Esad Merulić

Esad Merulić is a Montenegrin singer of sevdalinke and folk-pop from Podgorica. He is on Muzika-Balkan under Montenegro because he grew up in Podgorica and his whole career has been made there: even as a child, all of Podgorica knew him for singing sevdalinke, and the city is still his base, from which he sings across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia.

Sevdah came from home. His late father, Medo, collected old sevdalinke, and the family house welcomed sevdah singers of an earlier generation, among them Ksenija Cicvarić. He names Safet Isović as the unmatched singer of the genre.

At the end of the 1980s he recorded an album in Belgrade with Rade Radivojević. Two albums of sevdalinke followed: Sevdah, around 2013, made, as he put it, for his own soul, and Etno tradicional in 2016, mostly old songs of Podgorica, which he presented on Montenegrin television. Alongside them come many singles, the best known his own song "Žale godine" (2015), whose video has passed two million views on YouTube, as well as "Most", "Drumovi", "Nek je otmeno", "Toliko o ljubavi", "Srce kameno" and, more recently, "I da me ljube druge" and "Nije zlato sve što sija".

After he sang on Television of Montenegro's morning show, the presenter Danijel Garić told viewers they would think Halid Bešlić was the guest, and the comparison stuck. At a MESAM show in the Sava Centre in Belgrade he was the only performer from Montenegro among the big names of the former Yugoslavia. He recorded the anthem of the Dani borovnice festival in Plav, sang at Turkish cultural centre concerts in Podgorica and Belgrade, and on 27 December 2017 gave a solo concert at the KIC Budo Tomović in Podgorica. The playlist gathers his best-known songs.