Albums

Nowhere Near (2024)
Where I Lived, And What I Lived For (2021)
Random Karma (2018)
Auf Sicht (2015)
Out of Season (2012)
Sag mir wohin (2009)
Schön ist es (2004)
Disconnect (2002)

Nowhere Near (2024)

“Nowhere Near”, my eighth album, was released in May 2024 in purely digital form and follows on seamlessly from its predecessor „Where I Lived, And What I Lived For“: very guitar-heavy indie music with exclusively English lyrics. Ten songs, reduced to the essentials, without much around it. The release was accompanied by two singles, namely “The Ocean” and “Nowhere Near”, both of which – in my opinion – represent the reference points and respective end points of the album and thus somewhat span the sonic cosmos in which this album moves.

Incidentally, the picture on the cover comes from the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery here in my town, where I once spend some time waiting. As luck would have it, I had my little Leica Minilux 35mm camera with me that day and – probably out of boredom – I took the picture of the chairs, which themselves seemed to be waiting for something.

Where I Lived, And What I Lived For (2021)

“Where I Lived, And What I Lived For” is my seventh album to be released in 2021. An album that follows on seamlessly from its predecessor “Random Karma” (2018) and offers domesticated indie/alternative rock.

First of all, however, the title of the album needs to be clarified. “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For” is a chapter from the famous book ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau from 1854, in which he describes his temporary escape from civilization and his life in nature. Not as an escape from the world, but as an attempt to realize an alternative lifestyle close to nature. In essence, he was probably concerned with the question of what a person really needs to live. And for many people today, this seems more relevant than ever. And so several songs on the album deal with these questions and themes: “Home Is A Long Way Away”, “You Never Knew Yourself”, “Ahab” or “Die Spuren in denen du gehst” (incidentally, the only song with German lyrics and therefore probably a special tip on the album).

What is immediately noticeable when listening to “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” compared to the previous, especially older releases, is the clearly more emphasized indie character of the album. It is more direct and raw than the previous albums. Also worth mentioning is the fact that – with the exception of “Die Spuren in denen du gehst” – all the lyrics on “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” are in English. While the previous albums offered a more or less varied mix of German and English lyrics (there are even two songs in French on the first two records), this time – in keeping with the main theme of the album – the focus was on a deliberate, intentional reduction and restriction in terms of language. In combination with the equally reduced instrumentation (essentially guitars, drums, bass and vocals), the result is a highly compact and dense listening experience that is wonderful to listen to both quietly and turned up and loud.

If you wanted to pick out individual tracks from “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, your first choice would probably be the three singles. If you have already heard these or would like to get a new, different impression, then the aforementioned “Die Spuren in denen du gehst” (The Tracks You Walk In) would be a good choice, which is a little out of the ordinary due to its German lyrics alone. Where I Lived, And What I Lived For” was produced by Heiko Schulz, who was also responsible for the technical realization of the ideas on the previous albums, and who also contributed the bass for this album.

Random Karma (2018)

After “Auf Sicht” and after only three years, I’m delighted to be able to release my new record “Random Karma” in 2018. Yes, that’s right – record! Because “Random Karma” will be released on vinyl, in a very small edition of 150 copies. And the whole thing in a 180g vinyl deluxe pressing! (Of course, there will also be digital versions on the usual streaming and download platforms in addition to the record. So nobody who doesn’t have a record player has to buy the record) BTW: The digital version of “Random Karma” contains five (!) bonus tracks that are not on the vinyl version.

The release of a vinyl record closes a circle for me, because the very first album that I recorded many, many years ago with my former band “Maggie’s Woodfeet” was also released in 1990 for the good old record player. It was only after that, following the general trend, that we switched to CDs. As a result, we released two CDs with Maggie’s and five CDs that I released solo. Now, in 2018, it was time to do something new again. In this case, new means “back to the roots” and thus back to the record. And all this despite the fact that I don’t even own a record player myself. For me, it’s less about the audiophile expression – and I’ll spare you the whole discussion about whether analog sounds better than digital at this point – and more about the haptic experience of holding a 30x30cm printed piece of art in your hands.

And the whole thing really is art! After I was supported by the wonderful Sven Cichowicz with the artwork for the last two covers, this time Christopher Tröster did the artwork. So it’s hardly surprising that the look is actually fundamentally different from the cover art before. Although Christopher has also worked with pictures, they take up a different space and play a different role than the photos/pictures in Sven’s very image-heavy artwork. In any case, I really like the artwork and it reflects the title of the record “Random Karma” very well.

