Axella Johannesson

One of the first "music cyber stars", due to the ability to distribute her music primarily via the Internet, Australian Singer/songwriter Axella Johannesson was born 11 January 1958 in Mount Vernon, New York, United States.
Personal life
Johannesson's family moved to Selden, New York in 1963, as part of the great exodus to the suburbs. She later moved to the Smithtown area with her mother and sister, when her parents divorced. "Things were kind of weird back then," she said in a 2002 radio interview on Gippland FM. "I'd attended six schools by fourth grade." Her mother remarried and the family settled in St James, NY.
Before she reached her teens, Johannesson became both a vegetarian and an avowed atheist , and remains so to this day.
Johannesson credits her mother's 45 rpm recordings of '60s pop music, her father's recordings of Trini Lopez and Hank Williams, and her stepfather's diverse collection of jazz and r&B recordings by artists including The Animals and Charlie Parker, along with her grandparents' recordings by artists including The Ink Spots and Nat King Cole, with helping her to learn to enjoy many styles of music. This inspired her to try songwriting.
Johannesson continued writing songs during her school years, while singing in cover bands. She also enjoyed performing as a solo act with her acoustic guitar, playing "coffee house" gigs in the Suffolk County, Long Island area. She retired from performing for several years after marrying and giving birth to three daughters.
When her marriage failed in 1989, Johannesson moved to Traralgon in Victoria, Australia, where she remarried and continues to reside.
Activism
As an adult, Johannesson was active in consumer advocacy. She often appeared before state and county legislatures to give testimony on issues in the public interest. She wrote extensively about public utility issues and was a registered intervenor, which allowed her to have input on behalf of consumers in public utility tariff cases.
As Executive Director of the Long Island Coalition for Consumer Awareness, Johannesson participated in the fight against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. She campaigned to put seat belts on school buses, and pushed for what became known as "The Lemon Law", a law written to protect car buyers. She was a frequent contributor to Suffolk Life Newspaper on consumer issues, and was heard regularly on "The Joel Martin Show" on WBAB radio in New York.
Cyber Musician
With the rise of the internet, Johannesson was one of the first to achieve "cyber fame" via on-line music delivery sites (OMDs) such as IUMA, Besonic, and mp3.com, among others, in the 1990s. She achieved several genre number ones on those sites. She also held the number one spot site-wide for a month on Ampcast.com in 2001, with "Mama Never Told You About Me", co-written with Jon Andersen of Texas.
After years of writing rock songs, and releasing the albums Fighting the Good Fight and Mama Never Told You About Me, Johannesson decided to pay homage to her roots by recording covers of some of her favorite '60s pop songs. Thanks to her early exposure to rhythm and blues records, she began to write and record in that genre ("I'm old enough to sing the blues now"). Her song "Ugly Man Blues", a comedic song recorded in 2004, received much airplay on internet radio, as well as being played on commercial and public radio worldwide. Finding it extraordinary that people on the other side of the planet were listening to her music, Johannesson said in a 2002 interview, "When someone told me that he heard one of my songs on the radio while sitting in a bar in Los Angeles, it blew my mind! I never would've thought that I'd live long enough hear someone say that!"
More recently, Johannesson has branched out into writing music for short films.
Although she still records, Johannesson's live performances are becoming relatively rare.

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