One More Time (Single) by Halby

An atmospheric ballad as an emotional snapshot from a dedicated musician's life: Songwriter, singer, guitarist and pianist Halby (real name Michael Halberstadt) first gained fame as a founding member, of the internationally acclaimed gothic band "Arts and Decay" (1986-1992). After studying jazz and popular music, Halby lived in Hamburg, where he worked as a studio musician and performed with artists as diverse as Gloria Gaynor, Nena, Frank Zander and Mathou. At the beginning of the new millennium, Halby returned to his hometown of Kaiserslautern and founded the record label Daddykate Records, on which he releases his own songs, as well as music for cinema and television productions, alongside mainly regional artists. In addition to this work, Halby has been running the music and culture club Salon Schmitt in Kaiserslautern since 2015. The former hairdresser's salon, where international artists of different genres regularly perform, also serves as a studio for audio and video productions.
Until the end of 2019, Halby was regularly on the road as a soloist and with various band formations on German stages, but like many of his fellow musicians, had to completely stop his concert activities from the spring of 2020 due to the corona pandemic. He withdrew for several months into the studio and used the time to write new songs.

Halby's new single "One more time" was also written during this phase. It is melancholic and stirring at the same time, thematizes the powerlessness of artists in a time in which they are not allowed to present themselves in the flesh - and art can suddenly hardly be a mouthpiece anymore. But "One more time" is also about the insecurity that is spreading throughout society in general.
For this, Halby finds a musical language that is accessible to a broad audience despite its very personal coloring. "After all, I come from the era of people like the Beatles, Kate Bush, early Genesis, or Steely Dan to Neil Young or even Radiohead, Sting, the Pixies and of course The Cure. And the beauty of good pop music, to me, is the ability to create something inherently homogenous out of all kinds of styles." All the aforementioned influences are palpable in "One More Time" - and if you want, you can also hear a hint of the early days with Arts & Decay in the subtly dark romanticism of this ballad. In any case, the melodic song is already a veritable step towards the dream that Halby reveals with a self-deprecating smile: "I'm sure I'll be able to realize the most ingenious pop song of all time with a length of exactly 3:43 minutes sometime in this life.