Nadieh, singer, songwriter, musician, The Netherlands.
(1957 - 1996)

Nadieh (Karin Meis) had written songs and poems since the age of eleven, and at 19 years of age was performing regularly (with her guitar) in several rock 'n roll bands.

In her twenties in the mid-eighties, she sold lock, stock and barrel to finance demo recordings of her songs, which paid off with her first recording contract.

Her debut album Land of Ta, released in 1986, gained favourable national coverage.

Two of her songs from this album were hits on the Dutch popcharts with lyrics such as these from the song Windforce 11: They called him the Gate / He was a stranger, to the time that He knew / He had that swiftly way of moving you / in everything He'd do / and by the time that He revealed to me / the secrets that He had/ There was a storm, windforce 11, through my head / Windforce 11!

In 1988 she won the Yamaha World Song festival, Best Singer's Award with the song "Haifa Blue" from her Company of Fools (1988) album, in Toyko, Japan. In the same year she also won a national Dutch music award for the CD.

The album No Way Back (1989) was followed by Eye on the Waves (1991) where by now she is household name in the Dutch pop music scene as well as winning music awards in a number of other countries.

At the end of 1992 she stopped performing internationally, to have more time for her children, and to focus more on writing and composing. She performed occasionaly in the Netherlands, while setting up a studio, to enable her to record under her own conditions. A result of this was On my Own (1994), her fifth album. She was planning to go back into touring, this time without a band, just with her guitars and her voice, but her November 1995 concert in Rotterdam was to be her last. In early 1996 she suddenly fell ill and died of lung cancer in April 1996.

Here are the words of her song Feminine about Táhiríh from her Land of Ta album:
It's not upon love I've cried / most of my tears / It's not upon dreams I've built / most of my fears / Portable emotions don't hit my heart / in fact they don't give me feelings at all / They say it's feminine / like it was meant to bring / water to stone-barren land / When she threw away her veil / the walls bent aside / for a thief in the night / it's always the other wing you need / for a flight / Being like Táhiríh. / going and flowing like / water on stone-barren land / Feminine / like she was meant to bring / water to stone-barren land

When she died, Nadieh was working on her first Dutch language album (Leef Mij (Live in me)), which the Nadieh Foundation brought out in 1999. They also manage the sales of her music at the website: http://www.nadieh-foundation.nl.