About Sofia

o, first, to the countryside outside of Uppsala, the ancient town nestled to the north of Stockholm in Sweden, where Sofia was born in 1980. From the very beginning she was captivated by music -- before the beginning, in fact. "Even when I was in my mother's womb, I used to kick when there was music around that I liked," she laughs. "When a special person played the organ in church, or during a rock concert, I kicked when I liked it."

he church also was a presence in her life. Her father, a minister, was part of a long line of organists whose work was respected throughout Sweden. His work took Sofia and her family to new places every few years; at four-and-a-half she moved with them to Gotland, a wind-blown island off the southeastern coast, in the Baltic Sea. Later they would settle in Karlskrona, a seventeenth-century village that had long been home to her mother's family.

ll the while Sofia listened to the music that surrounded her. Before she could even speak she spent hours at her family's piano as her grandfather or her mother played, then took her turn, "not just pushing the keys down," she remembers, "but trying to pick out melodies, one note at a time". The choirs in local churches filled her head with their songs; later, when she was old enough,

Sofia would join her father as he traveled to preach before faraway congregations. Eventually she became part of the program, singing before or after his sermons.

ooking back, Sofia considers herself lucky to have been raised within this tradition. "The music in the churches where I grew up was influenced by many different styles," she says. "It was a cultural mix, just like a country where people from many different places live. They'd even have hard rock, with Christian lyrics. I've never been into conservative music, so this was very good for me."

y the time she was fifteen Sofia had also begun creating her own tunes -- mainly ballads, inspired by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and animated by her yearning to experience life beyond the sheltered world she had known. Encouraged by one of her teachers to explore songwriting further, she finished ten songs with lyrics in Swedish, then switched to English as she began to realize that she had something original to say. Once she had crossed the linguistic divide, she never looked back.

here was a kind of magic in English. You don't really find that magic in your own language, because you use it every day. It's like if you only eat spaghetti, it's not so special, but when you get Chinese food it's really special because you don't eat it every day. Although," she laughs, "they'd be crazy if they felt that way in China."