to the Beatles and Michael Jackson, which inevitably made my Mom buy me my first guitar, a small acoustic landola, when I was six years old. I started taking guitar lessons and life was fine.

At age 10, I entered a music school in Stockholm; Adolf Fredriks Musikklasser. The school yearly gives a whole lot of concerts in Sweden and internationally. Amongst a lot of other things, I was sent to the castle Versailles (France) to sing with Barbara Hendricks. I loved my school and I still do. I and three of my classmates formed a band called the Jugglers when we were 12 years old and this was when I wrote some of my first songs, they were mainly silly boy band songs.

I entered the Stockholm Music Gymnasium which is a great gymnasium (upper secondary school), both when it comes to education in general and also to choral music as well, which is the main genre of music you study at the music programme. I entered the Stockholm Gymnasium Chamber Choir (SMKK) and we travelled the world and gave performances and competed in a lot of places, Berlin and Paris to mention a couple. Also my class choir and I competed in Limburg at the 2005 Harmonie Festival where we won three of the four categories in which we competed. We had a tour in China 2006 where we gave performances in Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. A lot of crazy stuff went down on that trip as well, in time I'll upload some photos in the Photography section.

My friends Emanuel Roll and Mattias Larsson discovered the in Sweden still very unknown and rare style of a cappella quartet singing called "barbershop" and asked me and Martin Wahlgren to join them in forming a quartet of our own. 4GooD was created and we sang on dinners and small gatherings here and there, had one big concert in the school auditorium and competed in the 2006 SNOBS (Society of Nordic Barbershop Singers) Nordic Championships where we finished in 6th place. This is where we met Doug Harrington. At the end of our third year at Stockholm Music Gymnasium Emanuel Roll and Martin Wahlgren decided they wanted to take their quartet singing to another level, at the time I felt that I myself didn't have neither the motivation nor time to carry on so we went our separate ways. They went on and formed the super awesome quartet Ringmasters (who very recently won the gold medal in the 2008 Collegiate Barbershop contest, check it out here).

After graduating from the Stockholm Music Gymnasium I joined the Stockholm Singers, gave several performances with them and participated in a master class seminar in Kecskemet, Hungary 2007 which was both interesting and fun. I studied French one semester at the Stockholm University. During this time I was sort of tired of singing and decided to take a break, except for singing with the Stockholm Singers. My vocal cords were tired as well and quite literally broke, which forced me to shut up for at least a couple of months which was indeed quite an impossible task, if you know me in real life you'd know why...

I mentioned Doug Harrington, a really great musician, vocal coach and conductor. The 4gooD quartet met him back in 2006 and he and Emanuel Roll became good friends. This friendship led to the creation of the Stockholm-based male chorus Zero8, which consists of male singers both young and, erm, less young. Most of my guy friends are in it and together we won the SNOBS 2008 competition, which can be seen in crappy quality on youtube here. Winning the Nordic Championship qualified us for the World Championship in Anaheim, California, July 2009, where we were placed 7th - the highest any non-american choir ever scored! And congrats to the Ringmasters on getting a fourth place medal, Swedish Match for winning a gold in the collegiate contest, Go Fish for placing fifth in the collegiate contest and of course to the other winners - The Ambassadors of Harmony and Crossroads!

Failing to keep things in chronological order, I must mention the recording of a song I wrote, Take Me Home. I've written quite a lot of music over the years but that song differs from what I usually compose. I decided to just record a basic version of it with me playing the guitar and singing and my friend Sebastian Lönnberg helped me with that in his home-studio in the summer of 2007. In time, I'll probably upload a small clip from that session here.

I've probably forgotten a lot of people and events and for that I apologize. This part of the site will grow and develop as well, more pictures and clips will be added and more names and events will be mentioned. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention my friend Sam Heiliger's band: Monde Yeux. Thanks for reading all the way through here. See ya!


2009.07.17