The singer Ela on a stage Photo: dpa picture radio
From BZ/dpa
The Ukrainian-born singer Ela (“sometime”) did not have an easy start as a child in Germany.
“I’m very familiar with rejection, it was really difficult times,” the 30-year-old recalled on the program “Music Made in Germany” on the private Rhineland-Palatinate radio station RPR1.
At the age of seven, she moved with her family from Ukraine to Saarland and was enrolled there in the second grade, the singer reported. There she was “such a bird of paradise with my plush jackets and my colorful clothes”.
“Unfortunately, it meant that my backpack ended up in the garbage can and all that stuff,” said Ela. She had no friends and never wanted to go to school again.
Her elementary school teacher put her in a choir, “that’s how the integration somehow still took place”.
With her folk-pop band Elaiza, the singer competed in the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Copenhagen. She has also written songs for Helene Fischer and Adel Tawil, among others. The songwriter lives in Berlin. In her own songs she deals with topics such as feminism, love and solidarity.
The complete radio show “Music Made In Germany” with Miriam Audrey Hannah will be broadcast on Sunday (20 August) from 4 p.m. on RPR1., at 6.45 p.m. on bigFM and at 7 p.m. on Radio Regenbogen, the entire conversation in the interview podcast on musicmadeingermany.de