20 ára »Jóhanna Guðrún 9« - „Hver er hver“ - Yohanna

Today is a special day for all fans of Iceland's Most Beautiful Voice! It's the 20th anniversary of the release of one of the most successful debut albums in music history of Iceland - »Jóhanna Guðrún 9«! And because that's a very pleasing occasion, I just had to make this "new" video....

Yohanna's or Jóhanna Guðrún's debut album was released on her tenth birthday, October 16, 2000. The album contains 11 Icelandic cover versions of internationally very popular pop songs.
The CD was a huge success, or more precisely it was the most successful album in Iceland in 2000! So were sold far more copies of "9" than of the album "The Marshall Mathers LP" by US super star Eminem!

Sales rose to unimaginable heights and Jóhanna's debut album quickly reached gold and platinum status. Well over 10,000 CDs were sold in Iceland, with a population of just 281,000 Icelanders at the time! Just to illustrate: Converted to the number of inhabitants, over 2.8 million copies should have sold over the counter in Germany. Very astonishing but just as pleasing for the then ten year old Icelandic singer!
So it is not surprising that Jóhanna was awarded the "Tónlistarverðlaun fólksins" as the best newcomer of the year 2000. Her first, but not last award...
To describe the gigantic hype in Jóhanna's homeland that surrounded the new and unmistakably highly talented child prodigy with the golden voice, I would like to quote the newspaper "Morgunblaðið":
On December 31, 2000, the paper wrote in a report "Jóhanna Guðrún, tiu ára, er vinsælasta söngkona landsins í dag." ("Jóhanna Guðrún, ten years old, is the most popular singer in the country these days.") and declared the entire Christmas season of the year as "Jóhönnujól", which means nothing else than "Jóhanna-Christmas" ...

With this album, Jóhanna Guðrún started her remarkable career as one of the most popular and undoubtedly best singers in Iceland ...

The album "Jóhanna Guðrún 9" was produced and published by María Björk Sverrisdóttir. I'm still grateful that she discovered Jóhanna's talent and potential and that she fostered my favorite singer so much in her early years...

The song “Hver er hver” is track 4 of the CD and a cover version of “What I am” (1988, written by Brandon Aly, Edie Brickell, John Houser, John Walter Bush, Kenneth Withrow) - the Icelandic lyrics are by Karl Ágúst Úlfsson.
© 2000 Hljóðsmiðjan, Hafnarfjörður, Iceland

Source of the original video: http://krakkaruv.spilari.ruv.is/krakk...