Red Alert Blazin Thru The Years CD

Andersson was 12 years old when she first got a taste of that performer-crowd magic; it was during a singing contest in her native Sweden, on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Although she had been singing in front of a small group of people since the age of 4, this was the first time she stepped behind a microphone--before 6,000 people no less. Delivering the theme from The Deer Hunter, she slayed, winning the contest with ease. It was then that Andersson became hooked on music and live performance. As "Connected" points out, she's always felt as though she was born to sing, and that was the moment that she decided to devote her life to it.

As a youngster, music wasn't everything, but it had a large presence in her early life. Growing up on a small Swedish farm, Andersson's father raised pigs and cows and grew grains and carrots while her mother played piano, accordion and trumpet, and taught music to local school children. While Andersson's parents didn't own a vast rock'n'roll record collection, albums by the likes of Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin caught her ear, as did the Peter Gabriel, Tina Turner and Duran Duran singles that were being spun by local European pop stations. It's a tad ironic, considering she never intended to pick up the instrument in the first place. It was only after Andersson was locked out of playing the flute in school - due to an excess number of her peers signing up for the instrument - that teachers asked Andersson's mother to convince her daughter to give the violin a try.

As a teen, Andersson attended performing arts schools and toured with the prestigious World Youth Choir. She also performed and sang as a member of a three-piece, all-female group called Sudrets Spiror. Sudrets Spiror focused on three-part harmonies and played everything from Earth, Wind & Fire tunes to Swedish and Ukrainian folk songs. After being one of a handful of students selected to attend a noted Swedish music school--where she was to study jazz singing--a friend introduced her to Sweden-born roots artist Anders Osborne, who was in need of a violinist to accompany him at shows in his homeland.