Album Notes

Rolling Stone reviewed Louise Hoffsten's Knäckebröd Blues and heralded a blues talent from an unexpected place:

"Hoffsten was a major pop star in her native Sweden when a turbulent divorce and the onset multiple sclerosis turned her life into an Ingmar Bergman movie. She's back, defiant but wiser, with a terrific blues album that has divas Bonnie Raitt and Marcia Ball testifying that she's the real thing. Although she's no shouter, her tart, delicate soprano enables her to shift emotion nuances and deliver dimensions of feeling often missed by many blues belters."


With numerous gold and platinum albums on her resume, Louise Hoffsten has long been a top tier major pop music artist in Sweden. Despite her success on the home front, she's been an all too well kept secret as far as U.S. music buyers are concerned.... until now.

Her first album for Memphis International was originally entitled Blues and was only available as part a book of the same name, authored by Hoffsten in her native tongue. The album reflects the artist's emotional and physical tribulations at the time she was simultaneously stricken with multiple sclerosis and endured a painful divorce at the time of its recording. The album of classic blues songs chosen and produced by Hoffsten is an aural interpretation of the confusion, pain, spirituality and hope that she had written about in her book. It is said that the blues provides catharsis for those afflicted and that theory seems to be borne out by Hoffsten's experience.

The songs on the album include LIghtnin' Hopkins' "Baby Don't You Tear My Clothes," John Lee Hooker's "It Serves You Right To Suffer," Blind Willie Johnson's "God Don't Never Change" and a traffic stopping sultry version of Willie Dixon's classic "I Just Wanna Make Love To You" that has everyone who listens to it, believing it completely.

The album has been a staple on XM Radio's Bluesville channel where it was ranked at #1 for two weeks running and no less an authority than Blues Revue noted, "She understand the music and commiserates with its creators. Most important, Hoffsten takes this tradition and does nothing more than mean it."

Hoffsten has the last words: "The blues is a universal language, understood by everybody with thoughts and feelings. This album, through our friends at Memphis International, seems like the way to convey these emotions to the country that spawned it in the first place."