The Best of Maximilian Hecker

Maximilian Hecker

Polyester

Summer Days in Bloom

The Whereabouts of Love

To Liu Wen, the Opposite House, 3 a.M.

Holy Dungeon

Birch

Rachael Yamagata

Untouchable (Kastrup Pt. II)

Sunburnt Days

Summerwaste (Dance Edit)

Kate Moss

Battery Park

The Days Are Long and Filled with Pain

This Poison Called Love (Home in a Town That Has Sunk)

Anaesthesia

Gangnam Misery

Messed-Up Girl (Ballad Version)

Help Me

Cold Wind Blowing

Silly Lily, Funny Bunny

No One's Child

If Only I Could See

Nana (Full Band Live Version)

I Am Falling Now

Over

Snow White

Dying

My Story

Kastrup

Lady Sleep

Rose

The original version of POLYESTER, released as the opener of Maximilian Hecker's celebrated debut album INFINITE LOVE SONGS, that in 2001 had earned him a rave review in The New York Times, is one of the wistful Berlin musician's most characteristic tunes. The ultra zeitgeisty, darkwavy remix of the song now propels the formerly rather discreet indie ballad into the sphere of a bold mainstream pop hit, with Hecker's angelic voice soaring to unexpected heights, reaching for the very stars that it had deserved all along.

Polyester (Remix)

The original version of THE WHEREABOUTS OF LOVE, released as the first single, as well as the grandiose opener of Maximilian Hecker's 2012 album MIRAGE OF BLISS, is one of the Berlin musician's most renowned songs, with more than half a million plays on Spotify, and a very prominent position on the OST of K-drama "The Age of Youth" (2016). The song's remix now, produced by Hecker himself, is the ultra-modern James Blake-ish, U.N.K.L.E.-like reinterpretation, if not deconstruction, of the formerly very lush and utterly British sounding pop hymn, albeit no less elegant than its original, with oppressive piano sounds, subtle synth pads, and reverberating rim shots.

The Whereabouts of Love (Remix)

The title of Maximilian Hecker's tenth studio album does indeed allude to J. M. Barrie's Neverland, i.e. to the island where Peter Pan is living a life in eternal youth. However, Hecker's Neverheart, unlike Barrie's Neverland, is not at all positively connoted, for the tongue-in-cheek neologism has to be regarded as a Wilhelm Hauff cold or rather: stony heart (see Wilhelm Hauff, "Heart of Stone", 1827) – that sort of stony heart that the protagonist of NEVERHEART is constantly confronted with in his wretched, or more precisely: two-toned love songs. Be it his own Neverheart that constantly screams "devotion" and yet performs avoidance, or that one of the respective playmates who – in the sense of a mirroring of the singer’s emotional ambivalence – use to say "white" and yet act black, and who leave the whispering pleader "alone to stay with him all night" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), who "drive him away and pull him into their hearts" (Two-toned Love, part I), who "fall in love and fall apart" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), while the falsetto singer "blooms in their shades and fades in their lights", "breathes in their fears and drowns in their hopes" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), always "reaching out to rise and yet to fall" (Neverheart). Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of his neverheartache and his two-toned lovesickness by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave NEVERHEART its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the album's lyrical content with a (two-)tonal grace, a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life": a piano, a Gizmotron, an Organelle, electric, almost no acoustic guitars, an abysmal synthesizer bass, subdued or­ches­tral per­cus­sion, revolting from time to time along with the electric guitars in order to drown Heckers low falsetto, his fallen angel's voice that occasionally soars to unexpected heights before eventually rising up back to the ground.

Neverheart

In TWO-TONED LOVE (PART I) REMIX, Maximilian Hecker whispers "devotion" and performs avoidance, sings "black" and means white, tells the story of ambivalent lovers who drive each other away from one another and yet pull their counterpart into their heart, who drown their tears and dry their sorrows, who run their hearts out while holding their fire. Half-dead cool! In the electronic reinterpretation of his two-toned love song, Hecker’s falsetto finally hovers over the very beats and EDM sound elements that the music industry had periodically suggested to the enigmatic yet hardheaded Berlin musician, but which, with a few exceptions, he had always rejected. The reason for Hecker’s recent change of heart: his blind faith in his associate’s magic touch, in the abilities of Jem Seifert, collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich, who like no other German producer knows not only how to reconcile indie and pop, how to facilitate a two-toned love indeed, but even how to accompany these two once incompatible genres down the aisle, so to speak, eventually prepared to live rock-happily ever after.

Two-toned Love (part I [Remix])

With "Lottewelt", Maximilian Hecker has already written a novel about his relationship with his severely disabled sister who died early. LONG-LOST CRAZY LOVE now is the song with which the Berlin musician pays homage to his everlasting long-lost great love; his "neverglow", as he calls his sister in the piano-driven love ballad, his sœur fatale as it were, who might even be the reason why Hecker creates what he creates, why he sings the way he does, and why he has become that hopeless and, in his consistency, almost autistic-seeming romantic – the Rilke insect ultimately, who for twenty years now poetises, crawls, whispers and moans at a high level. "She’s my demon … But she’s my angel, too. A scatterbrained butterfly … sitting on my shoulder and watching over me". With these words, taken from a dialogue in "Lottewelt", the musician and debut novelist describes his sister Liselotte – who in the book he portrays as a chimera, a hybrid creature of a femme fatale and a sister, as a "guardian angel child" and at the same time a "fallen angel child", as he thereupon sings in the chorus of LONG-LOST CRAZY LOVE. And once again, as in "The Whereabouts of Love" (2012), "Kastrup", (2015) and "Hennigsdorf" (2015), but also in the title track of his tenth studio album "Neverheart", the enigmatic falsetto singer takes up the theme of isolation, of withdrawal from society, of neverheartedness. Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of this very neverheartedness by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave LONG-LOST CRAZY LOVE its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the song's lyrical content with a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life".

Long-lost Crazy Love

The title of Maximilian Hecker's song NEVERHEART does indeed allude to J. M. Barrie's Neverland, i.e. to the island where Peter Pan is living a life in eternal youth. However, Hecker's Neverheart, unlike Barrie's Neverland, is not at all positively connoted, for the tongue-in-cheek neologism has to be be regarded as a Wilhelm Hauff cold or rather: stony heart (see Wilhelm Hauff, "Heart of Stone", 1827) – that sort of stony heart that the protagonist of NEVERHEART, this enigmatic musician with the low falsetto who speaks of "reaching out to rise and yet to fall", of "coming home to reconcile his love" and later of "leaving home forevermore" is confronted with in his exalted lovesickness song. Be it his own Neverheart or that one of the addressee of his whispered words – a lover perhaps, his mother even, or anyone he half-heartedly tries to connect with. Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of his neverheartache by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave NEVERHEART its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the song's lyrical content with a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life".

A falling star would actually be a shooting star or a meteor, but Maximilian Hecker seems to take the title of his catchy Travis-esque folk-pop ballad literally when he sings about "leading a life like a rising star", unsure of how to love, or how to deal with his "orphaned" or even "stillborn" feelings of love, spending his time with his "fair-weather friends" rather than with his soul mates, and therefore ultimately finding himself falling, or rather: after the fall, with his "head down on the ground". Similar to "Two-toned Love (part I)", the first single of Hecker’s soon to be released tenth studio album "Neverheart", the lyrics of FALLING STAR are equally characterized by the stylistic means of the oxymoron whereby the enigmatic musician tries to display his emotional ambivalence in matters of the Neverheart. Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of his downfall by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave FALLING STAR its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the song's lyrical content with a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life".

Falling Star

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The Best of Maximilian Hecker

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