Marcel Winatschek

Kerli From Elva

Kerli is from Elva, Estonia—five thousand people surrounded by forest, in a place that had recently escaped the Soviet Union but hadn’t quite shaken it. She was the weird kid who sang, and she had to get out. Not romantically. Just gone, anywhere, it didn’t matter where.

Where she grew up, there were rules about feeling. Don’t be too happy or sad, because something bad would happen. Not might—would. You learned to bury it. Except Kerli couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was always the one who felt everything, who wanted more, who couldn’t survive that kind of suffocation.

By fourteen she’d won the Estonian Eurovision pre-selection. That year she decided music was all that mattered. By fifteen she’d auditioned for Island Def Jam and was signed. She escaped. Made it.

Her music is genuinely strange. Minor key, off-kilter, the whole production cold and wrong and right. Someone who grew up somewhere passion was dangerous carries it in the sound. Someone who could never be casual about anything, who had to mean every word.