Rita Eriksen

On May 26, 1966, Rita Eriksen entered the world in Sola, Norway. Beyond her intermittent solo recordings, she teams with her brother Frank Eriksen, who supplies vocals and guitar, to form the roots-music duo Eriksen. That partnership issued a string of well-received albums throughout the first half of the 1990s. Her first solo outing arrived in 1988 as the English-language pop collection Back from Wonderland, which drew heavily on familiar standards yet failed to register commercially. Four years later the siblings issued their joint debut, Two Blue. The album climbed into the Norwegian Top Ten and earned the 1992 Spellemannprisen for best Norwegian roots & country music release. Eriksen followed with The Water Is Wide in 1994, which peaked at number six, and Alt Vende Tebage in 1995, which reached number three on the same chart. Rita next joined Irish singer Dolores Keane for the traditional-music set Tideland in 1996, another strong seller. The duo’s subsequent album Blåmandag appeared in 1998 to modest results, after which Eriksen remained silent for a decade. The career-spanning collection De Aller Beste finally surfaced in 2009 and topped the Norwegian albums chart. During the intervening years Rita first resurfaced on the understated 2005 collaboration From the Fountain with the Queen Bees, then issued her second solo album, Hjerteslag, in 2008. Twenty years after her debut, Hjerteslag climbed to number six and prompted the immediate release of the chart-topping retrospective De Aller Beste.