Publication : NeuFutur Magazine
By: James McQuiston Posted on: May 25, 2023
Ute Lemper’s Time Traveler is one of the most fascinating songs we’ve covered in NeuFutur. The track adopts influences from mid-1970s easy listening, funk, and soul performers all while furthering an absolutely inimitable set of vocals. There are multiple layers here that will continue to yield new twists and turns each time one queues up the song. This is an experience much more than a simple pop track. What is most beautiful about Lemper’s latest is that it can be enjoyed as the artist statement it is, or it can be purely understood as fitting in among the most radio-friendly efforts from the era. Time Traveler has something for everyone who tucks in.
Publication: Close-up Culture By: JAMES PRESTRIDGE Date: May 15, 2023
Iconic Chanteuse and dancer Ute Lemper joins us on Close-Up Culture to discuss her new album, Time Traveller.
Hi Ute, welcome to Close-Up Culture. I believe your journey to make your new album, Time Traveller, began some 23 years ago. What are your memories of writing this songs?
In the year 2000 I had just found new love with my partner Todd and started a new passage in life after a divorce and a few years in shows in the West End and on Broadway. I was touring with my album “Punishing Kiss” and was highly inspired to start writing songs myself. I was filled with ideas, lyrics, poetry and harmonies on my piano. Todd and I recorded the songs on a 16 track analog tape machine in his music studio in Chelsea. 2 years later we had switched to a protools set up and the old tapes disappeared for more than 20 years in the basement… until we discovered them again by coincidence.
Now a lifetime later, still together making and producing music, we had the old tapes carefully digitised and could not believe the originality of the old songs. By touching them up, partly re singing, partly keeping the youthful voice, blending old and new stories, laying a more contemporary sounding groove under it I suddenly found the inspiration to write music again.
The album shows a time warp, a wrinkle in time and a beautiful encounter with our younger selves, but at the end the new songs dominate as they express my more mature contemporary philosophy of life.
What was your journey like to make this album?
I wrote the new as much as the old songs on paper then at the piano, I play some keyboard and sing, then record a first version of the songs. After this core is identified we start producing, inviting musicians to play and programming some elements. I sing many harmony vocals , I love a wall of vocals, harmonised in a cool fashion. I learned to be a protools engineer and can execute edits and mixes myself and I love creating the work from scratch to a perfection. But the emotion of the track rules at the end.
What kind of experience can audiences expect from Time Traveller?
It is a mature adult contemporary poetic journey in a contemporary sound picture. The songs are sung intimately but also express great joy of life in accordance with beautiful thoughts about the quickly passing time.
I understand the opening title track is accompanied by a cutting edge video that uses AI. What can you reveal about this?
I asked a great team in Berlin to experiment with newest technology, so you see me in different ages walking through a hundred years of history in time.
What are your hopes for the album and the impact it has on audiences?
I hope to show that making music and creating new even cutting edge creations continues also for us older generations. We can still come up with something wonderful that can influence the younger generations and my attempt was to build a bridge from yesterday into tomorrow. The songs have a certain sensitivity that speaks of a lived life.
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VENTS Magazine recently had the pleasure of interviewing German musical legend Ute Lemper about her new music video, “Time Traveler.” The interview can be read below!
Your music video has incredibly detailed graphics that take viewers on a journey through time. What inspired the story behind this music video?
The idea was to be a time traveler, through a hundred years of history from the past into the future. I am experiencing time running too fast or sometimes stalling in my own life, wondering about our planet’s evolution and the years marking our faces.
Important human beings appear to accelerate progress and contribute to culture and humanity, others destroy it all over again. Is it a cycle of history, simply the human condition? The video is a fun movie, that takes us on a visual adventure enhanced by AI, a journey through time and into our mind. The song is sensual and offers philosophical ideas.
How has your German heritage influenced your sound?
