Astrid Swan (Joutseno, b. 1982) is a Finnish songwriter, performer, scholar and author. In 2025 she is a researcher in the Finnish Research Council funded project Counter-Narratives of Cancer & a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Life-Writing Centre, Oxford University.

Record company/levy-yhtiö: Soliti, triani@playgroundmusic.com
Live booking/keikkamyynti: Fullsteam Agency, Jaakko Salo jaakko@fullsteam.fi.

Research queries: astrid.joutseno@helsinki.fi

Images on this site are by Valreza Collective and Tekla Vály (unless otherwise marked)

Bio

Astrid Swan is a songwriter, performer, writer and researcher. Since her debut in 2005 she has published six solo albums as well as a series of collaborative releases. Swan’s solo records have been released in Finland, USA, England, Germany and Scandinavia. Over the years she has performed on multiple tours in Europe and the USA. Swan’s sixth solo album From the Bed and Beyond won the prestigious Finnish music award, Teosto-palkinto, in 2018. The album, which describes the experience of becoming seriously ill and encountering the figure of death, was shortlisted for the Nordic Music Prize and nominated at the Emma Awards (her second nomination for a Finnish Grammy.) In 2021 Swan released her latest solo album D/other, which is an accomplished amalgamation of her thematic songwriting over her career, sonic production and her work with the long-term accompanying musicians in her band. In 2019 Swan co-composed, co-produced, recorded and mixed the SWAN/KOISTINEN EP (Soliti), a collaboration with singer/songwriter Stina Koistinen (Color Dolor) and the Canadian musician Owen Pallett.

Swan’s creative expansiveness has resulted in intersecting careers in music, literature and research. At this point, Swan considers it her method to continue to work in all three areas, often inspecting thematic conglomerates in both artistic and research methods at the same time. During her 20-year career in music, Swan has become an award-winning Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil 2021, from University of Helsinki, gender studies) and a practicing researcher as well as an author. She is currently a visiting scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, University of Oxford 2024-2025, where she works on the Finnish Research Council funded project Counter-Narrative of Cancer. In 2019 Swan published a Finnish-language memoir Viimeinen kirjani: kirjoituksia elämästä (Nemo), which constructed a narrative of the different strands of her life experience from a child who grew up in an unsafe home to a woman who wrote her own songs in the early 2000s to falling ill with incurable cancer in her early 30s. In 2024 Swan published her first novel, Noitarakastaja (S&S Kustannus) which she describes as an experiment on literary form and an elegy to mother-daughter love in the grips of generational violence.  Swan writes, produces, records and mixes her music. Her songwriting has drawn from the American songbook of the 20^th century, the nursery rhymes and folk songs of Finno-Scandinavia and the classical and contemporary music traditions of the last centuries. The result is a blend of pop structuralism, art music sensibilities, and the cold weather poetry of the dream escape from the North. Accompanying herself with piano, Swan is a storyteller striving for emotional accuracy in the poetics of music. Sometimes this might sound like being comforted in hell, other times like residing in a sonic bloom.

As a composer Swan is currently working on two projects: a) she is recording pop songs to express the insecurity, unpredictability and melancholia of grief and b) she is composing her path toward ancestry by using the recordings of violinist Kerttu Wanne (1905-1963) and pianist Astrid Joutseno (1899-1962) to co-create with them.