I spent it promoting the first single of 2024, which was "Burn All Night" feat. Electra Black and which did quite well (by my modest standards) on Spotify, where it outperformed all my usual hits:

I also started two new video series on my socials:

1) "Faderhead Track You Might Not Know" – where I briefly talk about a lesser known song and give some background info

2) "Comment Replies" – where I answer comments directly on video.

If you haven’t seen either of these, they are on IG, FB, Tiktok and YT Shorts.

I am thinking of doing a series, where I go through every song on every album, one-by-one. That series would go on forever!

This newsletter is going to be quite long, so let’s get to the new stuff below!

CONCERTS

We are playing this year’s only UK show on May 4, 2024 at Electrowerkz in London!

Come see us live:

Feb 10, 2024 – Matrix, Bochum / DE – Tickets
May 4, 2024 – Electrowerkz, London / UK – Tickets
Jul 27/28, 2024 – Amphi Festival, Köln/DE – Tickets

NEW SINGLE

Today, on February 1, I am releasing a new single!

In case you didn’t hear: I am planning to release one every month, so the monthly newsletter is probably going to be a "New Single Out Now!"-newsletter for all of this year.

The new single is called "The Hell We Need" and it’s a very poppy ballad in the style of "Better".

I assume a lot of people will hate it, because it’s not a 4-to-the-floor club thingy. But:

a) that’s their problem and
b) they’ll probably like next month’s single!

"The Hell We Need" is a song about accepting the fact that life won’t always be good and that happiness is not a permanently attainable state. In a nutshell: hell is needed for happiness.

This became somewhat evident when making the song.

THE EVOLUTION

The original demo had been lying around on my harddrive since early 2022 with the "we all need …"-line as the verse and a fake chorus lyric.

In case you don’t know what a fake chorus lyric is: those are either made up words or just la la da da na na vocalisations as placeholders.

I go through my folder with demo MP3s every few months and this track has consistenly come out in the top 10, so I decided to release it as a single.

Of course I had to write proper lyrics, which was quite a struggle, because I tend to not want to deviate from the fake lyrics too much. Both in terms of syllable count and vowel shaping.

That means: if the fake lyrics have 9 syllables in a line and the strong vowels are eeeee and oooo, then the real lyrics have to have that too. Otherwise it doesn’t work for me.

In the end there were 9 completely different versions of choruses, all of which didn’t work for whatever reason.

Once I had settled on a lyric and a topic, I recorded the vocals properly. At that point the song was called "Where Them Sorrows At" and existed in 44 different versions.

So at some point I deleted all the vocals and re-recorded them in a way that sounded more like a hungover guy singing. This made everything better, because making music is not about getting it as clean as possible, but about getting the feeling right. And it wasn’t right.

At that point it was Saturday, January 20 – which you can see from the dates in the file list above. And Monday, Jan 22 was my original deadline for sending everything to Spotify.

At that point I had also been bitching to Gillian for a week, about how I didn’t like the single! And he (correctly) kept telling me that the song is fine and that I am just having my typical episode of hating everything I make once it gets close to deadline.

I am very aware that this always happens, but this time it felt different. So I talked to Danny about it and he said:

"You know, your verse should be the chorus/hook!".

Since I had nothing to lose, I sat down on Saturday Jan 20, opened an empty Cubase project and re-did the whole song.

1. What was originally the verse ("We all need some hell …") became the chorus.
2. The 4/4 kickdrum I originally had became a slower kick pattern.
3. The main bassline was turned into an 808.

And of course I now had to write brand new lyrics for the verses.

Uploaded everything to streaming services and planned a half-day video shoot for the next day.

VIDEO HELL

1. a phone set to vertical and
2. a DSLR camera set horizontally.

That way you can get material for Tiktok/IG/FB and also material for a traditional music video on YouTube.

Lyric videos that just have the lyrics play over the cover artwork are watched considerably less on YouTube, therefore my thinking was to do a quick video of me singing the song in the studio.

So on Jan 25th, my lovely girlfriend and I spent 6h shooting 3 different scenes of me singing the song. She was directing and running the cameras (plus the playback) and I was trying to remember the lyrics.

As some of you know, I have a short-term memory defect after almost dying from meningitis 20 years ago. So remembering lyrics is very difficult for me. Especially lyrics that are brand new.

Of course you can just tape the lyrics somewhere off camera, which is what we did, but it really reduced my ability to perform in front of the camera. Good-looking performance happens when you don’t think. It doesn’t happen when you are struggling to get the lyrics right.

Luckily this was a ballad, so it wasn’t too bad.

I have no idea why that happened and this taught me once again that having a checklist of things is absolutely necessary. I used to have a lot of checklists, until everything became so much stuff that I abandoned them. I guess I shouldn’t have done that.

Why is FullHD bad? Because we shot on tripods without movement. And I wanted to add some slight camera movement in the edit, which is not really possible if you don’t have enough pixels to work with.

If you don’t know the difference, look at this comparison:

I had already uploaded the video to YouTube and decided to take a bath, which I shoudn’t do, if I don’t want to re-start my work. Because sitting in the bathtub always gives me new ideas. It’s the lack of diversion and the focus on nothing that helps creativity.

In my case I remembered that I have a pen on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra phone and I thought:

"What if I scribble the text and then superimpose it over the video footage?"

I had previously tried all kinds of different computer fonts, but that none of them looked right.

So, after I had dried of, I scribbled the lyrics like this:

So instead of chilling out on the couch or writing this newsletter, I spent 2h placing and animating the titles.

For some reason, I can’t just say "Ah, fuck it! The video is already uploaded! I’ll just leave it like that!". Anyway, I am glad I did.

The added lyrics give me a bit of a Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring vibe:

Fun Fact: ever since I saw the "Being Boring"-video when it came out, the quote

"She was never bored, because she was never boring"

was one of my main mottos in life!

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ORIGINAL VERSION?

The original version of the new single is up on my Patreon, in case you are curious.

It seems the members really enjoy it:

Hope you enjoy the new song and if you do, please remember:

Word of mouth is the most important promotional support you can give, while at the same time it costs absolutely nothing.

So please be a friend and tell a friend about "The Hell We Need!"

Thank you!

Sami