Milica Todorovic on Burnout: 'I Felt Myself Sinking'

In an interview carried by Kurir and Mondo on Friday, Milica Todorovic admitted that she went through severe burnout last year and seriously considered quitting music altogether. The singer says that both the industry and the people around her were wearing her down at the time, and that she had no desire to perform in front of an audience.

Todorovic calls her song “33” her life song. She says she deliberately tied the track to that period and spoke publicly about it, not to seek pity but to encourage people facing similar problems to seek help.

“I recently talked about a tougher period in my life, and that’s why I said the song ‘33’ is, in a way, my life song. Why? Because it was only last year that I was hit by this thing we could call ‘burnout,’ or in Serbian ‘sagorevanje,’ where I felt myself slowly sinking, and where the music was wearing me out, and people were wearing me out. I didn’t feel like going on stage to sing, I wasn’t giving interviews.”

The singer said that during that period she also thought about leaving the music scene altogether, and that the tears came, as she described it, while she was explaining where the lyrics “You’re still too young to light your candles, when you want everything and nothing wants you” came from. She said she consciously decided to talk publicly about her burnout.

“I wanted to say that I deliberately said this publicly, so that people who have problems with this could say, oh, she’s a public figure and she’s talking about it. Yes, but I am a living being, made of flesh and blood, this can happen to anyone, and I’ll say it again: if you don’t feel good, it’s not shameful to see a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, anyone, so that it doesn’t end in murder, suicide, or turning to drugs or alcohol.”

In the same conversation, she touched on a subject rarely discussed in the music industry: addiction among colleagues. She said she doesn’t know exactly who among her fellow musicians uses drugs the most, but that the whole situation makes her sad.

“We have plenty of examples on the music scene, especially among my colleagues, and unfortunately you never know who’s using drugs more, and I feel sorry about that. I don’t blame them, I just want to give them support and tell them, look, I made it, you can too.”

How the Scene With Ben Kingsley Came to Be

In the same interview, she shared an anecdote from the time the filming of “An Ordinary Man” brought actor Ben Kingsley to Belgrade. The film’s choreographer was her boyfriend at the time, a theater director she was with for six years, and he took her for coffee at the Hotel Metropol while he was working with Kingsley.

According to her own account, Milica started singing the song “Jutros mi ruza procvetala” while waiting in the lobby, and the actor heard her singing and invited her to join him in the scene. She says she initially refused, feeling uneasy in front of such a big name, but that Kingsley convinced her to perform the song live while he acted alongside her, instead of using a recorded track. The scene was filmed with Milica performing live.

This is not the first time Todorovic has opened up about her private life in public. The singer has previously spoken about raising her son Bogdan, and she recently made headlines over chaos at one of her concerts, when panicked parents interrupted the show after losing their daughter in the crowd.

In this conversation, Todorovic repeats her message about burnout and seeking help as a kind of conclusion to the whole experience, not as advice from the outside but as something she went through herself and, as she puts it, came out the other side.