Yesterday I had another “existential blogger crisis”. Do people, who (sometimes) write on their own online space still call themselves blogger? Anyway, these past few years I haven’t been writing as much as I have when I started “a blog” decades ago. My ‘output’ if you want to be technical about it, slowed down and dwindled away. My motivation as well. Yesterday I was wondering once again what am I doing here. Or rather, what do I want to do? I have no idea.
I put a lot of the more personal or mundane / random content that had remained after the big 2024 purge on private. It might stay there or will be delete for good, once I’ve figured out what to do with this space in the future.
New perspectives. New horizons and all that. Or not.
When I saw the trailer for the German movie “No Hit Wonder” I right away knew, that I’d like to go see it. I liked the idea for the plot, I like the people starring in the main roles.
Movie Trailer (in German)
Yesterday afternoon after work I went and I really enjoyed it. So much that I’ll probably go again with a friend later this month. The leading male plays a singer / songwriter, who had one hit many many years ago and by now had turned into the classic “Has Been”. He ends up involuntarily leading a choir of a motley crew of patients with depression. I don’t want to give away any spoiler, but I was quite moved by it for a variety of reasons. Moved much more than I had expected from a trailer which makes it feel like a comedy. It mostly is a comedy, but the glimpses into the patients lives sometimes go a bit / a lot deeper. The movie touches on mental health in general obviously, but also on losing loved ones, mobbing in the digital age, financial distress, burnout from work. The data about how peoples’ mental health is suffering these days is not news and readily available if you’re looking for it.
The reason that this choir comes about is a scientific study to find out if music / singing can make you feel happier. One spoiler after all: It does! No surprise for me here. Of course listening to music or singing songs doesn’t solve your problems and it doesn’t make your mental health issues go away, but it does help to make life feel a bit easier. Either if it’s the community you sing with. Or the words you sing that have meaning for you. I wrote tons of words about both aspects here in the past, so I could definitely relate to that part of the plot and I loved it.
It is sort of a “Feelgood” movie, but I did cry quite a bit at the end. Again: no spoilers.
Because singing along to songs that mean something to me makes me feel happy, was of course the reason why I was adamant to score tickets for some more Frank Turner gigs.
April 2026
Solo, with a focus on the older stuff. Next April. It will be fun! As it always is. It’s also going to be fun tonight, when I see him and the Sleeping Souls open for Dropkick Murphys. Even though I don’t know the Dropkick Murphys back catalogue all that well, I think the main show will also be fun, because it’s people singing along to the songs they like and that’s always just a wonderful, life-affirming experience to take part in.
I had the idea to end this post with some thoughts on songwriting and how these days it feels so weird to me when I realize that a song I like and can relate to, wasn’t really written by the person singing it, but rather by someone else who writes songs for a variety of singers. That a singer’s album can be a pick’n’mix of songs from a variety of writers. That people write songs for anyone to sing. And don’t get me started on AI in that regard. Those thoughts are very unformed yet, so I will get back to that at some point.
Let’s just say that I’m glad that most of the artists I have found to love and fangirl over in various degrees in the last 15 years, write their own songs. That’s probably a reason why I love them.
Lyrics: “Nashville Tennessee” – Frank Turner, 2008
I don’t recall, when I first became aware of Bruce Springsteen as an iconic rock artist. I’ve never been a fan and I admit I still mostly / basically only know his hits from the time we went out dancing at 17 / 18 years old. The rock club we went to did not just play the then current hits, but also older songs like “Born in the U.S.A”, “Hungry Heart” or “Because the Night”. From that time on 30 odd years ago I knew who he was and of course he stayed around in the periphery of my music world.
Neither do I exactly recall, when I worked out the neat reference in these Frank Turner lyrics. Sometime in the summer of 2013 most probably, when I was listening to all the music Frank had released up to that point.
[Featured photo of this post has nothing to do with the movie or Bruce or Nebraska (I did try) but was a flash of colour this morning on my way to breakfast on a otherwise drab and grey day over here.]
Bit of foliage
After a exhausting week at work I felt a “mini break” was in order. So this morning I took myself off to have breakfast elsewhere and a matinee showing of “Deliver Me From Nowhere” the new biopic about… Bruce Springsteen and how and why he wrote the album “Nebraska” in 1982. I didn’t know anything more about the movie, but had heard good things from a friend who had seen it this week.
I kind of liked it. It touched on topics I could relate to: mental health issues, difficult relationship with a parent and the regrets you might feel, when things were left unsaid. I also enjoyed the insight into the music industry in the early 1980s and how they actually did record and promote albums then and why it was such a big deal that “Nebraska” was so different. I had no idea about all of that re: that album So all in all worth watching, if that’s something you might be interested it. I found some of the dialogue especially from his manager Jon too stilted as they had too much of an “I am now going to explain what’s going on in Bruce’s mind” vibe. It felt weird to me: either let the man himself explain it or let the songs speak for themselves.
As a hardcore fangirl of another artist I was also wondering how the hardcore fans of Bruce feel about seeing a fictional version of the man in what turned out to be formative time 40 years ago. And why an living artist (same goes for Bob Dylan this year) agrees to this project. It must be a bit weird to see yourself played by someone else on a movie screen, right?
