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Legacy October 2004

Original Article

Hunters of the lost word

Grandmaster Ertner already has prepared the setting for this story with his reports of Ramm-stein, so I can start with the story right from the beginning when I had met Paul Landers in a hotel in Nuremberg. Paul is a very nice and competent interview partner, who is only reminded of the one hour time limit for the interview by his hunger and a tough time schedule.
"After taking "Sehnsucht", the first song of this album for its title, you did the same again this time – a kind of statement to say "Look, this is the direction in which "Reise, Reise" is in-tended to go?"
"With a bad succession of songs you can ruin a whole album, make it totally inaudible! A lot of songs do not mean automatically a good album. As an example: have a look at he FC Bar-celona or Real Madrid: a bunch of good football players but not a good team. Team spirit, the team play is what counts. Rammstein always composes the succession of the songs in a way that one can and should listen to the whole album – therefore you have to compromise. Schneider really had created a good succession of the songs but our producer Jacob Hellner started to cry and begged us on his knees to change it. Schneider took the CD with him on a visit to Moscow, where he was invited. There he, too, realised, that the succession did not rock. Eventually the tracklisting is Jacob Hellner’s version."
"How do you create such a thing?"
"You just add one song after another and then listen to it."
"As you like it? Without restrictions?"
"Well, you have to care a bit. Schneider had put the songs referring to their themes: first hard, then melodious and at last soft; opposite to Jacob Hellner, who likes to jump from one theme to another."
"But the two ballads "Amour" and "Ohne Dich" are put one after the other on my CD-snippet – or was the succession changed once again?"
"Yes", confirms Paul, after he had pulled out his own CD of his pocket and had read the tracklisting on it. "But "Amour" only begins slowly, like a Chili-Pepper-ballad, then starts to rock, a bit like Muse – apparently your snippet is blended miserably."
"That is the bad thing about snippets- actually I wanted to buy the record yesterday, because I had mad a note that the release was on 20.09...."
"Well, that was how it was planned, but now it is the 27."
"Nevertheless, on all new albums there has been a title track – or should I say a song with the same title like the album is called?"
"That’s correct. A Rammstein album should be named after a song title from the record. "Reise, Reise" seemed to be the most reasonable."
"Any alternatives?"
"We thought of "Rot" ("Red"), no specific title, just to show we are on a new way; then there was the idea of an untitled album, only "Rammstein"
"Your white album then."
"Yes, but bright red. But we had to face some criticism, like: who do you think you are? We are not Metallica! So in the end it became "Reise, Reise", although even this was a difficult decision. We had some very good titles, but the German language is limited and does not of-fer many words, which match with us and which we haven’t already used as a song title. We experienced this problem already with the classic music album, when the young guy (i.e. Tor-sten Rasch – note of the author) asked for a title of that album. He would have liked to call it "Sehnsucht", but we had that already. So with the new album we tried to be free and easy and compromised on "Reise, Reise" There are so many words which have a double meaning and which are emotional, so they could be taken into consideration; "Mutter" and "Herzeleid" are perfect examples."
"Referring to this problem, the German language provides the most possibilities, as far as I know."
"Does it really? Then name some new Rammstein titles right now!"
"What about "Fleisch" (Flesh)?"
"Nope, we already had "Weißes Fleisch.""
"Another possibility could be "Blut"(blood)."
"Acrocity (another band) has already chosen this, but it would have matched well with the cannibalism topic. We didn’t want to reduce it to that. Another idea was "Rosenrot" (Rose-red). The word has to be ambiguous, has to reflect the music..not that easy."
"Then you should put up a "Rammstein title conquest" for the next album."
"There is nothing left....."
"There has to be more! Just have a look in the dictionary, it’s thick enough."
"You will find "clip" in there, but that’s no help at all."
"What about "Mauer" (wall)?
"It’s funny, but we had two pages full of these words, good ones, but we weren’t convinced. It sounded like a band trying to copy Rammstein. And we don’t want "Pseudo" Rammstein titles".
"Your album titles are always motifs – in contradiction to a concept album – and have some ambiguity. What’s the double meaning of "Reise, Reise"?"
"There is a problem with this title: it is so wide-ranged, you nearly can interpret it like you want to - already a bit too much range. "Mutter" already was widely interpretable; "Reise, Reise" is nearly inconceivable – everybody has to explore the ambiguity himself."
"With "Reise, Reise" you have chosen a repetition of words for the first time."
"Because we took the song title." "Which image do you use for the cover to illustrate the title?" "With a blackbox- the same way like a black-box looks after a plane crash with all the last recordings of the cockpit on it." "Is this the reference to the song "Dalai Lama", a song about a, well, kind of strange flight?" ""Reise, Reise" refers more to a cruise. The song isn’t about a special voyage; it’s more a kind of "Good-bye", "See you", "Adios". But we already had "Adios"."
"With "Reise, Reise" automatically a cruise comes to one’s mind, because of the romantic mood and the well-known affection of Rammstein for the mighty natural powers like water and wind – but here the water symbolises the good-bye, standing at the bay, waving after the leaving ship..."
"You got the picture – but another interpretation is also possible. The same goes for "See-mann" (Seaman). Many people thought it was about whores standing at lampposts. I don’t want to go into detail, because every explanation limits the fantasy of the listeners, and their fantasy is bigger than every explanation which can be made with our words. In a Rammstein song you can read between the lines, there is enough space for interpretation. We will never sing "Haut die Bullen platt wie Stullen" ( Beat up the cops! Literally it would be: beat the cops till they are flat as a sandwich; in German the slang word for cops is "Bullen", this rhymes with the word "Stullen" for sandwiches; as far as I know this was a slogan in the 80’s, when people with left wing conviction occupied empty houses to live in without payment and were confronted with the police on various occasions, to move them, which ended up in kind of street fights) this would be too directly and too simple. We probably would sing: "Ich muss zerstören, doch es darf nicht mir gehören (I have to destroy but it mustn`t be mine. To destroy is "zerstören" this rhymes with "gehören" which is to possess, to own)..."
