Some songs arrive quietly. Others demand to be heard.
Emergency belongs to the latter. Urgent, restless and charged with tension, it evokes the moment when familiar certainties begin to fall apart — and instinct must take over.
But behind that urgency lies another story: a composition its creator never quite embraced, a singer who heard something irresistible in it, and a record company with its own ideas about which song should lead the way.
Looking back at the ZENO debut album, was there a song where you and Jochen had particularly different ideas about the music?
Emergency. Interestingly enough, Jochen never really liked that song, although he'd written it himself. He would have preferred to hide it somewhere on the album, or somehow make it more substantial.
For me, it was a heroic wake-up call.
Did your vocal interpretation eventually change his mind?
I believe I convinced him with my singing. But he remained sceptical about the song and what it had become.
In fact, when EMI wanted to release Emergency as our first single, Jochen resisted. Even at the price of having A Little More Love released instead — a song written by Ule, not by him.
That's quite remarkable. But what was it about Emergency that attracted you so strongly? Was that heroic quality already there when you first heard Jochen's composition?
You see, I never really made a song my own just by listening to it.
That happened in the studio. Working out the vocal lines with the lyrics, physically confronting my own voice, struggling with its possibilities and limitations, pushing beyond what I thought I could do.
That was the interesting part for me.
And Emergency was a song that somehow nudged me and said, "Take me."
So I did.
You describe pushing those vocal boundaries almost as a source of pleasure. Was the struggle itself enjoyable?
No. Coming up against my limitations was a painful process. There was real suffering involved.
Then what made it worthwhile? The satisfaction of overcoming those limits, or hearing what you'd finally achieved?
Both. A mixture of the two, in constantly changing proportions.
Every song was different.