After releasing her self titled debut album on Caprice, Edda Magnason is now entering the family of Adrian Recordings. Her second album will be recorded and produced by Christoffer Lundqvist at his AGM Studio in November 2010.
Pianist, singer and songwriter Edda Magnason grew up in the countryside in southern Sweden with her mother, siblings and stepfather. Her father comes, as her name suggests, from Iceland, where he works as a vet in a small town 400 miles from Reykjavik.
She does not come from a particularly musical family. “Mum had piano lessons as a child but wasn’t allowed to “clink around” at home. My upbringing was a reaction to that. I got to play around on the piano as much as I wanted and there was never anyone who asked me to be quiet”.
Edda’s musical training has been patchy. “I have tried studying in periods, because there were many who “wanted to teach me” but in some strange way, I have always escaped. When I hadn’t practiced for my piano lesson, I used to placate my piano teacher by playing one of my own songs and then she thought I was clever and forgot that I hadn’t done what I actually should”.
She describes her composing as musical logistics; you feel your way and see which puzzle pieces fit together. “I have a problem with things like recipes, manuals and sheet music. I’m a law unto myself,” she smiles.
It was ten years ago, at the age of fifteen, that she bought a digital portastudio. That was a turning point: she stopped practicing classical piano and began writing song-based pop music that she made into demos.
“ I entered a dream world and began writing lyrics. I sat up at night and read English dictionaries like pure poetry. Since I had never travelled or had any personal roots in the language, I could be who I wanted and it felt like I had the whole world in my hand." She walked around with the portostudio in a silver tool bag and listened to Supertramp, Frank Zappa, the Portuguese jazz singer Maria João and Esbjörn Svensson. “ I never played in punk bands and stuff. In my teenage years I spent most of the time looking for ambient sounds and making overdubs that I drowned in sound effects. I was completely obsessed with recording on that little machine!”
“The embryo of the debut album grew when I realized I did not need to distinguish between my pop songs and instrumental music. The portostudio broke and I went back to the piano. Memories of children’s songs by Georg Riedel and Swedish folk music started to creep back – things that I hadn’t consciously listened to – but which apparently influenced me a lot anyway.”
Where one to summarize the feeling that permeates Edda’s music it would be playfulness and adventurousness. There is a deft freshness in the melodies that makes them sound accessible and easily played even if they probably would be perceived as difficult if another musician attempted them. The music presents a seamless blend of jazz, pop, folk, and classical. Some lyrics tell a story, others are more impressionistic and suggest her enthusiasm for haiku poems. Some of the pieces are completely instrumental, moments where she feels absolute freedom from all music genres.
