Musician Nadja Zela lives in Zurich – but the stage is her true home, as the singer, guitarist, lyricist, producer has a long and remarkable career with many years on the road and is an indispensable voice of the independent rock scene in Switzerland. From her all-girl band Rosebud in the early 90s to her current solo project, she has remained true to herself as a frontwoman with an unbound wild spirit.
Musically, she is an experimental and bold explorer of genres between psychedelic rock, blues, folk and black music, condensing her influences into a very unique language that consistently earns her albums enthusiastic reviews. She usually deals with a topic of content and musical nature for a longer time and then writes an album about it.
Her music flirts with the warm sensuality of the blues, but she leads her raw songwriting into cinematic sound spheres that undermine any emerging genre-nostalgia. The songs shake, then give unexpectedly gentle comfort again. Zela‘s writing draws noticeably from personal experience, but she finds a true, lyrical expression of our existence‘s brokenness and fragility in times of decay.
She continues to work as a guitarist, singer and bassist in other projects, writes film music, works for theater productions and is involved as an artistic coach for young women in the music scene. She is a mother of two children and also works as a graphic designer.
For her own musical work, Nadja Zela has been awarded various prizes, including the Werkjahr of the City of Zurich and the ERB-Prozent Prize «Space and Time», The Förderpreis of the Arvore Foundation and a prize from the Canton of Zurich for outstanding artistic achievement for her double album «Greetings to Andromeda» released in the fall of 2020 - a multimedia requiem project dedicated to her late husband. The album received great media attention and was partly celebrated as the «best album of the year».
Currently Nadja is also on tour with writer Ariane Koch, working on a program with a Ukrainian lyricist and writing her 6th solo album.