Lina Tullgren is from Southern Maine just over the border of the northernmost
seacoast of New Hampshire. It's an unexpected location for artistic incubation, but
osmosis is bound to occur when you grow up surrounded by family, friends, and
weirdos interacting at all times with their own interpretations of creative output.
Shifting in trainings and traditions, the 23 year old eventually found herself a voice
with the electric guitar, uniquely flavored and shaped from the many years of fiddle
lessons and classical technique. The shifts in genre and instrumentation are
stark, but important for her growth as a songwriter. Lina's morphing interaction
with music has mirrored a growing determination to harness her ability to melodically
and lyrically express complex emotions - a rare gift at such a young age.
With 2016's Wishlist EP - recorded to tape at the home of band mate Ty Ueda -
Lina proved an ability to craft simple, introspective and succinct songs, each one
a pulsing glow leaving you both hollow and whole, alone but never lonely. It is on
Lina's debut album Won that we reap the full rewards of this newfound confidence
in expression and rejection of internal hesitation. "The writing doesn't necessarily
get easier, but I feel more comfortable tapping into emotions and going to those
places that need to be written about. Won, as it turned out, is the product that I
have been hearing and picturing in my head as I write and listen to music." It is the
product of what happens when you push past the fear of what it means to think
out loud - to become accountable for your internal struggles by way of manifesting
your ideas into songs that are then free to grow apart from you, to exist on
their own while always remaining specifically implicative of you. Now backed by a
full band, each track manages to remain piercingly intimate, sometimes brief, and
always honest, while gaining a wholly new sense of gestation both sonically and
lyrically.
