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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.

Click here to read article on Close-up Culture site.

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Publication: OurQuadcities.com / EINPresswire.com/
By: Andrew Gesner
Date: May 15, 2023

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.

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Andrew Gesner
HIP Video Promo
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email us here

See original article online here.

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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.

Read the Review on Daily Brit site here.