Ich bin der Regen by Nadine Maria Schmidt

After two highly acclaimed albums (each of which received nominations for the German Record Critics' Award), Nadine Maria Schmidt and her band 'Frühmorgens am Meer' open a special artistic chapter for themselves with their third longplayer "Ich bin der Regen - Lieder aus Gedichten": While the predecessor works "Blaue Kanten" (2012) and "Lieder aus Herbst" (2014) had helped to ensure that the singer and songwriter from Leipzig was able to make herself known astoundingly quickly throughout the country as a highly individual and expressive new voice and author on the German music scene, the focus is on "Ich bin der Regen" poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries. Nadine and her fellow musicians deal carefully yet passionately with poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Eduard Mörike, Else Lasker-Schüler, Joachim Ringelnatz and others. In doing so, they create diverse, sometimes dazzling sound backdrops for the very different texts - whether in large formats with strings or winds, or in chamber-musically intimate instrumentation, while at the same time allowing them enough space to breathe and develop their own linguistic melody. Nadine's alto voice, rich in fine shades, and her nuanced singing provides the (dark) red thread in this diversity. Her setting of lines from Sophie Scholl's last correspondence sets a particularly moving accent. Thus Nadine Maria Schmidt & Frühmorgens am Meer go their very own way between chanson, songwriting, pop, classical music and jazz unperturbed, but with a surprising curve. And they don't completely do without their own song lyrics this time either: As a bonus track, Nadine Maria Schmidt's own song "Aluna - Meine Mutter war ein Flüchtling" (Aluna - My mother was a refugee), with which the ZEIT opened a 'dossier' in mid-February ("Nadine Maria Schmidt wrote an incorrigible good song"), concludes this atmospheric and thoughtful album.