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Anna F - King In The Mirror (2014) [FLAC]
Etichetta: Polydor/Island – 006025 37544226
Formato: CD
Nazione: Germany
Rilasciato: 2014
Genere: Pop
It must be her….Anna F. as she comes up racing her second hand bike with her long and curly hair all over her face. The meeting point is a park in Berlin, the weather couldn’t be any better. Anna waves as she approaches on her bike in her jeans shorts and the washed out tank top. And right away it becomes clear, that she’s one of those people you couldn’t possibly dislike. Without even trying, she pulls you in straight away, her mere presence making every moment seem like a treasure, in her lovely, honest way. If she would tell you to, you would open up the depths of your vulnerable soul to her in an instant and without thinking twice. But of course she would never do that. After all, she’s got enough soul and vulnerability herself. A fact, that’s clearly to be heard on her first album “King In The Mirror”.
But before she begins talking about her new record with shining eyes, she first tells us about her personal background, by a little lake in the park.
She grew up in the Austrian province of Styria. In Friedberg. A little 2.500 soul town. She starts playing the guitar at 11. Just shortly after that she already begins making first recordings of her own compositions on her cassette player. Then, for some years, she loses herself in a pubescent maelstrom of a search for meaning, before she decides to perform at one of her school’s final concerts. Anna catches back on fire and again, music becomes an essential part of her life.
After moving to Graz to study, she meets Alex Deutsch, a musician, music producer, and artist manager, who she keeps working with all the way since then. And then everything happens really fast: Anna’s song “Time Stands Still” is discovered by a company, that desperately wants to license the track for a commercial. But that’s not all: From the commercial, her song makes it into the radio and from the radio into the charts. Shortly after that, Anna gets to open up a Lenny Kravitz concert in Innsbruck, who ends up being completely fascinated by her performance, that he takes her along to support him for the rest of his tour. There, she plays in front of audiences with up to 15.000 people and makes a fateful decision: “My future lies in music. My music.”
Anna speaks freely, straight from the heart. Instead of putting up artificial walls between her and others, she builds bridges, over which one follows her gladly. Speaking in her Styrian dialect and with an irresistible combination of child-like joy and true pride, you literally get excited for her when she talks about her previous achievements: about her modeling phase while studying; the founding of her own label moerder music on which she released her debut album “For Real”; about her mysterious leading role in the movie “Invasion”, which was awarded a prize at the 2012 World Film Festival in Montréal; about the Arte documentary “On Jack’s Road”, in which Anna travels the US, tracking down the story of the infamous Jack Kerouac; or about the countless, spontaneous videos, marked by her odd sense of humor, on her youtube channel.
Creative versatility I guess is what you call it. A creative versatility, that is just as impressing as the likeable and almost innocent seeming euphoria with which she talks about it; versatility that finds itself musically expressed on her new album “King In The Mirror”; and a creative versatility that Anna first had to learn to tame, in order to not lose herself in it. “I built up a lot of self- confidence through this record and created a new understanding for myself in the process of making it”, Anna explains.
“In the past years, there’s been times when everything around me was so loud, I wasn’t able to hear where I actually wanted to be going. So I had to put aside this loud world with all its opportunities, until only I was left.” And the path to finding herself led her to L.A.
Here, Anna met up with some of the best and most successful songwriters in the world, people such as Jimmy Harry (Madonna, Pink, Kylie Minogue), Rick Nowles (Lykke Li, Nelly Furtado, Lana Del Rey) and July Frost (Rihanna, The Black Eyed Peas). An exciting and instructive experience, but also an experience, she admits, that made her realize how she doesn’t want to work and that strengthened the confidence in her own abilities. “In L.A., everybody just wants to write hit singles, because that’s what gets you the most money. But that forced determinedness is also something you can hear.”
So Anna went to Berlin, where she got together with Philipp Steinke (Boy). “I knew instantly, that Philipp’s the right kinda guy for me”, Anna says. And you can really tell how happy and content she is about the now existing result of this decision, in the form of an album.
Whereas her debut album was mainly written by the traditional, classical singer / songwriter rules, “King In The Mirror” has got a whole lot more of pop to it. But not a tacky, plastic kind of pop, but edgy pop, with lumps and bumps, with catchy melodies and lyrics that really stick, but at the same time with just enough filth to it, to make it authentic.
Take, for example, her notorious teaser- single “DNA”, in which Anna masterfully breaks the image of the girl next door. Or the dreamy “Too Far”, in which Anna yearningly sings about the everlasting fight of love. Or the leaned back, drifting “Friedberg”, about shifting back and forth between the two extremes of anxiety neurosis and over exaggerated self-confidence. Or the voluminously reduced title song “King In The Mirror”, that Anna wrote together with EMF-guitarist Ian Dench, in which she gets right to the heart of feeling the discrepancy between self-awareness and other’s perception of you.
All in all, this record is a lot about the duality of things: about truth and fiction, love and hate, yesterday and tomorrow, fear and braveness, about oneself and others. And about how Anna F. unites all these extremes, bringing forth “King In The Mirror”, that makes these contrasts audible, visual and understandable; about the reckless quest of finding herself in all this musical versatility, on which she takes her listeners by the hand and asks them to follow her; free of concern, free of prejudice and free of fear.
And as Anna sits there, in the flickering shade of a tree, in a short moment of silence and catching a breath, after an extensive monologue about her art, her music, and her life, you suddenly realize that she is indeed not lacking soul or vulnerability and that she also has the strength and confidence to be able to handle exactly that.
“King In The Mirror, Queen Of The Shy” – Anna F. has managed to put the extremes of life on an album, in every perceptible way; giving her personal stories a relevance, that make them reasonable also to others; and giving her musical vision a face that is so beautiful, secretive, and expressive as her own. At the least.
Tracklist:
1 Friedberg
2 Too Far
3 D.N.A.
4 Underdog
5 We Could Be Something
6 Tongue Tied
7 Unbelievable
8 Lost In Perfection
9 Fools
10 Good Girl
11 King In The Mirror
Backing Vocals – Anna F., Cäthe Sieland, Katharina Wappel, Philipp Steinke, Verena Halb
Bass – Chris Rodrigues
Cello – Matthias Bartolomey
Drums – Alex Deutsch, Anna F., Marcel Römer, Philipp Schwär
Flute – Katharina Wappel
Guitar – Anna F., Lars Cölln, Philipp Schwär, Philipp Steinke, Sebastian Koch, Simon Triebel
Handclaps – Anna F., Simon Triebel
Keyboards – Philipp Schwär, Philipp Steinke
Lead Vocals – Anna F.
Mastered By – H-Peh Mastering, Tom Coyne
Mixed By – Philipp Schwär
Percussion – Alex Deutsch, Philipp Steinke
Producer – Philipp Schwär, Philipp Steinke
Programmed By – Philipp Schwär, Philipp Steinke
Schuhplattler – Anna F.
Strings – Klemens Bittmann
Synthesizer – Philipp Steinke
Trumpet – Philipp Steinke
Tuba – John Sass
Viola – Klemens Bittmann
Violin – Klemens Bittmann
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