Oh Land - Watermusic (2018)

Before an injury put an end to her dancing career, Nanna Øland Fabricius studied with the Royal Swedish Ballet as a teenager. Permanently sidelined by a fractured disc in her spine, she turned her focus to music instead. Fabricius had been raised in the outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark, by a particularly musical set of parents -- her mother sang opera, while her father composed classical music -- but she took a different approach to her own songwriting, which drew heavily from dance-pop, R&B, and a year's worth of tutelage at the University of Electronic Composition. Now operating under the stage name Oh Land, she began creating a sound that evoked a unique mix of Robyn, Feist, and Lily Allen. Her dance training came into play, too, allowing Oh Land to fill her early performances with choreography and theatrical flourishes. By 2008, she'd signed to a Danish label and released her debut EP, Fauna. One year later, she inked an international deal with Epic. Working with Dan Carey, Dave McCracken, and Pharrell Williams, Oh Land spent much of 2010 working on her full-length debut. Her first single, "Sun of a Gun," was released late that year, with a self-titled album following in March 2011. Her sophomore long-player, Wishbone, arrived in 2013. Following its release, Fabricius tried her hand at acting, starring in the 2014 Danish western The Salvation. In November of that year, she released her third album, Earth Sick, and announced that part of the album's proceeds would be donated to Greenpeace's Save the Arctic campaign. She combined her ballet roots with her music in 2016 with Askepot, the soundtrack to the ballet of Cinderella that was performed at the Tivoli Ballet Theatre. ~ Andrew Leahey