05/11/2026
2 sisters from Gothenburg, Sweden started singing in a church choir as teenagers. Nobody outside their neighborhood knew their names. By 1994, their debut album had sold 9 million copies in America alone and one of them had survived a knife attack just weeks before hitting Number 1.
Their names were Linn and Jenny Berggren.
And their story is one of the most extraordinary in pop music history.
Linn Berggren was born on October 31, 1970, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her younger sister Jenny was born on May 19, 1972, in the same city. Their father, Göran, was an X-ray technician. Their mother, Birgitta, raised 3 children in a quiet suburb on the outskirts of town.
All 3 Berggren children took music lessons. Linn and Jenny both learned violin. Both sang in the choir at their local church.
Neither of them set out to become pop stars.
Jenny was studying to become a teacher. Linn was simply living her life in Gothenburg.
But their brother Jonas had other ideas.
In 1987, Jonas Berggren started a band with 2 friends as a school project. The group cycled through names — New Arbat Avenue, CAD (Computer-Aided Disco), and Tech-Noir. They played local clubs. They experimented with techno, Italo disco, and house music.
By 1990, his 2 sisters had joined as singers and a new friend named Ulf Ekberg had come in on keyboards.
They chose a new name: Ace of Base.
In 1991, they recorded a demo featuring a song called Mr. Ace — an early version of what would become their first massive hit. Jonas and Ulf drove to Stockholm and visited every major record company in Sweden.
Every single one said no.
One executive reportedly told them their songs were "too obvious, too simple."
They drove to Copenhagen and walked into the offices of a small Danish label called Mega Records. The label heard the demo immediately and signed them on the spot.
Then came the accident that changed everything.
Jonas and Ulf sent their demo tape to a Swedish producer named Denniz Pop. He listened once, didn't like it, and tossed the cassette into his car.
The tape got stuck in his car's cassette player.
Every single morning, when Denniz Pop got in his car to drive to work, the song came on. He couldn't get it out. He had to listen to it, over and over, for weeks. And gradually — grudgingly — he started to hear something.
He had lost the band's contact details. When they finally called him a few months later, he invited them to his SweMix studio in Stockholm.
What he did next was brilliant.
He stripped away roughly 50% of the instrumentation Jonas and Ulf had built. He simplified everything. He moved the whistling melody from the end of the track to the opening, making the song instantly recognizable from its very first second.
That song was released in August 1992 as All That She Wants. Linn Berggren sang lead. Jenny harmonized.
Within weeks, it sat at Number 1 in Denmark. Then the whole of Scandinavia. Then Germany. Then, in May 1993, it topped the charts in the United Kingdom for 3 weeks.
Still, American labels refused to touch it. Their answer was always the same: "This band will never work in the States."
Then something happened on a yacht.
Clive Davis — the legendary founder of Arista Records, the man who had signed Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen — was on vacation on his private yacht when All That She Wants came over the radio.
He stopped everything.
He rushed to sign a deal with Mega Records for the Americas. By October and November 1993, All That She Wants reached Number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
But Clive Davis had already heard something else. After finishing their album Happy Nation, Jonas Berggren had written an extremely simple new song. When Davis demanded to hear it, he loved it immediately.
That song was called The Sign.
Davis restructured the whole album, added 3 new tracks including The Sign, renamed the album entirely, and released it in the United States on November 23, 1993.
The Sign spent 6 consecutive weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became the best-selling single of the entire year 1994. The album sat in the Billboard Top 200 for 26 consecutive weeks and was certified 9 times platinum in America alone — selling 9 million copies in just 1 country.
The Guinness Book of World Records declared it the best-selling debut album of all time.
Here's what makes the story impossible to forget.
In April 1994, as The Sign was exploding across America, an obsessed German fan broke into the Berggren family home in Gothenburg. She climbed through a window in the night. She found Jenny sleeping in her old bedroom — she had returned to her parents' house after 2 years away.
The fan woke Jenny up with a knife at her throat.
Jenny described it years later: "She broke into my parents' house when I was staying there after two years away. I woke up and she was standing over me with the knife. I was terrified. That was the darker side of fame."
The fan was restrained. Jenny survived. The band hired bodyguards for the first time.
Just weeks later, Jenny found out The Sign had hit Number 1 in the United States. The biggest chart position of their lives. The moment every artist dreams of.
She said: "All I could think was that I almost got killed. Everyone was like, 'wow, let's have a huge party.' I didn't want a party. I was broken."
The 2 sisters who had started in a church choir, in a quiet Swedish suburb, had conquered the biggest music market on earth — and paid a price nobody warned them about.
3 songs from that one album — All That She Wants, The Sign, and Don't Turn Around — all appeared simultaneously in the Billboard Hot 100 for 48 consecutive weeks. A record that stood until Katy Perry eventually broke it.
Ace of Base went on to sell 50 million copies of their first 4 studio albums. They became the third most successful Swedish band of all time — behind only ABBA and Roxette.
Linn Berggren eventually stepped back from the spotlight due to ongoing vocal problems. She was replaced on stage and in promotion by Jenny, who carried the band's public face into the late 1990s and beyond.
Through all of it, both sisters kept singing in their church choir when they were home in Gothenburg.
Fame never changed who they were at the beginning.
2 girls in a Swedish church with their violin lessons and their quiet suburb — and then, somehow, the entire world knew every single word of their songs.
Share this with someone who grew up listening to The Sign and still knows every single word.
~Old Photo Club