"So there has to be a bit of pathos."
"We love to use emotional and dramatic style; music in minor; big violins. Although there are some band members who hate violins. But a bit drama and theatre- that’s us."
"Back to the music: in my opinion this is the most versatile album, in which the gap between hard and soft is growing more and more. "Feuer frei" could not be beaten until now, but with "Mein Teil" there is a song with even more abysmal aggression; and on the other hand you can see the progression in Till’s voice over the years comparing "Seemann" to "Ohne Dich". Were there others authors responsible for the songwriting this time?"
"Well done! First priority is always not to write the same song again if there has been a simi-lar song already. We did it once with "Klavier"(Piano) which is very close to "Seeman". We are not perfect but we try to be careful and we don’t want to copy us. We have put up some standards for us. And if we don’t fulfil them we try something new. And of cause we develop, too. Ten years ago, at the beginning, it was just fun to play, to create music with guitars and machines. We still have fun, but now we want to try to do something different, even more, as the strong influence of electronics is over now. This kind of music is not very innovative at the moment- everything has been done with synthesizers and sequenzers. Therefore we have gone back to the roots of playing, and especially after "Mutter", we concentrated on the band itself. We still use all elements in our music but the priorities have changed. The ones respon-sible for the basic ideas of the music this time were others and they had a stronger impact than on the last album. But of course we all worked together on that album, everybody has con-tributed to it; the house was build up with the same material together, but the basics were laid by others and you can hear this by the different colour of the music. We have a great potential of creativity in the band- you really could form three bands out of Rammstein – and that nearly made the caldron burst. We have managed our inner crisis, a normal phenomenon after ten years, and we are glad that we are able to continue to work together. This process is partly the explanation why "Reise, Reise" sounds different. Furthermore in former times the guitars were the leading instruments. The riff was king – everything else had to follow, especially the vocals, which only could be second place in the ranking at best. Till did not only improved his singing ability, we even learned to put things in a way THAT Till sounds better. The guitar doesn’t only play, she hands over the plate on which the golden thrush is served. Maybe this will change with the next record and the focus then is on dancing. But on "Reise, Reise" it is definitely on the vocals. Therefore all the rest can be different – the most important thing is that the singing sounds well. It was an experiment, but as far as I know from the responses to the CD, it has worked."
"You mentioned a crisis: how serious was the danger of a split-up?"
"Everybody who has had a relationship with a woman knows: there are ups and downs, and splitting up is one possibility. In a relationship there are only two, but we are six! Surviving only one day in such a relationship already is an art, not to talk about years or a decade...And with such stubborn people like we are it is even worse, but in the end we always could agree on something, maybe because we all come from the East? We have an extremely strong staying power, a strong will to make music together. But still you cannot avoid that fame and success change the list of values and priorities – if you give 1000 people a lot of money 990 are going to be assholes and only 10 stay relaxed (although there could be 990 other reasons why 990 from 1000 people are going to be assholes - comment of the author). We had the same problem: we were just a normal band, which played music. And then suddenly you are placed directly next to the Ramones in a record shop in Texas, you earn a lot of money...this has different effects on everyone’s psyche, and everybody copes with this differently. The powers in the band changed: in the beginning everybody had the same rights, but then there was a change, but now, knock on wood (he knocks on the table- comment of the author) we have changed back. As a band we just have a self-healing character! When you sometimes read of lottery winners, who spend their money, one has to admit that we have managed those attacks on our psyche well." "How often to you meet each other actually?"
"I see the band more often than my family! You know each other by heart, stick together on smallest room for a long time – I already mentioned: we have the energy and potential for three bands, and we have to cope with that. The advantage of this is a never ending pool of creativity, the disadvantage is you have to canalize and to compress it, have to squeeze it in a circle – I, myself, sometimes wonder, that we manage this for quite a long time already – it is nearly a mystery!"
"Although there is sufficient energy for three bands there still are no side projects to Ramm-stein?"
"Not yet, but there will be one. I cannot tell more.....The pressure had to be set free, and I think, this decision helped to relax the situation. But this will take a while anyway, because we now concentrate fully on Rammstein."
"Although the instruments stepped backed, there are some new aspects: in "Los"a guitar, strongly reminding of Depeche Mode’s "Personal Jesus", an accordion and a balalaika, female backing vocals in "Moskau", sounding very different from those in "Engel"..."
"The instruments were important to us, like the ones you mentioned, furthermore violins, an oboe on "Ohne Dich"- we noticed that every real instrument is different to a faked one. And if the record company still is paying for this – we would have been stupid not to go for a real accordion! The player who knows how to play his instrument is a very good experience- the more music goes plastic, the more computers fake instruments then you even more have to put something handmade against it."
"Nice statement! But one sentence grasps my attention: why "if the record company still is paying"?"
"You never know how long record companies, in the traditional sense, will exist!"
"This sounds as if you, like some others, want to get rid of them and start an own label."
"No. We have a contract which was signed in times, when money was no problem, and there-fore have sufficient budgets for videos....If you nowadays watch some bad videos it is not always because of bad ideas but sometimes because of tiny budgets. We are lucky to be privileged: we can use classic instruments in the production, are provided reasonable video budgets – and we use that, because you will never know how long this will last. Maybe after that we really do this: make a production on our own and then sell the ready made product to a record company, but now this is not to a topic for us."

