Lena Anderssen is a singer who puts life stories to music with her auto-biographical writing style and personal edge. On stage Lena is an intense performer who says, “The shorter the distance is from your heart to your vocal chords, the better”.
This Canadian-raised singer was born in the remote and exotic Faroe Islands, her mother is Faroese and her father a Norwegian Canadian. Lena moved to Canada at the age of three and together with her family lived in places like Vancouver, Thunder Bay, Port Dover and Montreal. When Lena was nearly seventeen her parents split up and she went with her mother and siblings back to the Faroe Islands to live. But already a year later, Lena travelled back to the west coast of Canada, feeling torn between which side of the Atlantic she should call home.
Singing always came naturally to Lena. But it wasn’t until she moved back to the Faroes in her early twenties that she discovered songwriting and fell in love with performing.
In 2006, Lena became the first Faroese artist to record at Abbey Road Studio 2 when she and her songwriting partner and producer, Niclas Johannesen, headed off to London to record at the legendary studio. It was for her album “Let Your Scars Dance” and this included her seminal song “Stones In My Pocket”, which she recorded live at Abbey Road with a string quartet.
Lena has also worked with Danish Grammy-winning producer and mixer Óli Poulsen, who produced one of her first hits “I Still Love You” and her second album “Can’t Erase It”. The song “Can’t Erase It” landed a placement in the American television series Scrubs and songs from her third album “Let Your Scars Dance” were featured in several television series such as Felicity, Nikita and Alias, as well as reality series Miami Social.
Lena has been compared to artists like Tift Merritt and KT Tunstall by the Belgian magazine Rootstime, while music critic Jan Janssen at Real Roots Café compared Lena to classic artists like Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith.
This Faroese-Canadian songbird has toured Europe, opening for artists like Xavier Rudd (AUS) and Beth Hart (US), as well as opening a show for Roxy Music (UK). She was also invited to Norway to play for the Norwegian Prince Haakon.
While touring in Denmark following her 2016 album release “Eagle In The Sky”, Danish music critic, Ivan Rod, attended one of her shows and wrote: “Lena possesses an immense voice which exudes depth, flexibility and honesty…She masters the phrasing and she can tell stories and translate them into relevant songs which on top of everything are melodic, catchy and substantial…The concert proved that she both writes and sings with an authority that is naturally associated with artists like Suzanne Vega and Alanis Morissette.”
In March 2018, Lena Anderssen’s musical journey led her to Los Angeles to record her forthcoming album “State of the Land” with the legenadary The Beatles engineer, Geoff Emerick. A month later he mentioned Lena when being interviewed for the South American online magazine Página 12 saying, “The last job I did was a record with Lena Anderssen, an artist who lives on the Faroe Islands, near Iceland; I finished her album a few weeks ago and I had a great time because her music is very good and she is absolutely wonderful.” In October of that same year, Geoff Emerick sadly passed away. Lena’s album, which is scheduled for an early 2021 release, was the last full album that Geoff Emerick ever engineered. The title track to this album was released August 14, 2020 on Songcrafter Music and is available worlwide. Here’s a link to the single State of The Land.