Mit-Mach music: How Simone Sommerland became the queen of the children’s ear worms

When the first chords of the stool classic sound, the children sing before Simone Sommerland does: “Hello, hello nice that you are there”, hundreds of little people in the concert hall in Leverkusen greet the woman, who is the most successful children’s song singer in Germany. But who is the 49-year-old who has long since conquered children’s room, but who is unknown to many outside of their target group?

Record holder with children’s music

In fact, with more than 530 weeks, the first summer land plate (“The 30 best game and movement songs”) holds the record for the longest length of stay in the German album charts. The long-running favorite with cover hits from “Aramsamsam” to “Show your feet” is much longer in the charts than plates by Helene Fischer or Abba.

More than 60 albums in the following series “The 30 Best …” have been published since 2010. The recipe for singing earwigs from the rich children’s song fund has so far brought the Lamp and Sumfleth label well over 600,000 record sales.

The YouTube channel has around three million subscribers, where Sommerland encourages new videos to sing along and participate. They were called up more than 3.6 billion times.

Big concert experience for little ones

“If you are looking for a children’s song, you keep landing with her,” a mother will say after the concert. “Our little one hears this up and down at home,” says a dad, on her arm a girl with a slipped unicorn hair ripe on her head, which is exhausted by the very first live concert of his life.

In Leverkusen – this year’s tour with more than 40 concerts until the end of November has just started – summer country is the focus: Even before it starts, small fans secure a dance place in front of the stage.

Sommerland gives everything on stage: she flies like a plane, circle her arms like the bikes from the bus and when she is happy, claps and stamps and calls according to Hurray. In doing so, she smiles tirelessly, seeks the conversation with her audience, leans outside the edge of the stage, as if she wanted to shine directly in children’s eyes.

“I’m going completely” – summer country about your appearances

When it comes to being with her audience, she is concerned with every live appearance, says Sommerland, who is actually called Simone Stiers and comes from weather in the Ruhr area. “I am not pretending at the moment,” she says in a conversation with the German Press Agency. “It may sound pathetic, but I’m going completely. And I try to give everyone a good time.”

Shortly before the interview in the rehearsal room for the tour, Sommerland exchanged her work overall with jeans and sweaters. She just helped get missing roller boxes, she explains. “I have learned to tackle and like to be involved in all processes.”

Farm child with stage request

Your success is also diligently developed. As the latest of six siblings, Bulls grew up on a farm in Wetter on the Ruhr, a “normal life” still lives there, as she emphasizes.

“I’m the only one out of the family that went this artistic path,” she says. “For me, singing was from an early age to the heart’s desire.”

Planned, but without a clear picture of where her way could end, the girl from the city of 26,000 inhabitants creates a career as an artist. She is already on stage at school, takes singing lessons, begins to study jazz and pop music as a young woman.

“It is part of knowing my being: If you don’t order the field, you cannot harvest in autumn,” she summarizes how growing up on your parents’ vegetable cultivation still shapes your way of working. “I understand my job very tangible – my job is a singer. Being famous is not my job.”

It would have become Eurodance instead of child music

At the age of 17 she lends the smacking in the music studio for the first time and then again and again her voice – and ends up the first charter sequence. In the musical booming 90s, she then goes on tour as a background singer with flowers. However, it rejects the offer of a record company to put even Eurodance act in the spotlight.

“But then I couldn’t identify myself to be on stage in hot pants and bikini,” she says. Instead, she preferred to “start” again. She makes cover party music, sings at events and weddings, finally founds a music school in her hometown.

Why Sommerland “work, work, work” must

“It was very long, very scarce with the money, which is why I still think: I have to work, work, work,” says Sommerland. Even when she picks up one children’s song plate after the next with her then husband as “Simone Sommerland, Karsten Glück and the KitaFrösche”, she remains primarily a studio singer and does not yet play the big stage.

She did not make success a millionaire, she says when asked. Because she primarily works as a studio musician who has only now started to compose herself, make the author and producers vigorously.

Together with her husband now divorced, she has three children. The end of the marriage does not mean the end of the children’s song series, Sommerland calms down. “From the new record there will be a new male voice.”

What else should come now?

Since her first stage tour in 2023 tailored to her alone, Simone Sommerland has been focusing on the tangible artist. Asked about her future plans, she replies: “I don’t have a glass ball, but I know I want to continue singing, I always want to learn something new.”

She wanted to compose more songs and design more live programs. This spring a children’s book appeared from her pen – she wrote the matching song “Mit Mausi Maus”. She also does not want to see the children’s music subject: in 2024 she was traveling as a singer and moderator in a variety program.

“Blatant, they come because of me”

Only the regular appearances really let your success in the children’s music business really understand, she says. She had offered to take autographs after the concert, she remembers the first tour start: “And then I came out of the hall and then there was just a long line.” Only then did her immersed: “blatant, they come because of me.”

It is the same in Leverkusen this afternoon: hundreds want a dedication, a short moment with summer country. For just under an hour she asks the names of the girls and boys, signed signed for every photo together, as if it were the first of the day. “This is always the most beautiful,” says Sommerland and smiles again.