BIOGRAPHY
Laleh Pourkarim was born in Iran to democratic activist parents. The family lived in hiding before fleeing, after Laleh's birth, to Azerbaijan, then to Minsk. When she was nine, the Pourkarims moved to Sweden (family lore has it that her mother chose Sweden because she was a fan of ABBA).
At Hvitfeldtska High School she was enrolled in the music program, growing up with classical music, ballet and circus music. She later got interested in punk, reggae and jazz music. She also learned to play the guitar, and formed a jazz ensemble, Bejola, with her music teacher when she was a teenager, and went on to teach herself to play percussion and the saxophone.
American audiences will get their first taste of Laleh's artistry with the release of her five-song debut EP on Island Records. She writes, plays, records, produces, and engineers every note of her music herself in her studio in Stockholm. She built the studio with money from her advance from her deal with Warner Sweden, which she signed in 2002. Since then, Laleh has become a major star in Scandinavia, where she has released five albums and won three Swedish Grammis amid 10 nominations. Four of those nods were for her 2012 album "Sjung" and its massive hit "Some Die Young," which also appears on her U.S. EP. The song topped the charts throughout Scandinavia, where it became a healing anthem after the terrorist attacks that took 77 lives in two separate incidents in Norway in July 2011. Laleh was invited to perform the song everywhere, from the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo to a memorial concert marking the first anniversary of the attacks in Oslo's City Square.
She has written songs for many other artists like Lena Philipsson, Demi Lovato, Adam Lambert or Ellie Goulding. The brandnew single "Bara få va mig själv" from the album "Kristaller" reached the top-posistion in Svebsktoppen.
