Anja Kotar

Anja Kotar is a Slovenian singer-songwriter, pianist and pop musician. She was born in Ljubljana on 25 May 1997 and grew up there, which is why she is on Muzika-Balkan, and since 2012 she has lived in California, where English Wikipedia says she is based. She sings mostly in English.

She began dancing at five and playing classical piano at six, won prizes at piano competitions and played for three years in the trio Allegria. In 2004 her show dance group won the world championship in Riesa, Germany. In 2012, at fourteen, she auditioned for X Factor Slovenija and impressed the judges with Adele's "Make You Feel My Love", but was too young to go on; she also acted in the youth film Gremo mi po svoje and its sequel.

In August 2012 she moved with her family to San Jose, California, studied piano at the Valley Christian Conservatory and sang in musicals and in the jazz group Room 107, which won a DownBeat award in 2013. In June 2015 she recorded her debut EP, Nomad, at Universal Music Group in Los Angeles, paid for through a Kickstarter campaign, and that autumn she started at Berklee College of Music. Nomad came out in February 2016, followed by a full album of the same name in 2017.

In February 2016 she came back to Slovenia for the Dnevi slovenske zabavne glasbe festival, singing "Čas je zdaj", which won her an award as the most promising performer and author, and the Eurovision selection EMA with her own English song "Too Cool". She later auditioned for the sixteenth season of American Idol and in 2019 finished a master's degree in music production at Berklee.

As an independent artist she has since released the EP Songs From Isolation (2021), written during the pandemic, and the album 12 Months (2022), as well as singles such as "Kids", "Movie" and "Fun For You", and she has sung as a guest on tracks by Hyu, Joza and Fluencie. The playlist holds 12 Months, one song for every month of the year.