Childhood & Early Life
Forsberg was born on May 2, 1994 in Pietarsaari (another Swedish name of which is Jakobstad), Finland. Her mother was Finnish while her father was Swedish, although he spoke in fluent Finnish.
As her parents were Baptist missionaries and devoted to missionary work, Forsberg’s childhood included travelling widely. She lived in Texas for five years and then in the U.S for a year.
When she was six, her parents settled back to Finland permanently.
Ardent music lovers that her parents were, Forsberg’s father had asked her to choose an instrument to start practicing when she was eight years old. Although double bass was her first choice, when her father introduced her to cello, she could not help but fall in love with the instrument. Since her mid teen days, she started studying voice formally and also sang at the churches.
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Career
The start to Forsberg’s career was sensational. At the mere age of 19, she posted a video titled ‘What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners’ on her YouTube channel, ‘Smoukahontas Official’ (her official channel is now ‘SAARA’). It spread like wild fire across the globe becoming one of the major hits of 2014. The video was released on March 3rd and it has been viewed over 17 million times.
This gave her an opportunity to come to ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ which gave her much recognition in the music industry and she caught the eyes of many producers. The show was aired on 7th April, 2014. She was on the show for around 180 seconds, and she impressed Ellen so much that she gifted Sara a camera and a tripod. The video is called ‘The Multilingual Gibberish Girl’ on YouTube.
When Forsberg went to the Ellen DeGeneres show, the entire trip was documented by MTV and released as a short series, ‘Sara Goes LA’. The series was later made available on YouTube as well.
Her mimicking skills were also the talk of the town. By mostly using non-existent words, she could mimic accents and speech melodies of various languages including that of the American with a California accent, Japanese with Estuary English, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Arabic to name a few. This generated a lot of praise for her from various media houses in different countries.
Forsberg re-impersonated few of the languages from her former video and added a couple of new ones in her first sequel. Those included ‘Something African’ and ‘Scottish’ which received a warm welcome by the listeners.
In another sequel, she released a video named ‘One Girl, 14 Genres’ where she is seen showcasing her talent of singing in 14 different styles and mimicking a number of musical genres.
By May 2014, Forsberg was a well-known name and bagged a deal with a production house by the name of Omnivision Entertainment, popularly known as My Damn Channel. As a part of the deal, she performed on their YouTube channel ‘WestToastTV’.
Keeping up with all the commitments was becoming tough for Forsberg when she decided that it was time to move closer to work. As a result she moved to Los Angeles in May 2014, where she currently resides.
Things have been looking up for Forsberg ever since she signed a landmark deal with US record label, Capitol Records in July 2014, becoming the first Finnish person in the process. The CEO of Capitol was extremely optimistic about their deal comparing it to the deals with international stars like Adele and Sam Smith.
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Her first single with the company came out in April 2015. The song, ‘Ur Cool’ was an instant chartbuster in her native country Finland and other parts of the world.
Following her success with Capitol, Forsberg became even more famous than before. The months that followed were quite hectic for her as she was involved with a number of projects both in Finland and the United States.
Her next project was a song called ‘Vauvoja’ where she collaborated with her fellow countryman, Kasmir. This song, too, was an immediate success in Finland, reaching the number 1 spot in most charts. Around the same time she was also involved with ‘Girl’s Generation’, a K-Pop band. She co-wrote their song ‘You Think’ from the album ‘Lion Heart’.
Later that year, it was revealed that Forsberg was involved with the making of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Cashing in her talent as a language expert, she helped Lucas film develop the alien language in the movie. It took her and the team 18 months to create it.
Collaborations with other artists continued as she co-wrote ‘My Heart Wants Me Dead’ with Lisa Ajax and ‘Drip Drop’ with Taemin. However, she had a fallout with Capitol Records in February 2016 after they had quite a few difference of opinions.
It didn’t mean the end of road for Forsberg as she continued to release her songs independent of a label. ‘The Urge’, the lead song from her debut EP was released in July of the same year.
She has also ventured into shows that are not musical per se. In 2016, she was one of the judges of the Finnish edition of ‘Got Talent’. She has also hosted ‘Remotely Funny’, a British game show on CBBC. She was also one of the creators of the alien language in ‘Star Trek Beyond’, a movie in which she plays a minor voice role.
Throughout her career Forsberg has appeared on many reality shows. These shows include Kaikki Vastaan 1, ‘Heikki Paasonen Show’, ‘Yökylässä Maria Veitola’, ‘SuomiLOVE’, ‘Supertähdet’ and ‘Posse’, among others.
