visions
| Visions on Alphaville´s music
by Alphaville, from various sources: Salvation(album 1997/2000) Interview with Marian Title (12/1997 German fc ´Faithful & True´ website) Why the title Salvation? "Originally we planned to call the album Inside Out because it represented one aspect of the album, especially the lyrics have some very personal point on it and the title of the song quite fit for it, to that tension. We called it Salvation because we felt so...when we went to France to write the album, we had no plans, no ideas, no concept for it, we just went down there and we simply started, we had no demos, no lyrics, nothing. After we finished the last song fo it we were a kind of relived and yeah we thought Salvation therefore was a good title for it." Lyrics (10/1997 German fc ´Faithful & True´ website) I love songs like Heaven or Hell or many songs of Prostitute; not just because of the music but because of the lyrics. At Salvation some lines are more banal than other lines in other songs... "Okay, what's the question?" Well, the question is... Why AV? Why the lyrics of Salvation are so shitty?? (laughs) No, no, but... why a return to a style alike ´Forever Young´? "Well, I don't know. sometimes it probably depends on the music. It depends on the inputs I get. A song is very different from a poem and maybe especially on Prostitute the lyrics were more like poems. Here it's just lyrics for some songs. And since lot of the music on Salvation is a kind of streamline music, the lyrics are a little like that as well. when I wrote the lyrics, I tried to return to very simple definitions of things, which I was fascinated with when I wrote the lyrics for Forever Young. I was very much interested in trivial, banal things which when you put them into a context can express a lot more than you probably expected them, when your read them in the first time. The lyrics on Salvation have much more trivial in it than especially in Protitute, which is very different, is more like poetry . Salvations marks a return to songlyrics in a kind of style. I just try to think of a lyrics which I really find great represents...New Horizons: I like the lyrics very much and this lyrics are probably the most banal on the whole album. They're very simple, very short, selfexplaining lines, bit they are communicating in their simplicity to the music, which is also very big and mighty, but is very simple and very naive in a way. And I tried to write very naive lines, because the story you have in New Horizons is maybe the story of our biography- of three very naive persons and I just tried to reflect that. And another lyrics I like very much is Guardian Angel. I like the lyrics of Guardian Angel, too." Allright. What are the lyrics you don't like? Maybe Flame? "´Flame´! Maybe not the whole song, I'm just talking about some lines. It's different if a song is all banal, it can have a meaning inside which is not banal. But maybe a song has just a line which is banal and you notice just that... ´Flame´ is maybe not a good example for it. What is a very good example for what I mean is ´Wishful Thinking´. The lines in ´Wishful Thinking´ sound quite banal, I a way. On the other hand, there is just one line which changes the meaning of all the other lines completely and that is the line "Sometimes I wish that you were dead". And it was probably a mistake to change the title of the song because that took a little bit away from the edge of the song, lyrically. But this is exactly what I mean. If you introduce a line like that into a hurt of more banal sounding lines, you change the meaning of those lines a little bit, in a way, and it makes them turning around, it takes that in something else. And that is what I tried to do with the lyrics of Wishful thinking. it's in a way a lovesong, but it's a quite interesting situation which the song describes: the situation is about somebody who has left his lover and now he starts to think that it was probably a mistake to do that. So the situation is anyway I think it's somehow interesting and very contraddictionary. Especially this song is much more contraddictionary and interesting than maybe people might think when then don't think too much about the lyrics. There in this lyrics are many hidden things, many lines between the lines." Inside Out (12/2000 French fc ´Streetside Romeos´ fanzine #1) "´Inside Out´ was basically done in Berlin. Rick and Bernhard came around one day and played me a rough demo with the music and the wonderful melody in the M-8-part. I fell in love with this song immediatly. I thought there´d be millions of exciting ways to sing it. The problem was, to choose from those millions of versions...till I finally found out that there was only one..and no choice." Guardian Angel (10/1997 German fc ´Faithful & True´ website) Talking about titles: the first title of ´Guardian Angel´ was ´Nightguard´. Why did you change it? "Because I had a polemist with a title like that. Because the word ´nightguard´ doesn't exist in English, it doesn't appear in the English dictionnary, so I just was looking for an existing word which could probably explain the situation of somebody who wakes beside a bed of a person who's very ill. That's the reason for the change." Flame (12/2000 French fc ´Streetside Romeos´ fanzine #1) "´Flame´ is just a love song. One cold November afternoon I was sitting in the kitchen, the only heated room in our house at Magesq facing the dramatic problem of not having the slightest idea for an appropriate line for the chorus of a song yet still unnamed, staring at the tiny blue flame flickering in a little window at the front of the gas-heater opposite my table. It took me about 3 hours till I finally got the clue..;" Dangerous Places (Alphaville´s mailinglist) (go to section ´Forever Young´, look under ´Sounds Like a Melody´) |