Ebba Forsberg

Hailing from Sweden, Ebba Forsberg has built a career as a singer, songwriter, and actress while drawing inspiration from leading North American singer/songwriters who surfaced during the 1960s and 1970s. She blended introspective acoustic material with the rawer edges of adult contemporary on her first solo release, Been There, which appeared in 1997. Later projects paid tribute to Tom Waits through the 2015 album Om Jag Lämnar Dig, to Leonard Cohen via 2009’s Ta Min Vals and 2017’s Take My Waltz, and to Bob Dylan on 2007’s Dylan på Svenska together with 2019’s Med Kropp och Själ.

Ebba Maria Knigge Forsberg entered the world in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1964. At age five she relocated with her family to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands; her older sister Kajsa Ribbing came back to Sweden after one year, yet Forsberg remained on Tortola until she turned twelve, when the household moved again to South Africa. During the following eight years she absorbed local jazz and pop sounds, while also teaching herself piano and vocals. As a young adult she returned to Sweden and served as a backing musician and singer for several established Swedish artists, among them Eldkvarn, Ulf Lundell, the Nomads, and, between 1993 and 1995, Traste Lindéns Kvintett.

Forsberg eventually rejoined her sister; together they shaped songs for her solo debut, with Forsberg handling the music and Ribbing the words. A demo secured a contract with Maverick Records, which issued the Mats Asplen-produced Been There in 1997; Warner Bros. re-released it the next year. She issued True Love in 2001, the same year she debuted on television in the series Anderssons Älskarinna, taking the title role. Additional screen work followed in the 2003 thriller series Talismanen. She then teamed with Tobias Hylander on music for the 2005 film Mun Mot Mun before delivering her third solo album, the 2006 self-titled Ebba Forsberg, an intimate English-language collection that reached number 26 on the Swedish chart.

Her subsequent release was the collaborative Dylan på Svenska with singer/songwriter Mikael Wiehe, which came out in 2007. Two years later she delivered Ta Min Vals: Ebba Forsberg Sjunger Leonard Cohen. The Dylan project peaked at number 22 on Sweden’s albums chart, while the Cohen album marked her first Top Ten entry. In 2011 she composed the score for the crime drama Happy End and released the original-song collection Falling Folding Flipping Feeling, which climbed to number 18. She reached number 12 with 2015’s Om Jag Lämnar Dig: Ebba Forsberg Sjunger Tom Waits, a set of ten Swedish-language covers of Waits material. In 2017 Take My Waltz again explored Leonard Cohen’s catalog, this time in English, and she revisited Dylan for 2019’s Med Kropp och Själ, another joint effort with Wiehe.