In this kind of repertoire of soul music with a contemporary edge and my own songs I do not see any specific influence from my German background. It is not theatrical music or chanson; this one is straight from the heart and simply vibey. The storytelling, though, might always have a certain edge and depth due to my heritage. I always search deeper and try to poeticize the mysteries of life.
Has your history in musical theater impacted your music career today? If so, how?
I spent years on stage in shows and theatrical plays, but always was the happiest when I could dedicate my time to my own creations, when I do not have to fit into anything but can be utterly free in my creation. A sparkle of an idea often starts off an entire project and it’s wonderful to go all the way, without any compromises.
How has the theme of change demonstrated in “Time Traveler” affected your own journey in the music industry?
Ha, I definitely have seen the evolution from vinyl in the 80s to CDs in the 90s, to digital distributions over the last 10 years. The change in musical production from tape to Pro Tools and the worrisome disappearance of the human performance in its imperfection in the contemporary pop music. Where will this lead? Will my children still have an ear for raw and authentic performances? I do not mind the minimalist approach of many contemporary pop productions, but I do mind the absence of humans giving their soul into the music.
How does “Time Traveler” differ from music that you have released previously?
The album carries only my own songs in lyrics and music. I had composed many of the previous albums but mainly to poetic literature, like Bukowski, Neruda and Coelho. These songs have my own words. It is not really jazz or cabaret, chanson or lied; they have their own language in a soulful universe.
What is next for you and your career?
I just wrote a substantial autobiography, now published in German and soon to be licensed in other languages. I am thinking of conceiving a show with stories about my life from cold war Berlin to Paris in the poetry clubs and New York in many transitions since 9/11, all accompanied by the essential songs expressing those moments in time.
What can you tell us about your upcoming album?
In the year 2000 I had just found new love with my partner Todd and started a new passage in life after a divorce and a few years in shows in the West End and on Broadway. I was touring with my album Punishing Kiss and was highly inspired to start writing songs myself. I was filled with ideas, lyrics, poetry, and harmonies on my piano. Todd and I recorded the songs on a 16 track analog tape machine in his music studio in Chelsea. Two years later we had switched to a Pro Tools set up and the old tapes disappeared for more than 20 years in the basement… until we discovered them again by coincidence. Now a lifetime later, still together making and producing music, we had the old tapes carefully digitised and could not believe the originality of the old songs. By touching them up, partly re-singing, partly keeping the youthful voice, blending old and new stories, laying a more contemporary sounding groove under it, I suddenly found the inspiration to write music again.
The album shows a time warp, a wrinkle in time and a beautiful encounter with our younger selves, but at the end the new songs dominate as they express my more mature contemporary philosophy of life.
What is your favorite lyric from “Time Traveler”, and why?
In these dark times, the eyes start to see…. If you move the wall sideways it becomes a bridge Was there ever innocence, I am fine with its loss I am a time traveler looking for you, here to save you
What have you learned from your time as a musician that has helped you with your upcoming album?
Follow the instinct, make space for the words inside the music and the silence within.
Invite incredible talent to contribute and shine.
Make the music embrace humanity in its beauty.
It is a teamwork, but stay faithful and truthful to your vision.
Ute Lemper has cut revelatory versions of songs by many popular artists. “TIME TRAVELER” makes clear that it isn’t only the world that’s changing: we are, too.
In his science fiction classic The Time Machine, H.G. Wells describes the exhilarating (and terrifying) experience of watching the years flutter by like the pages of a flipbook. Moments significant and mundane blur together into a single story of perpetual change. “TIME TRAVELER,” the new video from German musical legend Ute Lemper, brings this vision to life in dazzling color and subtle but resonant strokes. While the singer tells her story from the picture window of her ship on the seas of time, the clock accelerates. Battlefields become temples, the wilderness is tamed and grows wild again, ordinary men morph into historical figures, and the earth itself seems to shiver under the weight of history.
