Tracklisting

01.Blue Soldier Night
02.Holy Dungeon
03.The Greatest Love Of All
04.Open Arms Of Gold
05.Nana
06.Court My Eyes Alone
07.Glaslights
08.Messed-up Girl ballad version
09.No One’s Child
10.Your Kingdom
11.You’ll Come Home Again
12.Grandiosity
13.Lonely In Gold

All songs written by Maximilian Hecker. All songs performed and produced by Maximilian Hecker. Mastered by Darius van Helfteren at Amsterdam Mastering, Amsterdam.

Maximilian Hecker about the album:

In 2008, I reached a point at which I was no longer able to find any satisfaction in my career. I felt that, since the decision I had taken seven years earlier to make music my profession, I had seldom been successful in expressing genuine emotion in concerts or studio recordings. I felt myself to be constricted in a corset of perfectionism and conventions – partly self-inflicted, partly dictated by outsiders. Retrospectively, I realized that a large part of what I had achieved on stage and in the studio had been only a rudimentary excerpt of my feelings, that the channel to my soul felt as if it had been obstructed in such recordings and live performances.

It was a series of cathartic and at the same time traumatic experiences – including my encounter with a Japanese woman called Nana in Tokyo in November 2008 – that heralded for me what I call the »decomposing mode«: in order to »survive«, I started to destroy all the suffocating elements in my environment – I liberated myself from narcissistic demands, stopped shaving, wore jogging pants as everyday clothing, distanced myself from women, even from the idea of finding true love one day. I began to make street music again, or rather, to »meditate publicly«, up to six hours at a time, just singing if no one was specifically listening to me – for this was the only way to keep open the path to my soul. And eventually, I began to record my new songs at home, shortly after composing them, using the simplest equipment (often only one room microphone). Exposed to all the street noise and »dirt«. Holding on to the moment of inspiration. My soul, my pure emotions immortalised on tape. All rational processes that before had deadened and delayed my feeling – such as arranging, determining the instrumentation, writing succinct lyrics (the lyrics on the album derive largely from a stream of consciousness emanating directly from my heart, improvised at the moment of recording) and finally the professional recording – these were eliminated. Just the essence remains: the pure emotion, the pure, artistic innocence.

Copies from http://www.maximilian-hecker.com/

China National Library Concert Hall, Beijing [CN], 2009-10-30
Photo by Diso Studio