About

Hi, I’m Ann-Sofi, the creator of The Jam Kitchen – and a whole bunch of other things.

I write songs for breakfast and compose piano music in my basement when I really should be doing the laundry. I have two young kids who often join in singing and dancing as well. This blog is about our life.

More than anything, however, this blog is about living your dreams -and how having a couple of young children can paradoxically both contribute and somehow interfere with those dreams. It’s about creating in the midst of chaos, and having fun even though you didn’t do your homework (read housework). It’s also a lot about perfectionism and fear, and how to get yourself out of its crippling grip.

You see, I didn’t always make music. In fact, until one day in late winter 2017, at the tender age of 47, I had no idea I could write songs. I always WANTED to sing and play, and for a long time, I had this idea about how I would like to sing songs that felt meaningful to me. But a whole bunch of fears and misunderstandings got in the way, for many, many years.

In the meantime, I did a coach training and started to help other people find and live THEIR dreams and overcome their fears. But slowly that little voice in my head got louder…and louder… and louder. I felt like a hypocrite and realized I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing as a coach until I started to respect my own dreams. So… here we go 🙂 As one of my mentors, Barbara Sher, put it: “It’s only too late if you don’t start now”

Background

I first created The Jam Kitchen in spring 2012. I was just about to finish my training to be a Barbara Sher life coach. I was also 5 months pregnant with my third child. I choose the name because I like to improvise – to jam – and because the kitchen is my favorite place to hang out… I thought it would mostly be about the coaching tools I had learned. Somewhere in the back of my head I also thought I would write a bit about my somehow unconventional approach to making music, and maybe that I would share a recipe now and then (One of my previous jobs was “recipe creator” for one of those companies that deliver boxes with organic vegetables.

But the years passed, the children needed my attention, I was tired and shattered as mothers of young children tend to be, and the blog never really caught on. Then one day my website crashed and died. And I made the decision not to try to recover it, but to give it a new form – from the place where I am now, seven years later – where that music I had in the back of my head has stepped up in a most unexpected way and kind of taken on a life of its own.

About me (the mini-version)

I grew up in a tiny village in the forests in Lappland in northern Sweden but left as soon as I had finished school and have lived most of my adult life in the south of Sweden. Since 2010 I live in Frankfurt in Germany. I have a background as a landscape architect but have changed jobs and careers more often than most people go on vacation. In spring 2017 I discovered – much to my own surprise – that I could write songs and compose music, which has been my main focus ever since.