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Personally, I am always moved by the question of what actually moves the musicians we meet. With hardly any other band is this overarching question as relevant as with ELLENDE. On the sidelines of their show in Dresden, singer L.G. took the time to answer this very question. You can now read the result!
Thanks again to lightinmirror.de for the wonderful pictures!
Shieldmaiden’s Voice: What role does artistic work in general play in your life?
L.G.: It plays a big role. It’s about the only thing that feels meaningful. Work is more of a means to an end for me, even though I have a cool job. But you can express yourself through music. It feels meaningful to make music and I also need it somehow, this expression of myself personally. That’s what it’s all about.
SV: What aspects, themes or feelings do you most often incorporate into your music?
L.G: There’s a lot of existentialism in ELLENDE. It’s the big questions that you have. There’s also a lot of passion in the music, because it’s very important to me that it’s fun, also for the others who are involved. It shouldn’t just be work, but really something you enjoy doing. There are also questions about the direction we are moving in as people, what decisions we make, whether we take responsibility. You can find that again and again in the songs.
SV: These are all topics that are very personal… How do you manage to protect yourself?
L.G: I don’t want to protect myself in the music. I just put everything I want to talk about into it and I don’t really care whether it protects me or not. Things just need to be said, I think!
SV: Self-sacrifice before self-protection, so to speak!
L.G: Exactly! It doesn’t do me any harm either. I’ve only experienced positive things with the music, especially when it comes to the exchange with the fans. I get a lot of positive feedback!
SV: That’s the counterbalance to the negativity in the music.
L.G: That’s right.
SV: So what are the essential elements that make a song an ELLENDE song?
L.G: It’s hard to say, because it’s a certain gut feeling… It has to be authentic and it doesn’t really matter in what form it comes across. It’s always quite similar, but as long as a certain mood is conveyed or a certain atmosphere is created, it’s not so important to me how exactly the song is made. That’s why I’ve sometimes changed studios.
SV: Todbringerin was released in August, which is a re-release of Todbringer that was necessary due to various things in the background. How is what we’ve just discussed reflected in the re-release? You have to revisit and rework things that you’ve already discussed before.
L.G: I see an album like this more as a kind of time period. So it’s simply an album that was re-recorded in a new time with new skills. I had no problem revisiting those themes and working with them again. It always feels very authentic, although I was a bit afraid that it wouldn’t work. But all in all, it was totally ok for me! It also worked really well.
SV: What does it do to you live when you perform the songs? What does that trigger in you?
L.G: It takes me back a bit to 2016/2017, when the album was first recorded. Because we’ve been playing Ballade auf den Tod, which has become our signature song, live since 2016, it’s nothing completely new. It has always kind of grown with us. This album has always been part of our live show.
SV: Live is a good keyword! What is your personal summary of the tour?
L.G: The tour is extremely great! Even during the week a lot of people have come and the feedback has been very positive for the most part. It just feels super cool to be on tour! I prepared for the tour for a long time and it was very exhausting. So I’m very happy that everything is going so well and I’m really glad that my voice is holding up. I was actually most afraid that I might not be able to sing at the end. But it’s still working! Even though I have a sore throat and am ill at the moment, I hope it stays that way. It’s just the best feeling to be on tour and the other bands are also super sociable and we all get on really well. That’s not always a given.
SV: What were your highlights on the tour?
L.G: The show in Switzerland was absolutely brilliant! The atmosphere was great and I can’t even say exactly why that was. There were some shows that were really next level In Budapest, the location was also super cool: it was a ship on the Danube, which was also pretty fancy!
SV: Backstage in the engine room?
L.G: Yes! There really was this huge ship’s engine in there! It was an old cargo ship! Things like that make a tour like this really exciting.
SV: What did people who didn’t see this tour miss out on?
L.G: A good experience, I think. You should definitely see ELLENDE live!
SV: So ELLENDE is more of a live band than a studio band?
L.G: Both! Both! But the other bands on this tour are also really great!
SV: If you had to summarize your career with ELLENDE so far in one sentence, what would it be?
L.G: Mhm… in one sentence… “Keep going!”
SV: What do you wish for ELLENDE’s future?
L.G: I wish that my live line-up remains as it is and as it always has been and that the passion doesn’t get lost with us!
Don’t forget to read the concert report on ELLENDE’s performance in Dresden, because there you can get our impression of this very passion.
We’ll soon be heading in a completely different musical direction again… But more on that soon!
Shieldmaiden's Voice 