It has not even been two years since Marko Purišić released his first solo song with the alias Baby Lasagna. In October 2023, he released ‘IG Boy’; not long after, Purišić was announced as a participant in Dora, the Croatian Eurovision preselection, with the song ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’. Of course, he won this selection and got second in the biggest music competition in Europe – the highest place ever reached by Croatia since their participation. Since then, Purišić has released his debut album DMNS & Mosquitoes and embarked on his first-ever European tour in support of this body of work. On April 11th, we were lucky to get to chat with the singer-songwriter before his show in Melkweg, Amsterdam. A live review of the show can be found here.
Back in 2004, when Purišić was only nine years old, he started playing in his first band. In 2011, he joined the rock band Manntra, which he played in until 2016 and then again from 2018 till 2022. Purišić eventually decided to quit the band because touring “was starting to get really hard” for the young guitarist. At the time, Purišić was highly doubtful about whether he still wanted to be doing this. As he stated, “There is a time in every person’s life when you just want to change something”. For Purišić, the ‘easiest’ change he could make in his early twenties was leaving the band he had been in for a few years. Purišić is still unsure about the exact “reasons why”, but the free time did allow him to focus more on his songwriting. For a while, he wrote songs mainly for other bands and “even got a contract as a songwriter,” but he missed writing something just for himself. As a contracted songwriter, one “usually gets a PDF file saying it needs to sound like this, [be sung] about that, [have] this tempo”. This he found interesting, but also quite restricting. So, he ended up writing his song ‘Biggie Boom Boom’, the first song he ever wrote for Baby Lasagna – and that’s how this solo project was born.
Asking Purišić if he has ever felt the urge to do anything besides making music, the singer started listing every single hobby he’s tried otherwise – a long list of sports including football, volleyball, badminton, and karate. However, he “gave up [everything] when [he] was a kid,” and music was the only constant throughout the years – so of course, it “has always been a dream to do something in music”.
However, when starting Baby Lasagna, it was never his intention to be where he is right now – on tour all around Europe. With every other band he’s played in, he wanted to be doing exactly that, but the point of Baby Lasagna was just to be able to put out some songs of his own. He stated how he “wrote like five songs” and how “it would be a shame for them to just stay on my computer” – hence, he thought of a name for this project and uploaded his first songs on Spotify and YouTube. As a joke, Purišić showed a friend of his the song ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’ while having a drink together, and this friend later encouraged him to send this song to Dora – “out of fun and with no expectations”. Purišić did not even find out which songs made it into Dora until several days after the entry list was revealed: that’s how little he expected. His song was not on the original list, but was picked from the reserve one after another entrant withdrew.
As Purišić gained most of his fame under Baby Lasagna through Dora and eventually Eurovision, we wondered how he feels his Croatian heritage has influenced his music and career. Purišić stated that what defines him is more so being European rather than Croatian, as he has always mainly listened to European music and never a lot of American music. Even his friends noticed how his entire playlist consisted of European music – think of music from bands from Germany like Rammstein, Swedish bands, and even the Netherlands’ own Joost. In terms of being Croatian, Purišić thinks the influences are mostly subconscious – there’s some folk in ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’, which he wrote about young people leaving their hometowns in search of a better life elsewhere – and in such lyrics too, his heritage can be found. Though, funnily enough, Purišić cares about lyrics the least. They are the last thing he hears when listening to music, and thinks of lyrics as his own “weakest point” that he “should work on the most when it comes to the next album”.
Purišić ran a little ahead of himself by mentioning the next album, because his debut has only been out for a little over two months. Before releasing DMNS & Mosquitoes, Purišić had written over 200 songs that had been collecting dust on his computer, because almost none of them were used for the actual album. Asking him if it was hard to decide a tracklist for the album, he said it was not because he “does not like recycling old songs to an album,” so “everything was new when [he] wrote it”. The album originally, however, was too short to be released, so he had to add some songs from the recycle bin after all. These were ‘Again’, ‘Catch Me If You Can’, and ‘Less Than Great’. Funnily enough, ‘Catch Me If You Can’ ended up being one of the album’s singles and therefore also one of Purišić’s favourites to perform live. He loves to perform “all the singles because people like them”. He understands that people fell in love with the project through ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’ and he is not tired of the song at all, but “if people only jump to that song, you feel like a one-trick pony”. Fortunately for Purišić, this turned out not to be the case, as people also jump to other songs. These became his favourites to perform as they show “there is more to this project than just that one song”. If he had to pick a number one? That would be ‘Biggie Boom Boom’, because “people go the wildest on it”.
