Viljen Er Styrke

Rasmus Lyberth was born in Maniitsoq in 1951 and grew up in Nuuk, the son of the teacher and writer Erik Lyberth. He was performing and playing guitar by the age of twelve. A few years later he went to sea, and it was on one of those voyages, by the usual account, that he decided music would be his future. In 1969 he began singing in the bars of Copenhagen, where he soon became known for emotional songs about the Greenland he knew and loved. A television appearance in 1973 led to a contract with the Danish label Demos, and his first album, Erningaa, followed in 1974. Its success set up the second, released in 1978 under the Greenlandic title Piumassuseq nukiuvoq, known in Danish as Viljen er styrke: the will is strength. That same year he received the PH Prize. In 1979 he entered the Danish Melodi Grand Prix and sang his song in Greenlandic, finishing eleventh of seventeen. After the second album he stepped back from recording for a long stretch, trained as an actor at the Tuukaq Theatre, and worked as an aircraft mechanic until he turned professional musician in 1988. Since the 1970s he has been one of the most popular artists on the Greenlandic music scene, and he has helped open ears to Greenlandic music far beyond the island, even though he usually sings in his mother tongue. The album's title has aged into something like a motto for his career: a singer who kept faith with his own language and found that audiences came to him.