Erja Lyytinen Band
Erja Lyytinen (Photo by Hans Lehtinen) ‘Forbidden Fruit’ is the fifth solo album from Erja Lyytinen, a pocket dynamo often referred to as Finland’s Queen Of The Slide Guitar. She had also been tagged as her homeland’s answer to Bonnie Raitt. Though flattering, neither epithet is entirely accurate. Lyytinen can play the Dobro and is highly accomplished in many different forms of guitar technique – not just bottleneck blues. And like Bonnie Raitt, Erja Lyytinen chooses not to dwell exclusively in any one particular niche. The blues is her home – undeniably so – but she loves to explore, blur and, where appropriate, transcend the genre’s boundaries. Born in Kuopio, a small town in central Finland, Erja was raised by a musically-orientated family on the sounds of Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Deep Purple. She also listened to a lot of pop music, especially Madonna and Michael Jackson. By the age of 15 she was singing and playing the violin with her mother (a bassist) and father (who ...