Vanessa Mai

Vanessa Mai is a German pop and Schlager singer, born Vanessa Marija Else Mandekić on 2 May 1992 in Backnang near Stuttgart, where she also grew up. She is on Muzika-Balkan because of her father, a Croatian-born musician: as a girl she sometimes accompanied him on the tambourine and stood on stage with him at the age of seven. When she sang at the Free European Song Contest in 2020, she represented Croatia, the country her father comes from. German newspapers still introduce her as the singer from Backnang.

She took her stage name from the month she was born in. Before music made her name she trained as a media designer, and at fifteen she danced at the hip-hop world championship in Las Vegas with the German champions Getting Craz'd. In 2012 Marc Fischer recruited her as the new singer of the Schlager band Wolkenfrei. The debut single "Jeans, T-Shirt und Freiheit" came out in 2013 and the album Endlos verliebt in 2014. When her two bandmates left in 2015 she carried on alone, and Wachgeküsst, with "Wolke 7", reached number seven in Germany and won the Echo award for Schlager in 2016.

In 2016 she was a judge on Deutschland sucht den Superstar and dropped the Wolkenfrei name. Her first single as Vanessa Mai, "Ich sterb für dich", produced by Dieter Bohlen, became her signature song; in 2022 it went gold in Germany, one of the best-selling Schlager songs of the decade. She came second on Let's Dance in 2017, and the albums Regenbogen (2017) and Schlager (2018) both went to number one in Germany, the latter with "Wir 2 immer 1" featuring rapper Olexesh.

Her music has since mixed Schlager with pop, electropop and rap. Für immer (2020) brought "Venedig (Love Is in the Air)" and a duet with Xavier Naidoo, and at the Free European Song Contest she sang "Highlight (Ti si moja snaga)", finishing ninth of sixteen. Mai Tai (2021) and Metamorphose (2022) followed, with "Happy End" featuring Sido, a duet with Mike Singer and "Unendlich" with Andrea Berg.

In 2023 she revived Wolkenfrei for one more album, Hotel Tropicana, then released Matrix (2024) and, after moving to Warner Music, Traumfabrik (2025) with "Himbeerrot (One Kiss)" and "Sorry Sorry". In 2026 Vanessa Mai founded her own label, MaiMusic. The playlist gathers her official music videos, from "Ich sterb für dich" to "Ich fall in Love".