Brokenlande
Alles was ich will
Die Luege lebt
Letzter Zug
Lost Souls
Mensch
Cool Surf
Es ist ...
Sonne im 9. Haus
We all carry some darker aspects of ourselves with us. Some deny them, put them in a place, locked away, ignoring them. Others quietly draw from them and act them out … Here is a confession of someone who exactly knows what is going on!
Beichte = Confession
It is funny how some things come together. I was asked by Mercedes Benz to perform at their brand new flagship store in the city centre of Hamburg, Germany. After some intial conversations the manager pointed out that maybe songs would be a bit too distracting for the audience, especially songs with german lyrics. I agreed because I have always considered the local reuqirements for my music as well. And at this place the audience should look at cars, eat, drink, talk and listen to some good music - but music that is more a part of the environment than the main attraction.
I suggested, ok, I’ll do instrumental versions of my songs then. I thought, it shouldn’t be a problem. I just use my song playbacks and … well … how wrong I was - I ended up in heavy rehearsals for 2 weeks as it is not trivial at all to come up with guitar melodies on top of vocal songs!!!
I played 3 shows with this program and all of them were recieved very positive. And that was it, I thought. Again I was wrong, because when my mum’s birthday came up she expressed the wish: „You played these instrumental shows at Mercedes.me. I’d like the CD from this.“ "Well there is no CD at all, it was just live." „Well can’t you make a CD out of this?“ I looked into it and found that it really takes some extra work to bring the instrumental tracks to a level that is Album ready.
To get from „noodling over chords progressions“ to proper instrumental tracks being friends with Erlend Krauser was really helpful. And not so much regarding his outstanding technical abilities, it was more the basic approach to melody and vocals, because his job at James Last was to play well known vocal songs as guitar instrumentals. I was able to analyse the playing, the meldodic concepts, of Erlend which enabled me to find a concept for my own tracks and to cut a long story short here it finally is:
The lyrical guitar project!
Dedicated to my mum and inspired by Mercedes Benz and Erlend Krauser, special thanks to Alexander Choinka, manager for the Mercedes.me project!
On Apple Music
Kehrwieder has been quite a long time in the making. This was due to the fact that during the process the recording and production tools got changed through a couple of times. And it was finally with the advent of Reason 6 with audio recording ability that suddenly the final writing, arranging, mixing and mastering suddenly happened very quickly.
Kehrwieder in german means, at first glance, or is understood as „come back“, „come back home“. But this is wrong. A „Kehrwieder“ is basically a cul de sac! A loop! You walk down a road to just reach a dead end and you have to go all the way back! That’s a Kehrwieder. And that’s why there is so much electronics happening on this album and loops of course. And two covers, „Mensch“ bei Herbert Groenemeyer and „Wie tief kann man sehen?“ bei Stoppok. Kind of Kehrwieder as well.
The video here is the EPK from the promo period. It is in german though.
This is the result of the urge to go out and to play live again. After producing and writing records for others Tom Wendt wanted to sing and play again original material. And as it became kind of impossible to find a proper band he decided to go entirely solo and perform live with just a couple of electronic tracks as a backing and perform the vocals and the guitars live.