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Sandra Kim is back. A day after her accession to the throne in ‘The Masked Singer’, the newspapers are full of interviews with the singer who gave everyone goosebumps with her bombastic outbursts. In Het Laatste Nieuws she talks candidly about the legacy of ‘J’aime La Vie’ and the future.<!– –>
Friday night, the masks from ‘The Masked Singers’ finally fell off. The unmasking of ‘Wolf’, the first dropout, will probably lead to a lot of pulled-out hair and eaten shoes. The real apotheosis, however, was the unveiling of ‘Queen’, who was literally crowned queen of the program. And what was suspected for weeks by the best investigators in Belgium, Karen Damen in the lead, became reality: behind the glittering mask, Sandra Kim’s sweaty blonde hair turned out to be hidden.
“There was only one name when it came to the identity of Queen: mine. I got hundreds of messages from fans who recognized my voice. Even from children who did not know me at all ”, admits the country’s only Eurovision winner.<!– –>
Don’t like to be in the spotlight
“Oh no, another song contest”, thought Sandra Kim in her own words when she got the proposal to participate in ‘The Masked Singer’. She never liked being in the spotlight, not when she was on an international stage at the age of thirteen, and not now. “I want to say. I want to give the people who come to watch and listen a good time, that they can have fun ”, says the 48-year-old singer in Het Laatste Nieuws.
Sandra Kim, real name Caldarone, does not feel like a real queen at all. “Every now and then I want to be the queen of the night on stage. Not in real life. Then I’m just Sandra, who is married and lives in an ordinary house in Limburg. ”
Zero input
The shadow of ‘J’aime La Vie’ is still hanging over Sandra after almost 25 years, and she has had a hard time with that. “I have tried, for years, to pry myself away from that Eurosong image. But it never worked out. I have changed managers three times. Each time they drew me back to the same kind of music, light and accessible to everyone. “You have an audience of 7 to 77 years old,” they always told me. And after a while the record companies said, ‘Sandra Kim is one has been“and I didn’t get a chance to make new music anymore.”
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She does not regret her Eurovision adventure, because her career was launched immediately. However, she turned into a tiny star from one day to the next, and as a young girl she had it “psychologically difficult”. “All the girls my age then dreamed of being Sandra Kim. I dreamed of being an ordinary girl in a normal school with ordinary friends ”, it sounds.
“What I do regret is the way it all went. Especially when I see how young artists are now dealt with. They write their own lyrics and their music. They decide what their clip looks like and how they dress. Not me. I had no input. Zero. Everything was handed to me on a silver dish, but I had to swallow everything. Without grumbling. Sometimes I think: ‘If only I had won Eurosong a few years later.’ But you can’t turn back time. ”
New start
Does ‘The Masked Singer’ mean a new start for Sandra? In any case, she thought it was great that she could sing different songs. “That I finally got another chance to make my voice heard. Because that is my great gift: my voice. I know that and the people who kept coming to my performances too, but the general public might have forgotten that. ”
“It could be that ‘The Masked Singer’ suddenly opens doors that I thought would be closed forever. I am quite curious about what will come my way. I am willing to get everything out of it. We’ll see. We’ll see. I find it hopeful that there was so much talk about me now – on the street, in the supermarket, in the restaurant, when they were still open. People came to ask me if I was Queen. That means that they have not forgotten me and my voice. ”
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