Kasandra

Kasandra was the stage name of Davorka Ručević, a Croatian pop and dance singer born on 8 January 1967. Croatian Wikipedia calls her one of the main figures of Cro dance, the Croatian dance-pop wave of the 1990s, and the press called her the queen of Croatian dance. She is on Muzika-Balkan as a Croatian artist of that scene.

She lived in Zagreb all her life: in January 2021 tportal wrote that she still lived in the Zagreb neighbourhood of Bukovac with her mother. She died in Zagreb on 3 December 2021, at the age of 54, and was buried at Mirogoj.

Her career ran from 1992 to 1999 and was guided by her manager Vladimir Mihaljek, one of the people behind the Cro dance scene. At her peak her voice was said to cover four octaves. She recorded for Croatia Records, Tonika and Orfej, and her first album, Sunce izlazi, came out in 1992.

The mid-1990s were her best years. At the Zagrebfest of 1994 she sang "I've Got a Feeling", whose video was reported to be the most expensive made in Croatia up to then. At Zadarfest she sang "Kazna" in 1994 and "Prevarena" in 1995. Her second album, Sladoled (1995), took its title from her cover of the Prljavo kazalište song and also held her biggest hit, "Nisi ti jedini na svijetu", along with "Bilo bi dobro".

After those successes she withdrew from the music scene. She later said she had not wanted to be in the public eye at any cost, and that endometriosis had kept her from working. Her songs kept being played long after, and when she died, Index.hr wrote that several of her hits were still widely heard. The playlist here is the album Sladoled.