This is a really strange album now. In Songbook, everything is in it that makes the guitar, composer and singer Masha Qrella, including her inconsistencies and contradictions. Finally, as in her identity card, Mariana Kurella began in postmason-Berlin post-mauer-Berlin, before interpreting Kurt Weill, Heiner Müller and then set to music with English and German texts on album length Thomas Brasch.
Each of her albums was a surprise, but this is a surprise bag in which the individual parts together do not really make sense, but every single part is pretty great, whether your own composition or cover version. This is also due to the fact that SongBook gathers some of the pieces and rejected projects that have remained, but nobody has cleaned up his rumbling chamber for a long time. The Berliner steals his whole pathos of the queen classic “I Want to Break Free”, from Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with somebody” makes her an intimate piece of folk pop, which is dazzling before transparency.
For the heavily flowered dream pop song “Anger and Glück”, Alexander Osang wrote her text, “Sometimes The Rain Just Keeps Falling for a Long Time” is based on Novalis, and with “Heart Failed (in the back of a taxi)” she shyly bowed to the Saint Etienne worshiped by her. Sometimes the contrasts also break open in the piece: The Manfred Krug song “To see the wide world” turns from sophisticated pop into a guitar meditation that leads back to Qrella’s early bands Mina or Contriva. Above all, it proves that so little coherent, so irritating and diselowned by Songbook: everything that Masha Qrella touches becomes musical gold.
You can find out which albums were published in March 2025 via our monthly publication list.