The Future

Simon Lynge was born in Holstebro, Denmark, in 1980 but grew up in Qaqortoq in southern Greenland. His father was a theatrical performer and accordionist who played with Rasmus Lyberth. By Lynge's own account he had no formal schooling as a child and worked as a shepherd and hunter in a village of fewer than forty people, an hour by boat from the nearest town. As a teenager he delivered groceries for a supermarket in Qaqortoq, then moved to Denmark to study opera, piano, drums and theory at the Holstebro Music School. He worked his way through Copenhagen's young music scene and travelled to London, Nashville and Los Angeles to write and perform. In 2008 a concert at Highland Grounds in Hollywood impressed the producer Matt Forger, an engineer on Michael Jackson's Thriller, who suggested recording his songs. The sessions at Bright Orange Studios in Los Angeles became his debut album, The Future, released in 2010 by the London independent label Lo-Max. It made him the first solo artist from Greenland to have an album released across the United Kingdom, and it reached the top of Amazon UK's rock chart in its first week. The title song had already been used in a 2009 advertisement for Hotel Arctic in Ilulissat, which won a gold award in Berlin. Lynge went on to play Glastonbury, the first Greenlander to do so, and toured Europe supporting Emmylou Harris. A former shepherd from a tiny settlement had found his way into British record shops, singing in English about what comes next.