Mikael Wiehe - Career

Career

Wiehe's father was Danish and he spent the first six years of his life in Copenhagen. His father left the family when he was 5 years old, and when he was 6 his mother moved with the family to Malmö, in the Scania region of southern Sweden, giving Wiehe his noticeable Scanian accent. He is a leftist folk musician, dealing with what he considers right and wrong in the society from the eyes of the proletariat, but he also writes personal, non-political songs.

Wiehe was one of the lead singers and the leading songwriter of Hoola Bandoola Band in the 1970s. After the split of the group in 1975, he was the leader of various other bands before becoming a solo artist in the beginning of the 1980s. He was a close friend of the late Björn Afzelius, the other lead singer of Hoola Bandoola Band. They sometimes toured around Scandinavia and recorded together in the 1980s and 90s.

Today, Wiehe performs all around Sweden, using material from his 20-some albums (excluding various compilations). A recently published song book contains the lyrics and melodies to 220 of his songs. In 2000, he released the single Det här är ditt land, a Swedish-language adaptation of the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land which received substantial play on Swedish radio. Wiehe has also translated many of Bob Dylan's songs into Swedish some were performed by the late Totta Näslund.