biography
Rebecka Törnqvist was born in the university town Uppsala, north of the Swedish capital Stockholm. Daughter of a journalist/teacher mother and physicist/musician father, Törnqvist spent parts of her childhood in Lesotho and Kenya before returning home to boarding school. She began writing songs at the age of five and a few years later moved onto confiscating the family radio in the dead of night to record music from Radio Luxemburg and other foreign stations. Alongside classical and East African music and the songs of Alice Tégner it was pop music, which kept Törnqvist company and provided respite as the family uprooted itself at regular intervals.
In 1993, the strongly jazz-derived debut album “A Night Like This” was released to critical and unexpected commercial success. The following album “Good Thing” played extensively on the radio and propelled Törnqvist onto the continental and Japanese markets.
The collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning musician Per “Texas” Johansson led to the album ”The Stockholm Kaza Session”. It was produced on the Kaza label that Törnqvist had created with Kjell Andersson, legendary A&R at EMI.
”Tremble My Heart” (1998) was a milestone in Törnqvists work as she considers it to be her first “own” album, marking a change in her composing and of musical concept.. Pål Svenre remained as producer while Johan Lindström entered as arranger och guitarist. The collaboration with Lindström had great impact on Törnqvists music making, and 2006 he produced ”Melting Into Orange”, followed by ”The Cherry Blossom And the Skyline Rising from the Street” 2008.
Earlier Törnqvist had joined forces with Sara Isaksson as singers in the new group “Gloria”. The song “Party On My Own” became a minor hit from the first album. Isaksson and Törnqvist returned as a duo a few years later to produce “Fire In The Hole”, acoustic interpretations of Steely Dan’s music.
In 2006 Törnqvist worked with producer Jari Haapalainen on her contribution to the Olle Adolphson-homage album “Dubbeltrubbel”. Thoughts of a future and more extensive collaboration took hold and has now come to fruition with the upcoming album “Scorpions”.
Törnqvist lives in the countryside where she is torn between her cosmopolitan yearnings and her gardening hermit romanticism.
