As a singer-songwriter, the Viennese gives a strong sign of life with her fourth album “Dreams on cement”. The title seems to be a program for the time of the political overturns. “It sounds somehow, although my starting point was different,” says the 39-year-old in a conversation in which she also gives personal insights into her thinking and life.
If you take the album title and put it in the context of current political events, you could hear closer to the events around the world. “Dreams on cement” was probably not meant programmatic, wasn’t it?
Maybe that’s the case because I always sit down a clip for my albums that have a great generality somewhere. I’ve always opened barrels that raise great philosophical questions. In this case it is the game with the contrast, but in the title there is also the contrast of the dream world to reality. You can retreat to your dream world, which harbors dangers. At the same time it is also a kind of refuge. But reality is indispensable. This is an interplay of these two states that are always omnipresent. There were always times of crisis in human history. So the title of my new album is somehow fitting, although my starting point was different.
What was your starting point?
My starting point was the topic of contrast. That has always been fascinated and I wanted to explore it philosophically and musically. I always played with contrasts, but now I wanted to focus on an album for an album and drive a little into the extreme. “Don’t wake me up” starts as a piano ballad and breaks with distorted guitars.
“Don’t wake me up” for me is a tension moment of the entire album, in a way a key song that begins tender, vulnerable and very quiet and then this bombast comes. This contradiction triggers questions. How do you are generally a calm or a loud person?
I am more of a quiet person, but I have this fire, this force in me too. I often have very strong nightmares, but I don’t see it so negative because I have the feeling that I can process a lot in this way. I can let out the power live, otherwise I’m more of an introverted person. What the song “don’t wake me up” is deliberately a day’s dream in which I imagine what I cannot live out. It is totally nice to build a world that may not be living, but at the same time there is the risk of losing yourself, remaining reality.
What is your most beautiful daydream?
(laughs) I have a few such inner fantasy trips that help me to relax. I usually imagine that I lie on a boat that floats on a calm water with only light waves. I connect with the vibrations of the sea or the lake and look into the sky, see the stars and the moon. This picture has something totally relaxing and calming for me.
And it symbolizes the flow of time and sharpens the sense of the infinity of the universe.
Yes, exactly, but the song is about the dream of a not lived love.
Love, relationships and life determine the new album. How did you manage to find yourself and not to lose yourself, because the eleven songs already give me a clear picture of you what you wanted to tell with “dreams on cement”?
Most of the time I am writing one or two songs and when I feel that I have a river and an album can be created, then I deliberately set myself a heading that helps me to write for this album that it is coherent. On the one hand, this is a work that has to do with the fact that I am researching myself, but it is also just fun to fantasize a little. Not everything is always only personal. They are observations and philosophical mind games.
But that means that you are in the middle of life?
Yes definitely. You mean how I can make it that I stay on the ground and don’t drift into my dream world? I think because I am always very challenged in my life that I can make ends meet. I am very pragmatic from my nature. I am structured, very well organized. This is a good counterweight to my dreamy way that I also have.
But it is nice when sometimes the dreams can give in, right?
It’s really nice, but it is also sad, because my introverted manner sometimes is content with the daydreams. I just imagine things. Of course there is also a pain in it, because I would also like to experience things myself. I wanted to tell about it, about the feeling of dreaming, but that didn’t happen.
But you also manage to put catchy tunes into the world like “never” again. This is melodic pop music that brings the lyrical note of your texts even more to develop. Do you deliberately play with these moments?
Yes, it is a conscious decision. When I lie very far into the pop area, which the song “never again” does the most. I love pop and also admit it, but I always need a counterweight. I think it’s nice to process something in a very pop song that goes down. This creates a contrast. The song is about stopping setting myself. I have already got a lot of stones in my way in my music career, but I still don’t stop with it. That is the message of the song. I will never stop, I will keep going because I have to.
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Image: Emil Hildebrand
Source: Nachrichten
