My father was a musician and my great inspiration as long as I can remember. Inspired by him, I attended elementary music school as a young boy. In my early teenage years I started to play in a rock band. We kept playing for years. That was a great time, a lot of gigs and unforgettable moments. When you’re young, you have so many plans and dreams. I was just about to follow them, unaware that something life changing was approaching. The war.

I was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city under siege that was constantly bombarded and attacked from the surrounding mountains. It was a kind of war never seen in the modern history. Civilians were deliberately and systematically targeted and more than 11,000 people were killed, among them 1,601 children. To live under those circumstances, mostly without food, electricity or water, was just a brutal way of surviving day by day.

After more than two years, in July 1994, empty, with a torn soul, I came to Sweden. In all the confusion my friends and I started a band just to check if it would still work. It did, and suddenly we found ourselves playing in different places in Sweden and Denmark. A couple of years later I began to record my own music in my little home studio.

The war is over and I’m grateful that I survived. It turned my world upside down but in a strange way it also helped me to realize that I am alive only if I never lose faith in love.

July 12, 2008