At the pop college, a teacher told me my music was good but that I had nothing to say. He asked me what I wrote about. I couldn't answer him.
That was almost twenty years ago. This is the answer.
Two countries, no home in either
I grew up in Timișoara. My family was German, I went to a German school, and to everyone around me I was the German kid. Then we came to Germany and I was the Romanian.
Before that there was a childhood I still think of as a good one. Walking in the mountains with my parents. The smell of pine. Black tea in the morning at a hotel, which I had never tasted before. At night bears came to the bins outside and I stood at the window and watched them from somewhere safe.
In December 1989 I was six. We lived in the city where the army shot at people. My parents sent me to my grandparents in the village so that nothing would happen to me. Then my grandfather heard that the dictator's troops were coming to the village too. He nailed the windows shut and we hid in the bedroom for a day, a night and another day.
Same child, same window. Only the other side of the glass had changed.
Water with a face on it
Shortly after Ceausescu was shot we left for Germany. Six months, two refugee camps. What I remember most clearly is a bottle of water somebody gave us as a present. In Romania water came from the tap. Here it came in a bottle with a blue label and a face on it, and I stood there as a child trying to work out why anyone would put a face on water.
At school there were rules I didn't know. The wrong clothes got you cornered in the yard. One girl used to point at me and tell everyone I had AIDS. I understood much later why that sentence and not another one: that winter the Romanian children's AIDS epidemic was on every news broadcast in Europe. She was repeating what her parents watched at dinner.
It made me angry, and the anger went sideways. I got into fights. I hurt other kids. Afterwards I lay awake feeling like a bad person, because my grandparents had raised me Christian and I had a very clear picture of what I was supposed to be. I wasn't it.
Set me free
In 1993 there was a jukebox in a record shop that played the new releases. It played a Vince Neil record with a cover of a song called "Set Me Free". I had no idea what the title meant. I didn't speak English yet. I just wanted that CD more than I had wanted anything. I asked my parents until they bought it, and then I felt guilty, because the men on the sleeve looked dark and dangerous and nothing like the person I was meant to turn into.
It took two more years of asking before I got an electric guitar. I was twelve. The first song I wrote was called "My Own". It was about a girl and about having to go my own way.
By fourteen or fifteen I had stopped fighting in the schoolyard and started martial arts, and the people I spent my weekends with carried knives. One night the group decided to beat up a man much older than me. I stood there and understood there were two options: join in, or leave. Staying and not joining in was not one of them. So I left and never went back. Several of the people I knew then are dead now.
That was the first thing I ever did purely out of my own will. It had nothing to do with music.
Lazuright
My band was called Lazuright, from lazurite, Lazarus and "right". I was in my twenties and completely certain about what I was doing. Before a show I had exactly one thought: I am going up there and I am going to show you.
At the Taubertal festival we played at half past midnight. While we were still setting up, the crowd was still shouting for the band before us and calling them back for an encore. I stood there thinking, when we are finished you will be shouting our name. Sometimes it worked. At Southside in 2006 it worked.
That summer the singer of Eagles of Death Metal talked to us after our set and invited us to open for them in Cologne the following night. One of us had an apprenticeship to get through and chose it over Cologne. Nobody did anything wrong. He needed a life that worked. I understood that, and I still couldn't live with what it meant. I wanted more than the others did, and after that there was nothing holding it together.
There was nobody to show anything to. That was the part I couldn't handle.
Twenty years of almost
I trained in music and sound design. A couple of years after Southside I wrote the score for a production of Tannöd at the Theater der Altstadt in Stuttgart, a play about a family beaten to death on an isolated farm, taken from a real case from 1922 that was never solved. It was never enough to live on, and at some point I buried the idea that music would ever pay for my life. I built a career outside the industry instead and I was good at it. It paid for everything and it asked for everything.
I never stopped playing. I just stopped expecting anything from it. There were concerts alongside every job I ever had. The biggest audience of my life since Southside was a few thousand people in an arena in Munich, at a corporate event that had nothing to do with me.
The music was never gone. It just was never fully mine. I played the version that fit.
A few sentences from those years stayed with me. Our manager at Lazuright told me I was an average type and average doesn't sell. A producer came up to me after a competition and said he hadn't decided yet whether I was the biggest asshole in the room or the most impressive person in it. And a guitar teacher of mine, who played with Die Fantastischen Vier, told me my songs build tension beautifully and then never let go, never resolve, never arrive anywhere.
He was talking about the songs. Without knowing it he was also describing how I was living.
Don't you know me
Sooner or later a life built that way stops holding. Mine did. What was left standing was a question I had been carrying since a schoolyard in 1990 without ever asking it out loud.
Eigenwill
Eigenwill is not aimed at anyone. Not at my grandparents, not at the industry, not at anyone who ever underestimated me. It means making the thing I actually stand for, with my own story in it, instead of the version that fits.
Somebody I have never met left a comment under one of my songs, addressed to a record label whose name he didn't even know, telling them to listen because this was the next big thing. He owed me nothing. That one I kept.
I am not doing this on my own. There are people close to me who carry part of it, and friends who keep telling me to keep going. They are the reason this exists at all, and it took me a long time to let anyone stand that close.
I make music for people who have survived something and kept going. Who always had to function. Who learned how to get through the dark and are ready now to make something out of it.
So, what do I write about?
This.