How singer Sina turns literature into hits
Published: Tuesday, Jan 9th 2024, 11:20
Back to Live Feed
A good song lyric is literature, and not just since Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. That's why Sina from Valais likes to write her songs in collaboration with authors and poets. The book "Sina - Sich treu werden" shows how this works.
"I'm actually a bünzli", said Sina in an interview thirty years ago, shrugging her shoulders and laughing from the heart. Unforgettable. The interview took place in a dimly lit pub with wooden tables.
The occasion was the release of her second CD "Wiiblich", in the title track of which the then 29-year-old commented on the beauty craze that holds many women captive for life: "Medizin macht feminin / schnipslut, schliift und macht mi fiin / bi renoviärt, gseh üs wiä neu / Femme fatale odär eifach Fröi." The lyrics were anything but bünzlig, and musically she had just switched from the cuddly pop genre to the rock faction.
Sina's old fans - and her new colleagues, men with electric guitars who wanted to keep to themselves and looked disparagingly at the self-confident Valais woman with the strong voice - were the only ones who reacted in a negative way. Since then, Sina has established herself as the only woman in the Swiss pop business and has held her own for decades. Today, everyone wants to be on stage with her, and the raw material for her song lyrics is provided by literary darlings, some of whom have also contributed lyrics to the new book "Sina - Sich treu werden".
Valais translations
Author Urs Augstburger from Aargau describes his collaboration with Sina as follows: "Just when you think she can't surprise you anymore, she sends you this new song line: 'D'Wält isch voll gsturrunä Gschpänschtär'. As an echo of a previous sentence: 'D'Wält isch voll gspässigi Tänzer'. And as a songwriter you learn two things: no matter what you challenge Sina with, she always responds with something better. And secondly: Never mess with Valais German! In this dialect, there's a better word for everything."
Because Sina sings in dialect - a dialect that "Üsserschwiizer" and other German speakers cannot write for her - she first has to translate the literary entries of her sparring partners before she can make them singable. Sibylle Berg, the winner of the Swiss Book Prize from Weimar, received a crash course from Sina and writes in the book: "A few lessons of Valais German later, we lived together and I wrote many songs for Sina, perhaps fifty in the last twenty years?"
Christoph Simon, a temporary slam poet who sent Sina lyrics in his own Bernese dialect, was involved in just one song. He was delighted when she told him: "I'll push and translate and then a song will come back". A year passed. "How could I have thought that Sina would have the time and inclination to bring something half-baked from my notebook to fruition?" Simon thought to himself and forgot all about it. Shortly afterwards, Sina wrote: "Here are the finished lyrics from my point of view, please just write in and correct if you have something more suitable, better, more beautiful, right?" The resulting song "S'wird immär so sii" appeared on the latest Sina album "Ziitsammläri" in 2022.
Talent in the tumbler
The book "Sina - Sich treu werden" not only provides insights into the songwriting process and small literary tributes to a great Swiss musician. It also contains a wealth of different material: Interviews, photo series and newspaper articles alternate in wild succession with Sina's own text contributions, lyrics, personal documents and private pictures from her archive.
The result is a mosaic that moves like a kaleidoscope as you turn the pages back and forth. Sina in Super 8 trash films, Sina at the Bochum Theater, Sina with Roma, Sina in China. Is it a bit silly to wish for a little more structure between these book covers, especially as the classic cover and the title "Biography" suggest such a thing?
"We do whatever we can think of, throw our talents into the tumbler and see what colorful thing comes out of it," writes Sina in the chapter about her quirky shows with jazz performer Erika Stucky. Is it all just a question of imagination? To paraphrase Sibylle Berg: "What I liked about writing songs for Sinana was simply her imagination for my lyrics, which were usually a little nihilistic or even sad, as it should be for me. Sina managed to make something uplifting out of even the darkest lyrics. Hats off. "*
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
English 
German 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic