Ann-Sofi Eriksson is a Swedish composer and songwriter currently based in the countryside close to Frankfurt, Germany.
Her somewhat minimalistic piano music is often described as calming and relaxing, sometimes even therapeutic.
She also writes songs with lyrics about “life, the universe, and everything”, where she draws inspiration from her long interest in personal development and spirituality.
The long and winding road
Much to her own surprise, Ann-Sofi (born 1969) started composing music and writing songs just a few years before her 50th birthday. Growing up in a small village in northern Sweden, Ann-Sofi learned to play the piano at age 9, but as she discovered rock music as a teenager she abandoned the instrument and didn’t touch it again for more than 20 years. In the meanwhile, painting, theater, and gardening were her primary creative outlets and among others, she is a trained landscape architect.
She had a strong longing to sing and play music, thought, and after a short but intense flirt with the saxophone in her thirties, she found an old piano on a flea market and began a new journey rediscovering the instrument, this time learning to improvise and to accompanying herself singing her favorite songs instead of playing classical pieces.
For a long time, playing music was something very private for her, she even considered it a kind of meditation, and the idea of performing felt very foreign. As she started to create her own music, though, this slowly changed. The past few years she has occasionally played some of her songs in different settings, from churches and street festivals to a songwriting slam competition and small “living room concerts”. She is currently learning to record and edit her music, working on building a small home studio.
Ann-Sofi lives with her husband and their two children surrounded by nature in an old water mill with one dog, two cats, three horses, and a free-ranging gang of chickens.