Four Music / Sony Music Entertainment Love b/w - 38157838

Sometimes less is more, especially in music. Sometimes the most beautiful songs shine brightest when you simply perform them the way they were written; sometimes their value and depth are revealed most clearly when they are stripped of all ornamentation and all tonal ornamentation. This is also the case with the thirteen songs that Mark Forster gave us on his album LOVE last year: They are intimate, deeply touching compositions in which the artist primarily talks about himself and in which so many people were able to find themselves. A year later, Mark Forster has now re-recorded all of these songs, in a version that has been reduced as much as possible, stripped down to their true essence, to their melodic and lyrical core: On the album LIEBE b/w (black and white) the compositions from LIEBE can be found again, but now Mark Forster has only had his pianist Daniel Nitt accompany him while singing on black and white keys, on a Steinway grand piano, in a theater in Paris. Of all his previous albums, LOVE is the one that means the most to him; which he also had the most difficulty with when writing and composing. Lyrically: because the lyrics are so intimate and personal; because it's about his feelings, his biography; about his relationship with people who are very close to him; and that also means: about his view of himself. It is an album that focuses on depth despite all superficialities; that exudes calm and wants to slow down; an album in which the songs build on each other and grow apart; an album that intertwines its motifs; that you can listen to from beginning to end, and at the end, says Mark Forster, the moral of the story emerges. The album is called LIEBE, so it made sense to record the black and white version in the city of love, Paris. We rented a theater for one evening to perform the album twice in front of an audience. The La Nouvelle Eve Theater is located at the foot of Montmartre Hill, a beautiful old building from 1850 that belongs to the operators of the nearby, legendary Moulin Rouge: a hall with truly wonderful acoustics, and for the concert we borrowed a Steinway grand piano in Paris, which sounds even better than Steinway grand pianos are already used to. Only this wood and this tension can now be heard on the recording, only Mark Forster and Daniel Nitt and the singing guests who also contributed to the first version of Love: Maro and Maurice, the two Ugandan pop stars, flew in from their homeland for the joint piece Chip In; Sido, who couldn't be there because of his own rehearsals, joined Dank Dank by phone. The atmosphere at this concert was extremely concentrated, and so was the audience, says Mark Forster. At each of the two performances, 300 people listened, almost all of them had come from Germany, and at the artist's request, all of them, like himself, dressed in suits and evening wear to emphasize and celebrate the special character of this event. You don't have to have been there in Paris to feel the devotion with which the audience received Mark Forster's songs there; it is a sound document of rare magic and aura. On LIEBE b/w you hear an artist who is completely with himself and his listeners. He is an artist whose music touches the innermost in every form; an artist whose songs seem all the greater the more unguarded they appear to us.

• Four Music / Sony Music Entertainment Love b/w

Category: Pop