“That’s going on” by Herbert Grönemeyer: verbiage and resistance

The very first word on Herbert Grönemeyer’s new album “Das ist los” means hope. “Hope is so hard to find right now / I’m looking for it,” he sings in the opening song “Deine Hand”. His voice rises from piano chords and celestial “uh-hu-hu” choruses. Five songs later, one line reads “Every spark of hope is worth it”. The gently ascending ballad “The Key” tells the story of people who have fled a war and find that their key to their old apartment abroad no longer locks.

On his 16th studio album, which will be released this Friday, Grönemeyer once again explains the world and how he feels about it. While he warned of a new fascism on his last record “Tumult” (2018) with the call “Not a millimeter to the right”, it is now about the multiple crises of the present and about deep personal feelings. The 66-year-old singer seems surprisingly calm and spreads confidence, for example by invoking the power of solidarity.

When Grönemeyer presented his album on Wednesday evening in the Lovis restaurant in Berlin, he enthused: “It’s wonderful that you can make music again, what luck that is.” Last year he fell ill with Corona and therefore had to cancel a tour at the last moment. The more critical the time is, the more he tries to encourage people to think about things that are positive.

Because a first single was to be released early and the vinyl version of the album required a long lead time, Grönemeyer had to deliver the lyrics faster than usual. That presented him with problems. “I’m always sure about music,” he says. “I don’t know about the lyrics: is there something coming, is there nothing?” When the titles were already arranged, he “burrowed into the words like a kangaroo gone mad”.

For “Deine Hand”, the musically outstanding title of the album, Grönemeyer wrote the lyrics with the Berlin singer Balbina and composed the music with the young songwriter Nellie Christina Andersson. With a snap of the fingers, the pop song picks up speed, right on the line “Your hand, she pushes my hand in love”, bass and drums start. The love song “Herzhaft” is built around ultra-hard beats provided by Berlin electronic freak Hainbach. They are reminiscent of Kraftwerk and the Krautrock from Neu! and come from decommissioned devices that were used as particle accelerators and for nuclear research.

The first part of “Das ist los” was created in Umbria, where Grönemeyer and his producer Alex Silva set up a studio in a barn. Other songs were recorded in an “old hippie studio” (Grönemeyer) in Visby on the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland. The musicians wanted to retire, but reality caught up with them. Russian warships were navigating the Baltic Sea, and the attack on Ukraine was announced.

“Das ist los” is not really modern, musically many of the 13 pieces seem to have fallen out of time. Grönemeyer could have recorded classic piano ballads like “Tau” or the chanson-like “Beauty” thirty years ago. The swaying German rock of “Genie” sounds similarly backward-looking, but at least it contains the brilliant life advice “Oh, unfreeze your genius”. Grönemeyer has been working with Alex Silva since the album “Bleibt alles anders” (1998), maybe it’s time to do something different.

Grönemeyer throws himself into the fray with verve. Almost like a cabaret, he castigates the climate policy of the traffic light coalition in “Angstfrei”: “Whoever doesn’t kick / sticks to the traffic light / and waits for green.” He shouts “Yep!” and “Go!” to Schlumpf-Techno- hoot. With the mourning song “Urverlust” about the lost love of his life, Grönemeyer builds on “Mensch”, the “best song” he has ever written.

His neologisms are great: “Tragikstau”, “Zweifelzwangsjackett”, “strictly derelict dream”. With a quote from “Herzhaft” one would like to call out to Grönemeyer: Please more of “your nonsense”.

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