At the same time, however, Purišić mentions how he is already bored with this album. Not because he does not like it, but because he has been performing the songs on stage for a while now and desperately wants to get back to songwriting. His favourite part of his musical career is the writing itself, and after the tour has ended, he will be going to his room to write, because that is what relaxes him. It makes the job not feel like a job at all. Instead, he’s eager to work on new music – “let’s see what we will come up with next”. The 200+ demos on his computer, as mentioned, will most definitely not be part of that next project. What it will sound like, however, is not certain yet. Asking Purišić what song he last listened to, he mentioned how he’s last played ‘Animals’ by Architects as he has been trying to decide what genre his next album will fall into. He’s been listening to both metal as well as pop to try and see what he wants to do. One day, he wakes up and thinks “we’re going to be a metal band”, whereas the next day, he finds himself listening to pop and indie that sounds cool as well. Purišić wants to narrow it down for the next album, but is still unsure as to how that will work out. However, he wrote 200+ songs in one year and states how he is really quick at writing, so maybe the next album (and tour) will already come out next year.
At the moment, Purišić is still on that first album tour, however. When he started as Baby Lasagna, he “had never had a [solo] concert, did not have a band, did not have anything”. As mentioned before, he had never expected Baby Lasagna to take him this far. He has been on tour officially since February 28th, but stated how ever since Eurovision, he has only had two weeks off for the wedding with his now-wife, Elizabeta Ružić. Like “every musician”, Purišić has a love-hate relationship with touring. At the moment, he is having fun, but he does not know if he will like it in the long run because it’s also very tiring. “Every time I step on the stage, [I] fall in love with it,” he said. “When you do the concert and you meet the fans, it’s the thing that keeps you going”. When one comes home after a tour and it is all quiet, that energy is what you miss. At the same time, Purišić and his band had to cancel the previous day’s show in Paris due to the singer himself waking up with a sore throat and his drummer Matija Klaj having fallen ill as well. They had to travel to Amsterdam, do a show, and would have to wake up again at 06:00 the day after to travel to the next city. It is all worth it to Purišić, though, when stepping on the stage each night.
To Purišić, every city he has been in so far has had its charm. He has not travelled a lot before participating in Eurovision, so he has only fallen in love with the continent recently. He stated how, for example, the shows in Oslo, Barcelona, and Madrid were very small ones where he performed in front of approximately 200 people in small clubs without their equipment, whereas in Helsinki he got to play to 1300 fans. He’s had some time off in Barcelona and Madrid too, and has found himself “utterly disappointed that [he] does not have a day off in Amsterdam”. Fortunately for him, he has already been able to travel to the city several times over the past year, as he also performed at Eurovision in Concert, Het Grote Songfestivalfeest, and ESNS. The latter took place in Groningen, but Purišić travelled through Amsterdam to get there. “Every time I come, it’s like a fairytale,” Purišić said about Amsterdam; he is glad he has gotten to know the city already. In other cities, he has not had the time to discover, as most days he arrived at the venue late, had to soundcheck, and ate some food before the show already had to begin.
Asking Purišić whether he feels like it’s different to perform in his home country of Croatia, he stated that it very much does feel so. There has been “such an amount of hype” back home that the audience at each show differs from “a small child to literally a grandma that fell in love with ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’”. The next time he will be playing in Croatia, it will be a show with a capacity of 3000 people. In the rest of Europe, of course, the venues have been a lot smaller than that, and the audience has mostly been the young people he expected to see when he wrote the songs. Purišić feels possibly more nervous for these small shows than the bigger ones, because it allows him to see the audience. “If somebody is not really digging you, you’re like ‘oh my god, what did I do wrong?’,” he stated – and this can cause a lot of overthinking.
When the audience is bigger, the number of people in itself can be nerve-wrecking, but one cannot see the audience at all due to the size of the venue and the bright lights hiding them from view. Purišić mentioned how this summer, he will be playing Nova Rock in Austria, and that’s a scary combination of both – the crowd can get extremely big, and he will be able to see them too. He’s also playing the day after Linkin Park, so add that to the list. Purišić will surely be able to rock that stage, however, like he has done at all the other ones he has stood on so far. Between the final date of this ‘Meow Back Tour’ and Nova Rock, Purišić will surely already have written a lot of music for the next album – and hopefully, he will be back in Amsterdam soon with lots of extra songs.
