Goran Karan

Goran Karan is a Croatian pop singer, born on 2 April 1964 in Belgrade and living in Split. In the early 1980s he started out in bands such as Epicentar, Zippo, Deveti krug and Crna udovica, and in the 1990s he was the lead singer of the rock group Big Blue, whose "Priznaj mi" won the rock hit of the year award in 1995. That year he also took the lead role in the musical Sarajevski krug, and Big Blue toured Austria, Germany, Italy and France.

He went solo in 1997 and won Zadarfest in 1998 with "Kazna mi je što te ljubim". His first album, Kao da te ne volim (1999), made with Zdenko Runjić, was the best-selling album in Croatia that year, and he won Melodije hrvatskog Jadrana with "Prozor kraj đardina".

In 2000 he won Dora and represented Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm with "Kad zaspu anđeli", finishing ninth. The same year he won three Porins, among them best male vocal performance and best vocal collaboration, for a duet with Oliver Dragojević, and released Vagabundo, which went platinum; its "Ja sam samo vagabundo" took the Zlatni galeb at Melodije. The album Ahoj! followed, and in 2004 he sang "Ljubav trebam svaki dan" with Ivana Banfić at Sunčane skale, finishing second. "Ružo moja bila" won the Grand Prix of the Split festival in 2005 and was on the album Od srca do usana. In 2005 he was also one of the judges of Hrvatski idol.

After the Kornati fire of 2007, in which thirteen volunteer firefighters died, he wrote "Ovo nije kraj" and gathered singers from the Split area as Split Star to record it. His later albums are Dite ljubavi (2008), Čovik tvoj (2013) and Glas Juga (2018), along with the live albums Romanca pod zvizdama (2011) and Jedna noć u Zagrebu (2020). In 2017 Goran Karan recorded new versions of "Nikola Tesla" with Teška Industrija.