Maria Bill is an Austrian/Swiss singer. She’s currently touring with a program called “Maria sings Bill“, basically a Best of.

I went to this concert with and for my mom (it was a birthday present from three of my sisters and me – we spent the day with her, went to a pottery class and to the concert) without knowing any of Bill’s songs (not even her biggest hit I mecht landen). And I was rather doubtful that it would be my thing. But I did enjoy myself surprisingly much.

Austrian music is difficult. If people are singing in German, I just can’t phase out the lyrics as much as I can if they’re English, so I’m hyper-critical of them. And when people sing in an Austrian dialect that is almost but not quite like written German, it quickly sounds very, very fake. And Maria Bill sings exactly in that dialect and her lyrics are not great most of the time. But somehow it works nevertheless.

For one, some of her lyrics are really awesome. There are moments in almost every song which are really great. And her voice is really good, too.

But more importantly, Bill herself has an amzing presence on stage. She is full of energy and she moves in a weird, quite transfixing way that I liked a lot. You just see that she’s a performer. All of that doesn’t make her the most natural person on stage. You can see that she has routines and that she calculated what she’s doing and what works.

And instead of feeling tired and like she doesn’t care about the audience and she’s done it so often already, it somehow ends up being quite authentic and ultimately engaging in its rehearsed way.

Summarising: Her music will probably never be my favorite, but her show certainly was cool.