Michael Riehm - My Blue Moon (CD)

It's someone who has fallen out of time and maybe that's why it's so original and up-to-date: After a 15-year break, the singer and songwriter Michael Riehm from Lebach presents his CD "Mein blauer Mond". The ten Riehm songs seem to completely ignore the pop music hustle and bustle of numerous past decades, they rather reflect influences from the late 60s and early 70s, when good songs were also signposts in terms of music and content - the Beatles in particular send their greetings unmistakably. In this exquisite tradition, Riehm sings lines in German and occasionally Mosel-Franconian tongue strokes that are not only pleasingly poetic, but also serve as a critical compass. On top of that, the outdated bard with the lyrical timbre came up with beautiful melodies and played all the instruments himself - from acoustic and electric guitars to keyboard instruments and violins. But that's not all: Riehm recorded the arrangements on his own in the always young vintage sound - all this together makes this self-produced album all the more endearing.
Stefan Uhrmacher-Saarbrücker Zeitung was initially Neil Young's inner world counterpart of Michael Riehm, meanwhile it's Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Examples of this are the exemplary euphony “Komm gudd hääm” or the smart album finale “So kennd ed blaeiwen”. Vocally plus melodically, not least in terms of the lyrics, the ten current Riehm songs are like modern pop art still lifes. And their soft German-language folk rock flavor is clearly in line with the CSN&Y classics, or is rooted in them. The musical images interpreted in this way are unobtrusively introspective and self-sufficient. The listener encounters the album's title composition "Mein blauer Mond" or lyrical elements such as "Kind of the Ocean" in an almost healing way. Jochen Arlt, juror for the German Record Critics' Award For over 40 years, Michael Riehm has been writing songs that are characterized by unusual compositions and strong textual images. The songs are often designed "bilingually", that is, High German is combined with Saarland text elements - sometimes the refrain is Saarland and the main text is High German or vice versa. Stylistically, the musically diverse songs move through bossa nova, pop, jazz, classic, folk and blues. The quite "unusual" songs create poetic, freely associable images that are not immediately transparent, but leave room to always discover something new in them.

01 Come on gudd hem
02 longing
03 pity
04 On the window
05 Planet of the Apes
06 Everything will be fine
07 child of the ocean
08 My blue moon
09 Wings grow over time
10 That's how we know Blaeiwen