Poverina Shows

My debut album Poverina is going to be 20-years old this spring. It came out in May 2005 in Finland (and in 2007 in the USA). To celebrate I am going to be performing two Poverina shows in September. Here are the dates and links to tickets:

September 17th, 2025 G Livelab TAMPERE, FI

September 19th, 2025 G Livelab HELSINKI, FI

Joining me on stage will be my long standing band: Mikael Hakkarainen, Veli Kauppinen, Alina Toivanen and Johannes Salomaa. Hakkarainen can be heard on the original recording of Poverina. The rest of the band has played with me for over a decade at this point.

Music Video for “They Need You…” from 2006

This seems like the right time to look into the vaults! Here is my first music video. It was never released (until today). We made it in 2006 in between the Finnish and US release of Poverina.

The makers of the music video were:
Director – Miika Saksi
Cinematographer – Jukka Rouhuvirta
Dancers – Gruppen Fyra (Lotta Wichmann, Jenni Nikolajeff, Tommi Haapaniemi)
Make-up and hair – ?
Style – ?
Producer – Paulus Puusaari

If we have not remembered your name, please contact me and I’ll add your information to the video credits.

In 2005 I was 23-years old. It felt like realizing my dream had taken a long time and I was now too old to be releasing my debut album in the spring. It was a big production, the most expensive album I have thus far made. I had a producer (Nick Triani), engineer (Jyrki Tuovinen, Triani), musicians (names given later) and an arranger for the orchestral parts (Jimi Tenor). There was a combination of home spinning and a nice load of studio time in some of the best studios in the country. I benefited from the timing: just before the absolute take-over of home studios and the decision of record companies to reduce budgets to smaller and then to none.

I had been writing songs since I was 13, but most of the Poverina pieces came relatively freshly, closer to the process of recording. The name of the album [italian, pronounced po-ve-ree-na] is an example of the certainty and playfulness I possessed: my boyfriend’s Italian mother used to call me ‘poverina’ when ever we met or spoke on the phone and I liked the pity and the reference to poverty –– of having nothing and being nothing in feminine form –– Poor girl, tyttörukka. These were the connotations I was evoking. Of course it was a difficult title, often pronounced erroneously as ‘power-ina’ and interpreted as some kind of a feminist statement of empowerment. But my artistry was already constructing its forms both more seriously and more playfully than I was given credit for.
    As we recorded, I had the sense that my songwriting was getting better just then and so the atmosphere of studios and my ability to be quite spontaneous allowed for some very new tracks to end up on the album. On the other hand, writing songs for ten years before the first official release is a long time (I am discounting demos here). I had time to imagine and visualize how Astrid Swan would sound like. My vision was vast, I did not want to limit myself. It wasn’t enough to just have a group of musicians to realize one sound, I wanted orchestral sweeps, electronic minimalism and rock as well as jazz band capabilities. Luckily, I got it all. Jimi Tenor agreed to arrange the horns, strings and percussion as well as playing on some songs himself. In the bass department, I got to have both electric (Janne Lehtinen) and double bass (Tapani Varis) on the album. On other tracks you can hear Ninni Poijärvi on violin and my childhood and school friend Juulia Niiniranta on viola. There was Mongo Aaltonen on percussion and on some other tracks Abdis Assefa, Tuomas Toivonen and Arttu Tolonen – the Giant Robots – brought their city cool minimalism. There was the steadiness of Heikki Tikka on drums and the promise of Jukka Eskola’s trumpet playing… So many great musicians were willing to gift their time and sound to the album. If Poverina was a film or a series of TV episodes, it would have been rich in characters and plot twists, but I trusted that everything was united by my storytelling songs, voice and piano. That has been a recipe I have followed ever since, sometimes to more distant nooks and other times I have been almost easy to follow…

Poverina was enthusiastically received in Finland. Though I remember answering questions about my songwriting a lot. Did I really write it all myself? Was I really playing? I was often met with polite disbelief. Was I real? Was I late, early, a copy or an original?
Later I learned that my debut album was especially meaningful to a host of young women and LGBTQIA+ community members, some of whom have become artists of their own.
I have no yearning to claim to be the first of anything, but there was a sense of newness attached to me and to Poverina. The fact that I wrote and sang in English was not a problem then. I was perceived as a pragmatist: she must be reaching beyond this land.

In 2007 Poverina was published by Minty Fresh in the USA. Another dream-come-true. There was no music video for the Finnish release in 2005, but in 2006 we made a video for “They Need You If They Think You Love Them”. I remember it was aimed for the US release of Poverina, which had been agreed after a solo showcase at SXSW, Austin in 2006. I wore the copper dress that then featured on the album cover and the music video. In artistic co-operation you can never be certain of the outcome, it is always something resembling a dream and constructing something else from it. The video for “They Need You” had some elements that I wished for: choreographed dancing, a kind of narrative that builds from the song, but it had others that I felt uncomfortable with. Was I turning into the princess of other people’s dreams that I was warning against on my first ever single? Was I selling or being sold? Ultimately, due to artistic differences and managerial issues, the video was shelved and became something of a mystical memory. I did not see it for 19 years. Now I can watch it and think what if. What if I had traveled to the US with the video accompanying my music? What if I had set aside my hesitation and my searching? 

To read more on the times, here is a link to Swan’s 2024 essay “Fiction at the Root of My Existence” on the early 2000s and what it was like to attempt to forge a career in music as a solo woman on the road: https://wuwr.pl/awr/article/view/15632

Poverina Remaster

Poverina 20th Anniversary Edition will be out in September 2025 as a limited edition CD – with a reinterpretation of the US album artwork by Varpu Eronen. The remaster will feature one unreleased track from the Poverina sessions – “Special One’s” – a song I recorded a version of for the Teosto-palkinto winning album From The Bed and Beyond.

There might be more stuff coming this year, so keep your ears pealed and your minds, hearts and the rest of you intact!