On the more technical side: there are “only” eight songs on the record. Why only eight songs? Well, if you spend a little time with analog technology in general, and records in particular, then at some point (and quite quickly) you come to the point where you have to think about audio quality. To put it simply, audio quality decreases as the number of tracks on a record increases. In other words, the longer the playing time, the lower the quality. (Again, I’ll save myself the discussion as to whether you can actually hear the loss of quality in the end). However, we (i.e. Heiko Schulz, who is again responsible for this production as musical mastermind, and I) did not want to compromise on the audio quality in this respect, and therefore decided to stop pretty much exactly at the 17-minute limit (per side), which represents a good compromise between playing time and audio quality. Hence “only” eight songs.

Looking at the back of the album cover and the track list, you’ll notice that this time all the songs are in English. There was no particular reason for this. Somehow, however, I felt like making another album entirely in English. Probably because I mainly listen to English-language music myself at the moment, which in turn is due to the fact that everyone seems to be singing in German now, and English is once again the exception to the rule. It’s funny how that has changed over the years. The basic tenor and message of the record is “indie rock”. That means lots of electric guitars! “Random Karma” is probably the record on which I’ve used the fewest acoustic guitars ever. Heiko and I attached great importance to not sounding too vintage and dusty, but we wanted to pack beautiful (British) guitar sounds into a contemporary sound. I think we succeeded quite well. My favorite tracks are definitely “When we were young” (like “Crows and Ravens”, there are two “Karma Mix” versions of this song, which were released digitally as singles in advance), “In your Room” and “Parasomnia”, a rather unusual MW song on a rather unusual MW production.

Auf Sicht (2015)

At the beginning of the work on “Auf Sicht”, the question was what should come next after “Out of Season”, how the next record should be structured. Whether it should also follow a certain concept or whether it should be a compilation of songs that are more or less loosely connected to each other, as is usually the case. It’s not so easy to take the next step after a very special album like “Out of Season” – at least for me.

In my humble context, it’s probably no different than for R.E.M after “Out of Time”, Nirvana after “Nevermind” or Niels Frevert after “Du kannst mich an der Ecke rauslassen”. All records that marked a significant point in the careers of these artists and bands – especially from a musical point of view. Change or carry on as before? As I said, it seemed similar to me after “Out of Season” on a much smaller scale. Change or carry on as before.

While discussing this question with Heiko Schulz, songs came about almost casually – as always. And somehow, very quickly, quite a few of them came together, so that at a certain point we said: “forget the concepts and all the mental overload, go into the studio and just record the songs”. Basically quite simple. And that’s exactly how we ended up doing it. Out of almost 25 song ideas, we selected 12 that we worked out and pursued further and that ultimately made it into the studio and onto the record. Basically quite simple. But you shouldn’t forget the many hours of detailed work, especially between mixing and mastering, where we spent a lot of time fine-tuning the songs. More than on any other production before.

In the end, we are really happy with the result! “Auf Sicht” has become a beautiful record. With one or two beautiful songs and a lot of vintage vibe. My personal favorites on the record are “Melancholy” with its simple but concise theme and the beautiful Wurlitzer passages and “Time to go” with its crisp bass and a nice, somewhat lush middle section. Right after that, however, come “Deine Liebe ist so still” and “Die leeren Tage”, whose final structure was not planned in this way and which – almost literally – only came about at the editing table when we took the different parts of the song apart and put them together again. I can’t say today whether the record represents a change for me musically or whether it’s more like “more of the same”. Ultimately, however, it joins the list of its four predecessors and continues to develop something that began in 2002 with “Disconnect” and that I don’t know what will come next.

Out of Season (2012)

Somehow it’s always been a big wish of mine to make a concept album. In other words, one that has a certain theme, a certain statement or a consistent central theme. And: I’ve always wanted to work with real strings! It must have been around 2010 when I discussed these ideas with Heiko Schulz and we decided to try to do just that: make a record with strings. However, they weren’t just supposed to be an “accessory” or a better keyboard replacement, but the central point around which the other instruments were to be positioned both in the arrangement and later in the mix. It quickly became clear that we would need someone who understood string arrangements. We found this “someone” very quickly in Gerhard Schiewe, who contributed the arrangements.

