Recommendations of the Editorial team
The Berlin-based songwriter Stella Sommer grew up in North Frisia. In a small town on the North Sea. The appearance of their band project Die Merheit at ROLLING STONE Beach is almost a home game.
“I believe that the north always looks the same in almost every country in the world,” she once wrote about her origins. “Somehow desolate and flat. Almost as if a ravine opened up behind the northern border of every country and the world beyond ended. At least that’s how I imagined it as a child.”
The radio waves reached her across the sea, carrying songs by Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Monkees. And at some point she fished her own songs out of the water, which bore traces of her role models, but were still very unique because, like all great songwriters, she invented her own language that is closely linked to her voice and her origins. A bit brittle, dark, poetic in a laconic way, profound, always keeping a secret.
This own voice has been her own since the first album of her band project Die Heiterheit, “Heart of Gold” from 2012, present. Since 2018, she has also been releasing albums with songs in English under her own name, which have often earned her comparisons to Nico because of their dark intonation. Regardless of language, her voice became an important companion in the increasingly dark world. “When the time comes, we will know, things always turn out differently than expected,” she sang in 2016 on a double album with the beautiful title “Pop & Death I + II”then reassure us: “It’ll be okay.”
From the Great American Songbook to 60s folk
Nine years later, she sang to a Johnny Cash boom-chicka-boom beat: “Black magic is guaranteed to help/It’ll get you to your goal and it’ll never disappoint you/I lean towards black magic.” It was the title song of perhaps the best hilarity album “Black Magic”which is inspired by the Great American Songbook, but at the same time deals with very present fears and looks for strategies to overcome them. “This too will pass,” Sommer sang. “You will get through this too/The mouth is a wound that laughs/You will get through this too/I sing the seasons, sing the rain/I sing the times and I sing you along.”
“Black Magic” In its musical elegance and its balance between doom and humor, clarity and mystery, is for me the best German-language album of the 21st century – and the successor, which we revealed in our podcast ROLLING STONE WEEKLY over the summer that it is influenced by the folk music of the 60s and Bob Dylan’s early albums, is also said to be in the works. Maybe at ROLLING STONE BEACH in November we’ll hopefully hear the first new songs in addition to hopefully a lot of black magic. Sommer’s appearance with her current colleagues Sonja Deffner, Hanitra Wagner and Philipp Wulf is definitely a good reason to look forward to our festival in November with great joy.