Swedish~ Stereo~

Holidays are on so I'll keep on sharing Christmas cards and live-performances at least whole this week and here is another Swedish artist sending congratulations to fans - Anna Bergendahl singing two songs from her latest album.
By the way here you can check a nice documentary SVT has made about Anna's life after Eurovision and her trip to USA in a search of insipration

Today I've received some wonderful romantic letters from Anna Bergendahl made as origami-birds and containing pieces of her latest single's lyrics. How sweet is that!!!
I always loved you, Anna! This blog's followers know it. But I didn't expect it to be mutual.
So let's continue our relationships next way - you write beautiful songs (like those ones on your newest EP) and I love you even more with every release and tell the world about it. We're gonna be a perfect couple!

Already few minutes are left till the start of new seventh Swedish Idol season on tv4.se - one of the greatest Swedish music-show that already gave birth to loads of young stars like Agnes, Måns, Ola, EMD, Darin, Rebound and many-many others so probably already today you'll see some new artists who will be lighting up your music skies many years from now. Probably you won't understand it from the first audition but sometimes you see audition of young artist and realize that this star have come and gonna stay on the stage at least for years. I've chosen first auditions of some Idol-participants who has become very popular in last years and this is realy funny to see how much some of them has grown (like Darin, Gathania, Erik Segerstedt), others like Danny, Måns and Marie Picasso don't seem to change too much (though they were adorable from the start and it's not criminal at all). My personal Top-3 of the most impressive and touching auditions I have seen is - Darin, Anna Bergendahl and Sibel (in random order). But every of auditions below is worthy to watch - to look funny previous hair style of Erik Segerstedt, to see how Gathania decides to come with dance song because she thinks that to sing ballad on audition is dull and to convince yourself that Danny was actually always quite outgoing guy.

Every year a lot of Swedish artists represent country in two huge Polish festivals in Sopot (both are very spectacular and you can see many European big international stars there). This year plans of both festivals were broken with reconstruction of Opera Leśna which was always a place for these events. However though Sopot Festival had to be cancelled, another one - Sopot Hit Festiwal was moved to Bydgoszcz and surprisingly visually it almost didn't affect beauty of this show featuring such stars like Ameerah, Locnville, Lou Bega, Safri Duo, Tom Boxer and others.
This time we could see Sopot-veteran Velvet on the stage, I think Jenny performed almost all tracks of her second album for the last few years of her participance so now it was turn of "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" that she presented in a torn bridal veil, not that we know for sure but obviously it was made by her jealous rivals and isn't it great that Jenny was able to show such a flawless vocals and nice performance after it? Another Swedish contestant was Pauline with one of her latest hits "Never Said I Was An Angel", it was sweet and funny performance with Pauline walking around the stage like she came out there ocassionally, she was waving to audience and asked "How are you?", audience obviously felt fine and Pauline probably even better. Third Swedish contestant was newcomer Carina Dahl with debut single "Screw" and this performance was otherwise overfilled with concentration and energy of the singer, Carina looked and sounded like she was ready to tear stadium to pieces, very appreciated confidence for newcomer! Though Poland didn't appreaciate it enough and Carina took 13th place, Pauline - 8th and Velvet - 7th. However Ameerah with Didrik Thott's written "The Sound Of Missing You" won first round of voting with Anders Bagge's written "Drip Drop" by Safura on 5th and final voting was won by another Scandinavians - Safri Duo so let's hope next year will be more successful for Swedes as every year they try to provide really worthy artists and songs.

Another famous Swedish artist competing in Polish music contest these days was Anna Bergendahl who performed her hit "This is my life" at Orange Warsaw Festival and took 3rd place, watch fan's recorder performance here.

During Stockholm Pride week Linda Bengtzing, Anna Bergehdahl, Jill Johnson, Sarah Dawn Finer and Magnus Carlsson gave English interviews to oikotimes and great news are that both Magnus and Linda are definitely want to come back to a big spotlight of future Melodifestivalen. Linda seems to be especially eager about comeback. Unfortunately Sarah is not so eager about it but doesn't want to say she'll never do it again. Well, you'd better check it yourself right below.

And you can also check some well-recorded performances during last week. Second record of Rebound's performance is a bit distorted with agonizing dying fans but this is what actually makes me laugh to tears everytime I hear it.