It’s dramatic and fascinating to watch but also a metaphor for Lemper’s award-winning career. Through music, the vocalist has always bridged the distance between past and present – and she’s kept a keen eye on the future, too. Lemper has earned a reputation as one of the most formidable interpretive singers in the world, cutting revelatory versions of songs by Kurt Weill and Brecht, The Berlin Cabaret, Tom Waits, Philip Glass and Nick Cave, and many others. Her reanimation of the work of Edith Piaf revealed the cornerstone French singer to be an artist grounded in tradition but perpetually relevant. Lemper’s imaginative performances in musical theater — The Blue Angel, Peter Pan, Cabaret, and Chicago, to name a few of the shows she’s starred in — have established her as a cornerstone of the European stage and Broadway.
“TIME TRAVELER,” too, feels simultaneously contemporary, anticipatory, and rooted in the classics. This is a sophisticated jazz-pop sung written by the artist herself, an impeccable vocalist — but it’s also playful, and its starry-eyed lyrical hook will resonate with romantics of all kinds. And as the clip for “TIME TRAVELER” makes clear, it isn’t only the world around us that’s changing: we’re changing, too. The video shows us a version of Ute Lemper unshackled by time. Sometimes we’re shown the youthful Lemper who scaled the walls of contemporary theater with her dazzling talent, sometimes we get the current masterful Lemper, and sometimes we see the artist in transition, growing into her next challenge. The continuity is visible, and the message is clear. Time can’t lay a glove on her. No matter where she’s been or who she’s portrayed, she’s always been her brilliant self.
Publication: The Daily Brit By: Rugged Hank Date: May 3, 2023
Iconic Chanteuse and dancer Ute Lemper steps away from her historical repertoire and embraces her inner songwriter, producing an album that spans genres and time periods.
Life is a song and it wants to be sung. Ute Lemper, the New York-based singer and performer has made a name for herself worldwide as an entertainer and special interpreter of the Weimar repertoire of the 1920s, particularly the works of Brecht and Weill and Marlene Dietrich. However, the versatile artist’s palette has expanded over the years, leading to a growing desire to share her own original music and lyrics with the world. After composing the music to a variety of song cycles exploring the poetry of Neruda, Coelho and Bukowski she now brings us a piece of her own mind.
“Time Traveler” marks a significant adventure in Ute Lemper’s creative works with its contemporary music style of Neo Soul, Jazz and alternative R&B. This album features all-original music and lyrics and the story of this collection of songs began 23 years ago when Ute Lemper first wrote and recorded some of these pieces in her husband’s studio. However, for various reasons, these songs were not released at the time and were forgotten until by chance, the boxes of tapes reappeared in her in-laws’ basement in 2021.
The rediscovery of these songs inspired Ute Lemper to revisit her own personal history, encounter her younger self, and most of all to get back to the drawing board to write a new wave of songs from a more mature perspective. “Time Traveler” showcases this wrinkle in time , as much as the full range of her talents as a songwriter, performer, and interpreter of her own material. Through the songs, Ute Lemper shares feelings about her path reflecting on joys, regrets, wisdom, longings, and fulfillment.
The album includes ten original songs that merge various genres, including jazz, soul, R&B and chanson. Ute Lemper together with her partner Todd Turkisher take risks in terms of production and sound, luring the listener onto a completely unexpected path in some pieces, such as the opening title track which is accompanied by a stunning cutting edge video that uses AI to explore the subjects of Time Travel and evolution.
With “Time Traveler,” Ute Lemper has emancipated herself musically from all categories, drawing inspiration from a diverse range of artists and bands such as Hiatus Kaiyote, John Legend, Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan, Annie Lennox, Erykah Badu, and Robert Glasper. However, she remains true to her own unique style and vision, producing an album that is one hundred percent Ute Lemper.
Overall, “Time Traveler” represents a significant milestone in Ute Lemper’s career, showcasing her evolution as an artist and songwriter. Through her original music and lyrics, she continues to inspire listeners and to share her own personal journey with the world.
