Who is Sibylle Baier?

The mystery around the reclusive German folk singer explained

There’s a striking scene towards the end of Wim Wenders’ 1974 film Alice in the Cities. It shows a young woman singing on a ferry.

This character doesn’t appear in any other scenes of that movie, and she doesn’t speak a word, she just sings a song, for no one in particular it seems, and for less than a minute.

First we’re hearing her gorgeous alto voice in the background, then she appears in the camera view, standing, singing and looking into the distance, while Alice and Philip, the film’s protagonists, are watching her.

This short, ghostly scene captures the only camera appearance of the elusive German folk singer Sibylle Baier.

Baier recorded a bunch of songs in the early 1970s, which remained unreleased for more than 30 years. She’d never play a single concert and gave just a handful of interviews over the years.

The top comment on a YouTube snippet of the film scene says:

“God it's so surreal seeing her sing that I've listened to that song so many times and I've started to imagine her as a wistful spirit of the valley who doesn't always have a corporeal form. this video is so lovely, wish there were more just like this”

photos courtesy of Orange Twin Records

Sibylle Baier’s only record Colour Green came out in 2006 on the small American independent label Orange Twin; it compiles 14 songs written and recorded between 1970 and 1973.

Upon release, the album was celebrated and hailed as a lost acoustic folk masterpiece by the music press and indie tastemakers such as Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth or Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

Baier was portrayed as a reclusive savant and her haunting voice and dark lyrics likened to the works of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake.

20 years have gone by since the release of Colour Green, but the music hasn’t lost any of its mysterious appeal. Quite the opposite in fact – it keeps inspiring musicians across genres and generations.

Baier didn’t speak to the press around her album release, but she finally accepted an invitation by experienced journalist Carol McKinley to jump on the podcast The Big Ponder in 2021.

In that interview, Baier makes clear that she has no interest in becoming a cult celebrity, though it makes her happy that people all around the world seem to be connecting with her old songs.

For her, the music belongs to a distant dark episode of her early life – one that she left far behind when she left Germany for the USA, where she lives with her family today.

She’d almost forgotten those songs exist. That is, until her son Robby discovered some old tapes in the attic…

Many articles, even her German Wikipedia page, state that Sibylle Baier was born in 1955. If that was true, she’d have been aged 15 to 18 writing the songs on Colour Green. It’s a wrong bit of information, though one that’s persistently circulating.

Baier’s actual birth year is 1946, the year after World War II ended, so her music-making period was in her mid-20s.

As a child, Sibylle had been brought from Poland to Southwest Germany, the American-occupied sector of the defeated and divided country. Throughout her youth, G.I. soldiers were everywhere around her, and that’s how she learned the English language so well.

In the harsh post-war economic climate, her parents struggled to make ends meet. Young Sibylle spent a lot of time by herself, roaming the countryside and writing poetry. She loved American literature, T.S. Eliot was one of her heroes.

Growing up on classical music and European folk songs played on the family’s gramophone, Baier discovered jazz and blues through American radio programs. When her father gave her an old nylon-string acoustic guitar, she taught herself to play and learned from listening to Joan Baez albums.

In her unorthodox songwriting technique, she improvised on the guitar, often developing music and lyrics at the same time. Her lyrics, which juxtaposed depictions of everyday life with the turmoil of her inner landscape, were written down in notebooks stained with cigarette burns and cat hair.

The early 1970s were a particularly dark, depressive period for Baier, shaped by recurring suicidal thoughts. One of her friends literally dragged her out of her bedroom to take her on a road trip from their native Stuttgart to Strasbourg, France, and then further on, across the Alps, to Genoa, Italy.

Returning from that adventure, Sibylle felt completely renewed. Now thankful for the gift of life, she wrote the song “Remember the Day”.

All of the tunes on Colour Green just “fell out, to save my life”, she says.

When her family slept at night, the young woman captured herself singing these songs, using a reel-to-reel machine made for recording business meetings – hence the intimacy and closeness.

At the time, Baier was part of a circle of young Bohemians interested in art, film and music in Stuttgart. The filmmaker Wim Wenders was part of that circle, as was Baier’s late husband Michael, who’d become a successful film and TV script writer. She says she “lassoed him in” with her guitar.

