Bilbi

Bilbi is the stage name of Maja Pihler Stermecki, a Slovenian singer, songwriter and actress born in 1981 in Maribor. She took the name from Hebrew, in which Bilbi is the name of Pippi Longstocking, the best-known character of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Her songs tell personal life stories with humour, tragedy and self-criticism.

She started acting and singing in secondary school, and in 2000 she went to Vienna to study acting, singing and musical theatre, graduating in 2004. She then worked in Berlin, where she lived, on theatre and puppet roles and wrote her own songs and music for the stage. In 2010 she came back to Slovenia, and in 2011 she joined the Maribor Puppet Theatre.

Bilbi is a project she created with her husband, the composer and musician Gregor Stermecki. Its first single, "Hvala za vijolice", was recorded at the Radio Maribor studio and introduced in September 2010; it spent two weeks at number one on the SloTop50 chart. The song is on her debut album, Drobne slike, released in 2011. With the title song of that album she took part in Slovenska popevka 2011, where she and Gregor Stermecki won the expert jury's award for the best lyrics. A review in Siol.net picked out "Kaj pa ti" as the album's song for a different audience.

She came back to Slovenska popevka in 2013 with "V dnevni doma", sang "To ni blues" at EMA 2014, the Slovenian selection for Eurovision, and in 2015 placed eleventh at Melodije morja in sonca with "Limonada". Her recordings, from "Spomini" and "Starši" to "Romanca v dvigalu", are gathered here in one playlist.