The Human Spirit Needs Hope Lena Anderssen’s new album finds light in life’s dark corners – using hope as her driving force. You can’t deny that there’s something about the songs and her voice that draws you in, embraces you and makes you feel like she could sing away even the darkest, most defiant storm clouds. Lena Anderssen’s music story is not an unwritten one in Denmark, where her 2012 album ”Letters From The Faroes” received great reviews – also internationally. The album was chosen ”Album Of The Week” on Denmark’s National Radio P4, and in the Faroe Islands, where Lena has lived the past several years, the album was voted ”Album Of The Year”. Lena Anderssen is now ready with her follow up album ”Eagle In The Sky”, a collection of twelve songs strongly rooted in her childhood years. Chaotic Childhood Caused by Alcoholism On this new album, the singer and songwriter takes the recollective and sometimes painful journey back to her turbulent childhood and adolescent years in Canada. A time that was marked by Lena’s father’s alcoholism and her mother’s struggle to make ends meet, often working nightshifts as a nurse. Looking back on her childhood, Lena says that even though the dark corners are real enough, it’s hope that is the driving force behind ”Eagle In The Sky”. ”The last thing I wanted to do was make a dark and depressing album. I’ve got a lot of shadows hanging around my place, but I want my music to be radiant and comforting. The human spirit needs hope, and I want hope to live in my songs.” The Sound Of North America Lena wanted ”Eagle In The Sky” to have a more North American sound than her previous albums and Canada felt like the perfect place to both finish writing the album and start some recording. So she travelled to Vancouver in 2013 with her partner and producer Niclas Johannesen. Since then the album has had several recording locations, including Denmark, Los Angeles, Isle of Man and the Faroe Islands, and has had over 50 different musicians contributing to it. Featuring both a symphony orchestra and a boys’ choir, ”Eagle In The Sky” is without a doubt Lena’s most ambitious body of work so far. In addition to a wide range of Faroese and Scandinavian musicians, the American drummer Matt Chamberlain (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, John Mayer, Elton John) also plays on the album and the award-winning singer songwriter, Christine Collister, also adds her vocals to several tracks. A Real Person Behind Every Note From the very start, the musical vision for ”Eagle In The Sky” was to create an album where a real person played every note. A human in place of a machine. ”We wanted to try to create something that could just as well have been made in 1976 as in 2016. Perhaps it sounds a bit anachronistic, but I think there’s just as much of an ”organic nature” to be found in music as to be found in food and other things. We were simply looking to create a well-produced album with real human performances, a proper human effort behind every note. There’s something satisfying about knowing somebody was actually giving it their very best.”