Because we were working in parallel, we had to change the entire workflow for the production, but it worked pretty well What was still missing was a string quartet. We were lucky enough to meet the enchanting “Nixen” through a couple of corners. All four of them are professional musicians who not only know their way around classical music, but also pop/rock music. For example, they have already played the strings for Mando Diao on their tour. The string recordings took place in summer 2011, and in the following weeks Heiko and I recorded all the rest in the studio. The release of “Out of Season” finally took place in November 2012.

This time, Sven Cichowicz was responsible for the artwork, the cover design and the many beautiful pictures. The whole process with him, from the shoot to the cover design and production, was simply wonderful and relaxed. It’s really difficult for me to name my favorite songs on this record, because I simply like and enjoy listening to all of them. This is largely due to the wonderful strings, which give the already slightly melancholy and dreamy songs the right depth and expression. But if I had to single out three or four songs, they would be “How can you be sure?” (wonderfully sustained and a beautiful opener), “Schrei aus Glas” (a hammering middle section), “Und doch irgendwie anders” (a beautiful flow and strings of butter) and “Someone else” (actually a very simple song, but with those strings…).

Sag mir wohin (2009)

For whatever reason, it took almost five years before the follow-up “Sag mir wohin” finally saw the light of day after “Schön ist es”. It was probably not so much due to time or organizational difficulties that the work on this album took so long. The first-time distribution via digital distributors (iTunes, amazon and musicload) can hardly be cited as a reason either. In retrospect, there were probably two things that explain the protracted overall process: Firstly, the rather convoluted and more complex arrangements of the songs, which led to the actual recordings (and especially the mix) being characterized by the desire to do “a little more here and a little more there”, with the result that the editing and mixing took what felt like an eternity.

German lyrics predominate in the songs: seven of the eleven songs are in German. The songs themselves are far less accessible than the songs on the two previous albums. Heiko Schulz not only sat behind the mixing desk for this production, but also contributed the drums, bass and piano parts. The cover design was handled in the usual manner by Frank Philippin: once again artwork based on a story told in pictures. It is about paths and roads that we walk, usually without consciously noticing them. My favorite songs on this not-so-easy record are “Stadt ohne Himmel”, “Feels like Home” and the title track “Sag mir wohin”.

Schön ist es (2004)

Just under two years after “Disconnect”, my second solo album “Schön ist es” was released. In the meantime, I had found that I enjoyed German lyrics and so nine of the twelve songs are written in German. As with the last production, Heiko Schulz was the one who not only played the “other” instruments – i.e. everything except guitars and vocals – but was also responsible for recording and mixing the songs. And just like last time, Frank Philippin (brighten the corners) contributed the wonderful artwork with the great snapshots from London and Stuttgart. Really quite extraordinary, ordinary pictures – wonderful!
My favorite songs on this album are clearly “Allein im Herbst”, “Siebzehn”, “Winternacht” and “So fing alles an”. While “Winternacht” and “Siebzehn” are more rocky with their crunchy guitars, the other two songs are more upbeat in terms of tempo and mood. I always enjoy playing “Allein im Herbst” live – especially because of the catchy chorus. Well, by my standards…

Disconnect (2002)

“Disconnect” was released in 2002, almost five years after the break-up of my band „Maggie’s Woodfeet“, in which I had played many concerts and tours as a singer and guitarist since 1988, recorded a vinyl LP and two CDs and gained a lot of experience. From the first record and music publishing contract, GEMA settlements and negotiations with promoters to the basics of songwriting.

After the end of Maggies, I continued to write new songs, which – without the help of my bandmates – wasn’t so easy at first. On the other hand, I could now try out things that would not have been possible in the band context and against the background of different opinions and ideas. Trying things out and experimenting was the order of the day!

And so it’s not surprising that “Disconnect” is – in my opinion – a very heterogeneous, multi-layered album. No two songs are the same. Neither in terms of songwriting nor instrumentation. Samples, loops, doubled guitars, effects etc. can be found almost everywhere. Unthinkable with Maggies!

My favorite songs are still “Meine Zeit”, which develops its very own charm with its Mellotron, the “tight” vocal sound and the drum computer, and “Der Besuch des Schakals”. Actually still a remnant from the old Maggies days, but never really in good hands there, here in a version with German lyrics. And: “Election Day”. A very special song for me. This was the first song I wrote after Maggies and since then I’ve always played it as the first song at every concert.