About Erja Lyytinen
Erja Lyytinen is a Finnish vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter.
Erja Lyytinen began playing the guitar when she was 15 years old. Around the same time, she started writing her own songs. In high school, she performed with various projects, one of them being a soul-influenced Brothers & Sisters band, in which she was the singer. At the time she was influenced heavily by artists like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Later she found the music of Koko Taylor, and she mentions one of her favourite songs from Taylor was the piece "I'm A Woman" from The Earthshaker album. She also mentions Bonnie Raitt as a great influence.
Throughout 1997 Lyytinen spent a year in Sweden studying in Malmö Musikhögskolan as an exchange student. She returned to Finland to study music education at Sibelius Academy. At the time she was the first woman to study electric guitar as a major at that institution.
Lyytinen took part in Finland's MTV3 channel's series called Kulkuri ja Kaunottaret in 1999. There she worked as a bandleader and as a lead guitarist. The music on the program was mainly based around the style of Finnish schlager music. Many famous Finnish artists of that genre performed on the series.
Attention!, Lyytinen's first album was published with "Dave's Special" band in 2002. The songs on the album were mostly danceable jump and swing blues numbers and were for the most part written by Lyytinen herself.
Throughout her career Lyytinen has been the opening act for Robert Plant, Focus and Tom Jones, and played with Joe Bonamassa, Jennifer Batten, Sonny Landreth and Carlos Santana, among others.
On 10 November 2002 Lyytinen was the opening act for Robert Plant, the former vocalist of Led Zeppelin. She has mentioned that the occasion is one of her most treasured concert memories.
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