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From her early years in Wuppertal to the enormously successful career that she
has today, she has come a long way. She has gone on tour throughout the
German-speaking regions of Europe and five cities in China, played with Bosse,
Keimzeit and Virginia Jetzt!, opened for Xavier Naidoo and Herbert
Grönemeyer, and delighted fans all over the world. She is Kira.
Born on October 20, 1978 as the second of three children, Kira grew up in
Wuppertal with her two brothers and a large family. After a long period of
pleading, she got a violin and enrolled in a music school at the age of ten.
After six years of studying this instrument, however, she began to realize
that she would not be able to develop herself on it. So she got a job at a
metalworks factory and earned enough money to buy her first electric guitar,
which she still has to this day.
Immediately she began writing her songs, which had English lyrics at the time.
"If you write your own material," she has said, "there's a personal meaning
and the greatest sense of credibility behind every word and every note. And
that's also the most important factor for me—it doesn't matter whether
I'm listening to music or writing it. A song has to say something to me, be
honest and touch me."
In her early years Kira often devoted more time to her guitar studies and her
songwriting than to her school work. Ultimately, she decided to drop out of
school after twelfth grade to devote herself fully to her music. With the help
of her guitar teacher, she recorded one of her first songs and submitted it to
a home recording contest advertised in the magazine Gitarre & Bass.
Though she initially didn't count on the idea that something would come of it,
her material was passed on to Hamburg-based producer Michael Hagel, who called
her a year later to provide his feedback.
Over the next two years, Kira constantly wrote and recorded songs, sending
them to Hamburg for his feedback. Now as her producer, he encouraged her
again and again to try writing her songs with German lyrics. "As soon as I
tried that," Kira has said, "we were both immediately convinced by the result
and the new feeling it generated." Today she can't imagine singing in English
any more: "I love my language and the many possibilities it offers me to
express myself and to define who I am."
Knowing everything would fizzle out if she didn't take the next step, in 2000
Kira decided to move to Hamburg, where she enrolled in the pop music course
at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. In 2001 she landed a publishing
deal with Freibank. Though she was subsequently interviewed by several
interested record companies, none of them was willing to unconditionally
support the clear line of her music.
By lucky coincidence, however, Freibank had heard that Herbert
Grönemeyer's record label Grönland was looking for new German
talent. At an appointment in London in November 2002, Kira was introduced
to Grönemeyer, who was so impressed with her singing and guitar-playing
that he signed her to the label just four days later.
Kira's first album, Inauswendig, was released on October 25, 2004. "To
be signed by him was like an accolade," she has said. "The great thing was
that Herbert knew how easily he could have influenced my album with his
experience and personality. But he didn't do anything. He trusted me and
left me to do it. That's the greatest compliment he could give me."
Since being signed to Grönland, Kira has been working steadfastly toward
her career "without any expectations," she told Melodie und Rhythmus.
"It's simply beautiful to have a vision and convert it into music. And don't
tell me that any recording artist works exclusively for himself. We need
applause from the public as much as a sense of achievement."
After a string of appearances throughout much of 2005, including an opener for
Herbert Grönemeyer at the LTU Arena in Düsseldorf in January, a tour
with Virginia Jetzt! in March, a couple of Lausch Lounge gigs in Hamburg in
June and September and the Schupfart Festival in Switzerland in late September,
Kira began work on her second album, Goldfisch, which was released on
August 11, 2006. While Inauswendig hovers thematically around
introversion, the ego and the comparison of one's reality to that of other
people, Goldfisch is more thematically geared toward extroversion and
the joys of life. "For me," Kira said in a press release, "these two albums
are like two completely different worlds that have almost nothing at all to
do with each other. They're each based on a totally different attitude
toward life."
Following the release of this album, she made another series of appearances,
including a multi-city tour with Keimzeit, her own "Fast wie Sommer" tour, and
opening for Herbert Grönemeyer on four dates of his own tour in May and
June 2007. Later that summer she appeared twice on the German TV channel
GIGA-TV, a specialty channel devoted to digital lifestyles, once on their
four-day, one-shot special Giga Island (which used her song "Fast wie
Sommer" as its theme), and again as part of their coverage of the
Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA), an annual consumer electronics show in
Berlin.
Kira has been working on her third album since the fall of 2007.
"It'll
be very warm, direct and simple," she has said. "The focus will be utterly
on the songs—the album should radiate peace."
Funding for the album was boosted by a support grant from the German
government's recently-introduced "Initiative Musik" program in early July
2008. Meanwhile, after happy years with Freibank, Kira switched publishers,
and is now represented by Wintrup Musikverlage.
During the production of the album she has made several appearances, including
a guest spot on the German radio station NDR's monthly show Hamburg
Sounds and relatively small-scale shows in Hamburg, Lüneburg, Berlin
and Kleinmachnow. Some of these shows were designed to try out new songs for
the album. "New songs are like new varieties of chocolate," said an entry
in the news section of Kira's website in February 2008. "They have to be
tested and tasted before they can be firmly allowed to belong to the
assortment."
That summer Kira and other German artists were invited by the Goethe Institute
to perform at a Chinese-German bi-cultural event in Guangzhou called
"Deutschland und China—Gemeinsam in Bewegung" (Germany and
China—Moving Forward Together), which started in Nanjing in August 2007
and is running in a succession of Chinese cities till October 2010. After
Kira's gig there, she performed at a number of universities in Chongqing.
Shortly after her return to Germany, her new tour, called "Deine Insel" (Your
Island), was announced. It ran from March 26 to April 4, 2009 in a succession
of several German cities, namely Magdeburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Bremen, Hamburg,
Wuppertal, Hannover, Detmold and Berlin. Just in time for the tour, an EP,
Deine Insel, was released, which contains several songs intended for
the new album. Following the success of her gigs in China in November 2008, Kira
was again in China in June 2009 to do shows in Shenyang, Beijing and
Shanghai.
Over the next eighteen months, there followed concerts in Hamburg, Kiel and Berlin. Kira concentrated on composition and working in the studio, resulting in many songs that are unreleased to this day. In January 2011, Kira announced her temporary retirement from the music business.
Bibliography
Early years
Inauswendig
Goldfisch
Third album, EP Deine Insel and additional appearances