Martin Graf about "Reise, Reise"

It has been a difficult birth, like Paul Landers has conceded freely in the interview. There was the danger of a split up for Rammstein, like for so many others, caused by wrong insinuators, the problem of money, fame and a certain degree of power, accompanied with the powerless-ness to stop those effects. Therefore "Reise, Reise" nearly has the effect of a catharsis, because the band has recollected its old powers, which still are: controversial topics, Till‘s unique voice, which has been put into first place, and a simplicity in instruments, which there-fore works with the maximum of efficiency and effectiveness. Rammstein do not need solo parts, everything is there to serve the song, to court it and work for it; and in the top of this strong oak the golden thrush has its throne. At the very beginning the first single has to be the highly controversially discussed "Mein Teil", one of the most aggressive, dark and in a way most blasphemous song Rammstein has ever written, but which still has the quality of subtle texts, which on "Reise, Reise" are more conclusive, ambiguous and stylish like I dare to claim for "Mein Teil". Apart from typical structured songs, like the title song or "Dalai Lama", a new desire for nonchalance, experiment and a kind of multi-dimensional punkrock can be discovered – as a proof I want to quote "Keine Lust" and above all "Los", which are, in rela-tion to Rammstein, nearly done economical, but really live on the power of the word.
The eruptive and increasing "Stein um Stein", which represents in text and music the changes between restrained and cruelly attacking, which shows in the stanza and the refrain the antipodes love and hate, which only together are a true unity and are reason for the other and vice versa, has to be mentioned as well as the two ballads "Ohne Dich" and "Amour", which show best the improved quality of Till’s singing – compared to the old "Seemann" one in-stantly recognises that ten years have passed, which Mister Lindemann has used for improving (!) but not for wasting time and ruining his voce with drugs and alcohol. The "journey" part of the album consists of the songs "Moskau" and the second single "Amerika", if you go for the literal meaning of the word "journey". "Reise, Reise" cannot reach the quality of the master album "Mutter", but it can be second best, together with the album "Herzeleid".

© 2005 Richiebaby