The Amazing - FUV Live - 2015

The Swedish band The Amazing began as many do: just friends, drinking and jamming together. The name was born from one of those early jam sessions, when guitarist and '70s prog rock fanatic Reine Fiske jokingly declared them, “The Amazing, 1969." This not only gave The Amazing a name, but a place in time, as if they were an unknown band at an imaginary British music festival in 1969. It was tongue-in-cheek, but ironically for this self-deprecating group, the name stuck. The Amazing recently returned to Studio A to do a rare acoustic session with three of the five band members: frontman/guitarist Christoffer Grunup, keyboardist Fredrik Swahn, and drummer Moussa Fadera.

The Amazing’s performance showcased that the early, offhand-joke-of-a-band name actually foreshadowed their future. With five years of playing and recording now under their belts, the group's third album, Picture You, delves even deeper into their ethereal sound, finding the band at their most focused and deserving of the superlative moniker that has carried them here.

• The Amazing - Words & Music - 2013