Agnes Obel

Obel had the privilege of growing up around music, as her father would love to collect strange objects and instruments such as the xylophone and even a double bass. Her mother was a pianist and would play Bartók and Chopin on the piano. Obel naturally took to the piano at a very young age. Her teacher told her that she shouldn’t play what she doesn’t like, so she just played what she liked. As a musical artist, Obel discovered Jan Johansson’s works, which were pivotal to her understanding of creating music, especially in an individual way. It was in 1987 that Obel joined her first band as a singer and bass guitar player. She even had a small part in a short film alongside her brother called Walking Backwards. She recounts that this was around the time that she stumbled upon an album called “Dummy” by Portishead, which left a lasting impression on Obel, describing it as the mix of melancholy and a dream.

She met Danish musician and producer Elton Theander, and together the pair founded the band Sohio. It was a short-lived project, as Obel decided to move to Berlin after visiting it once, and has lived there since. In 2009 Obel uploaded a demo of her song “Just So” onto her Myspace page. Despite the song being used in an advertisement for Deutsche Telekom, Obel had to fight hard looking for a label.

Agnes Obel however, was offered a deal under PIAS Recordings in 2010, and released her debut album “Philharmonics” that same year. She writes, plays, sings, records and produces all of her material on her own, taking a lot of care perfecting the piano alongside the vocals as she has said “The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices”. The album went to number 1 in Denmark and Belgium. It also charted in France, Netherlands and Switzerland, going 5x Platinum in Denmark alone. Her sophomore release, “Aventine” gained similar success, again, making it to number 1 in Denmark and Belgium.

It was on her 2014 tour that she decided to start work on her third studio album, saying that she wants to work less with piano and more with other kinds of old keyboards.