Baier passed some tapes of her nightly recordings on to friends, including Wenders. After her appearance in his movie, her music was used in another German film (Umarmungen und andere Sachen, 1975).

Another friend, the movie director and producer Hans Geißendörfer, offered to connect her to some acquaintances from the music industry, but Sibylle had no interest in turning her innermost thoughts and feelings into an actual career.

“Our lives were very full already”, she says laconically.

In 1980, Sibylle Baier left Bohemian life in Germany behind completely, relocating with her husband and kids to the USA.

The family lived in a wild land trust in Massachusetts, an all-solar off-grid community. (It’s interesting to note that the 1975 film Baier wrote some music for had a similar plot – two young women say goodbye to city life and settle on a remote farm.)

In this new environment, she had other things on her mind than making music – like taking care of her children, the land and the animals. She’d still play piano and sing at home for her kids, but she’d never released a record or even just played a concert, and she was fine with that.

She’d almost forgotten about her early home recordings, when her son Robby found the reels in an attic. But he remembered these songs – he was still a small child when his mother wrote and recorded them, in her bedroom down the hall.

For Baier’s 60th birthday in 2006, her children planned to throw a big party.

Robby, who’d actually become a music producer in his own right, had edited and mixed the old songs he’d found, and burned CDs for the birthday guests as a gift to take home.

When one of these songs was suddenly played at the party, Sibylle Baier wasn’t very happy at first. She felt embarrassed.

“I’m livid, I’m angry”, she fumes in the aforementioned podcast. “Why, these old things […] It was very uncomfortable.”

A few drinks later, shock turned into acceptance, and she even started singing along with her kids.

Turns out that J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. was a guest at her birthday party as well. Mascis loved the music and took one of the CDs home. A while later, his friend Andrew Rieger, a musician who runs the independent record label Orange Twin, visited him at his house, when Mascis played Sibylle Baier’s music over coffee. Rieger was flabbergasted.

He reached out to Robby and agreed to release the CD on his label just the way it was, without any changes or overdubs.

This is how Colour Green finally saw a wider release, 33 years after it had been written and recorded.

The album became wildly successful in the indie music community. Several print runs on vinyl LP and CD sold out over the years.

What fed into the mystery around this German folk singer was that there was little to no information available.

“Sibylle is a star who chose to shine for her friends and family instead of the whole world”, the press release stated.

Sibylle Baier wasn't even on the internet. She remains offline until today. Robby is maintaining her fan page and Facebook account.

Sometime after the release of Colour Green, Wim Wenders stood in front of a record shop in Chicago, stunned at the face of young Sibylle Baier on an album cover in the window. He went into the store and bought a new copy of the music that he’d kept on the old, battered tape, which she’d given to him in the mid-1970s.

Wenders got in contact and commissioned her to write a song for a new film of his. For her old friend, she actually went into a recording studio, and her new song “Let Us Know” landed on the soundtrack of Wenders’ 2008 film Palermo Shooting – an afterthought to a career that never happened.

Baier hasn’t recorded any more music since then, but her old music continues to inspire young musicians. Their heartfelt cover versions are all over YouTube. You can hear echoes of Sibylle Baier in Phoebe Bridgers, Angel Olsen or Weyes Blood.

The 27-year old jazz singer Eliana Glass even confirmed calling Robby Baier to find out what equipment his mother might have used to recreate those exact conditions for her own album.

The late acclaim didn’t change Baier’s life. At the time of the podcast interview in 2021, she still lived in Massachusetts, writing poetry and singing in a local community choir. Her husband passed away in 2019.

She’d turned down all offers and deals for recording, performing and touring.

In a rare written interview, she was asked whether she ever felt a vocation to being a musician or an actress.

Baier’s answer, in true Zen fashion:

“Singing, acting, shoveling snow, sowing, seeding, mending, working, writing, looking, feeding. painting, cooking, sleeping… it all is what is laid on your doorstep, and it is all flawlessly what is. And that is all that needs to be done – if at all.”