Herbert Grönemeyer disengages from the machine
German singer loves English language
On his new concert DVD, I Walk: Live, recorded in Germany, pop-ballad megastar Herbert Grönemeyer doesn’t sing a word in his native tongue, nor does he speak any German to the audience. Everything’s in English. Same for his new studio CD, I Walk. Which may seem curious, until you realize the Berlin artist is an unabashed anglophile who has called England home for more than a decade.
“When I did my first English album in the late ’80s (1989’s What’s All This?), I hadn’t lived in London yet and had no contact on a daily basis with the Anglo-Saxon culture,” Grönemeyer, 57, explained before a recent corporate gig at a Mercedes truck factory in southwest Germany, a test run for a 13-city North American tour that brings him and his band to Montreal on Thursday.
“Now, after all this while in England, and after working with (longtime Welsh collaborator) Alex Silva, writing lyrics together and producing, we thought: Why don’t we try to put an album together that represents much more of this time in my life?”
For good measure, they made I Walk’s leadoff track a duet with U2’s Bono, whom Grönemeyer met through human-rights activism.
Not that all of his fans have embraced the English experiment.
Grönemeyer — better known outside Germany for his acting role in Das Boot, the submarine war movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen that got several Oscar nominations in 1983 — was booed by many in a crowd of expats at a London concert a year ago when he announced that, for the U.K. market, he would be changing the lyrics to his 1985 German hit Airplanes in My Stomach, now retitled Airplanes in My Head. The negative reaction left Grönemeyer a bit cold.
“The big difference between the German and the Anglo-Saxon culture is that the Germans want you to be part of their machine: Don’t stick out, don’t do anything that sets you apart, stay in the machine and run along like a good little engine, and then you’re fine,” he said. “AngloSaxon culture likes you for being different and doing weird things.
“Yeah, the Germans are not forgiving when you step outside the normal track. But the thing is, I’m not employed by the culture, so I can do what I want.”
Deutsche Kultur does pay the bills, however.
In Germany, Grönemeyer has sold 18 million albums — more than any other artist in the country’s history — and sells out stadiums. His biggest seller was his 2002 album, Mensch, a response to the groundswell of public support he felt after losing his wife (German movie star Anna Henkel) and brother to cancer in 1998, leaving him a single dad of two pre-adolescent kids.
Mensch’s title track also leads off his new CD, this time in English, with Bono’s keening Irish tenor riding high over the hoarser, flatter sound of Grönemeyer’s German-accented baritone, their voices mingling in the grieving refrain that is a New Age-ish ode to recovery after losing loved ones: “Oh, it’s all OK / The pain’s fading away / This is summertime / Nothing on my mind.”
Most of the other tracks on I Walk also were originally written in German and appeared on Grönemeyer’s earlier records, but a few are new songs he co-wrote in English: a masochistic dirge called Keep Hurting Me; Will I Ever Learn, a duet with AngloAmerican artist Antony Hegarty; Before the Morning, about his mother, who has Alzheimer’s; and The Tunnel, from the score Grönemeyer did for the George Clooney thriller The American.
The artist’s anglophilia will be on display again in November with the European release of the movie A Most Wanted Man, a terrorism thriller based on the John le Carré novel, for which Grönemeyer composed the soundtrack. Directed by another old friend, Anton Corbijn, it’s set in Germany and stars Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
For now, though, there’s the English-language album and the tour. It’s a stab at a comeback on this continent for Grönemeyer after more than two decades away. He last performed in Montreal during the What’s All This? tour in 1989, opening for Tom Cochrane at La Ronde. This time Grönemeyer might even do a number in French — another linguistic leap.
“It’s just for the joy of trying things out,” he said. “We did a couple of test concerts in March in Chicago and New York, and played a few German songs, and that’s the way I would like to do it again. My dream is to one day sing halfhalf — German for the songs I think sound best that way, and the rest in English.”
This time, however, English — the language of his musical heroes Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen and the Doors — gets pride of first place.
“The English language is much nicer for a singer — it lies much nicer on the melody,” Grönemeyer said. “German is much more attack-y, percussive, has a very strong character. And writing in English, you don’t have to be so precise — you can be more vague, and through this openness the emotions sometimes come out more strongly.
“German is so much more engineered and exacting.”