MAximilian Hecker was already singing in falsetto years before Justin Vernon went into the forest cabin with his guitar to record the first Bon Iver album. Now the Berlin musician has released his tenth studio album “Neverheart” – an album perfect for trudging through anonymous city streets in light snowfall after dusk and watching how nature and civilization squabble with each other. Sparkling piano notes, wafting sound surfaces, delicately plucked electric guitar strings, percussion for which a less martial name should actually be found because the drums and cymbals are patted most of the time. But the instruments actually only prepare the bed on which this falsetto voice rests – oh, nonsense: over which it floats.
If you want to describe the music of Maximilian Hecker, you almost inevitably end up in areas of your own vocabulary that don't currently belong to the “active” category and that smell a bit like that classroom in which you analyzed poems in the basic German course and that did what Bravo called “adoring your crush.”
Alpha Romeo instead of alpha male
Hecker spent the first five years of his life in Baden-Württemberg, the rest of his childhood and youth in East Westphalia, before he became a street and then full-time musician in Berlin. His aptly titled debut album “Infinite Love Songs” was released in 2001: endless love songs, some of them closer to contemporary pop, most of them even back then somehow otherworldly and indulgent, but all of them melancholic and poetic, lyrically vague and therefore precisely meant for you. Music for sensitive young people and cassette girl cassettes. In the video for the single “Polyester”, which was still shown on indie music television on Viva 2, Hecker walked through Berlin with a Prince Ironheart hairstyle and knight's armor, which made it easy for music critics to describe him as a minstrel, but at the same time already outlined what range the then 24-year-old intended to cover.
“Neverheart” should not only refer to “Neverland”, i.e. the “Neverland” from “Peter Pan” by JM Barrie, but also to the cold or stone heart from the fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff. In Hecker's debut novel “Lottewelt”, which was published last October, the title also has several levels: two female characters named Lotte and the amusement park “Lotte World” in Seoul. The press release for the album speaks of the “protagonist” and “ten pathetic, or more precisely: two-tone, love songs” and thus tries to put the greatest possible distance between the artist and the work. Hui! Or, less benevolently: Phew!
Fortunately, Hecker's work always works even without a leaflet; The music grabs the audience far too quickly for that. Sometimes it takes a little time until you don't perceive this fragile voice as another instrument, but rather grasp the content of the lamentation: “I'm following the voices in my head / I'm stumbling / I'm running out of true / I' m reeling,” Hecker sings in “Losing Heart,” one of three songs with “Heart” in the title – “Love” even appears four times.
Radical pop Biedermeier
Image: Blue Soldier Records
Instead of alpha male, it's more like alpha Romeo. Hecker himself, who by the way sounds very relaxed and approachable on the phone, speaks of “never-hearted Heinis” – of which he also counts himself. For him, these are men who seem to “hang on the strings of fate like a puppet and are therefore incapable of actively changing fate.” Whose “path of life and love” already seems predetermined or shaped by their traumatic past. Demand attention and live away. That sounds like the main character of a Nick Hornby novel and a type of person you'd rather let into your music collection than into your own life – but if you have enough women in your circle of acquaintances who have once dated musicians, you'd already have thought that.
It is important to Hecker that he does not follow a nostalgia cult or refer to any “good old days” and their language, but rather stick to “the hyper-sensitive, self-centered attitude that literally celebrates the sound of well-formulated language and is explicitly unironic, for example one of Doderer, Proust, Rilke, Goethe, von Lübeck or even Nietzsche” because to him “it has always seemed to be the most coherent way to give a work a timeless, classic feel, yes, to use it as a clear counterpart to profane everyday life and its colloquial language conceive”. So he definitely wants his work to be understood as apolitical: “My gaze almost always goes inwards, an almost autistic-seeming reflection of myself in music and novels, there is no room for anything political.” This almost seems like pop Biedermeier again radical.
Maximilian Hecker no longer has a concert agency in Germany, but people in China and South Korea are flocking to his shows. Over the last 22 years, he has witnessed first-hand how structural change has transformed the music industry. Still, he says what makes being a musician easy or difficult is ultimately dedication: “Even if no one listens to you, Spotify doesn't put you on any playlists, and no agent books your concerts, it can still feel like a huge success, a good album “To have recorded it.” And that also sounds pretty romantic.
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