Astrid Swan is a songwriter, performer, writer, and researcher. Her creative expansiveness manifests across music, literature, and research. She writes, produces, records, and mixes her own songs, drawing inspiration from 20th-century American songwriters, children’s poetry, Finno-Scandinavian folk traditions, and classical musical heritage. The result is a blend of pop structuralism, artful sensitivity, and the cool poetry of the North. Accompanying herself on piano, Swan crafts an emotionally precise poetics of popular music-sometimes comforting, sometimes immersing the listener in a bloom of sound.

Her new single, “Special Ones,” was written one night when she was just over twenty, but only now, years later, has she decided to share it with a wider audience. Her warm vocals and expressive instrumental arrangements resonate as a kind of gesture of belated reflection.

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