Ebru Gundes

Ebru Gundes (born 12 October 1974 in İstanbul) is a Turkish pop folk singer.

Early life

Ebru Gundes went to primary school in Ankara. Moving back to İstanbul with her family afterwards, she had to discontinue her education due to financial hardship.

The quality of her voice was discovered at an early age when one of her relatives took her to Nese Demirkat, a partner of Raks Neşe Müzik a record label in Turkey. Neşe Demirkat was impressed with her voice and introduced her to music producers Koral Saritas and Selcuk Tekay.

Career

Ebru Gundes sings the kind of deperately tragic arabesk love songs that are the core of Turkish popular music. Besides Turkey, she is especially popular in Iran where she was voted among one of the favourite singers.

Her debut album, Tanrı Misafiri, was released in 1992. It proved to be a massive success and sold 1,250,000 albums. At this stage she was a very sweet and innocent-looking girl, slim, dressed in white and with an attractive way of raising one eyebrow. She was on billboards all over Istanbul. And being from one of Istanbul's less affluent districts, with a rough manner and speaking voice in contrast to her beautiful singing voice, she garnered lots of public support. Her subsequent albums have been hugely successful and are listed below.

Stardom has taken its toll on her health. She suffered from a brain haemmorhage in December 1999 while recording the album Don Ne Olur, which resulted in two very heavy operations. Fortunately she returned to full health. She spent a lot of time away from the public eye, recouperating. Don Ne Olur was one of the best selling albums ever in Turkey. In November 2001 she released the album Ahdim Olsun. This album embodied the pain of the experience she endured from December 1999 to November 2001. It also offered a clear story line for the events that took place in her life that year.