He's out of step with the times, and perhaps that's why he's so original and current: After a 15-year hiatus, singer-songwriter Michael Riehm from Lebach presents his CD "Mein blaue Mond" (My Blue Moon). Riehm's ten songs seem to completely ignore the pop music scene of numerous past decades; instead, they reflect influences from the late 60s and early 70s, when good songs were also signposts, both musically and in terms of content – the Beatles in particular send their unmistakable greetings. In this exquisite tradition, Riehm sings lines in a German and occasionally Moselle-Franconian accent that are not only delightfully poetic, but also serve as a critical compass. On top of that, the untimely bard with the lyrical timbre has come up with beautiful melodies and has played all the instruments himself – from acoustic and electric guitars to keyboards and violin. But that's not all: Riehm recorded the arrangements himself in an ever-young vintage sound – all of this together makes this self-produced album all the more endearing.
According to Stefan Uhrmacher-Saarbrücker Zeitung, Neil Young was initially Michael Riehm's inner world counterpart, but now it's been Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Exemplary examples of this are the exemplary euphony of "Komm gudd hääm" and the smart album finale "So kennd ed blaeiwen." Vocally and melodically, and not least in terms of their lyrics, the ten current Riehm songs resemble modern pop art still lifes. And their soft German-language folk-rock flavor is clearly in harmony with, or rather rooted in, the CSN&Y classics. The musical images interpreted in this way are unobtrusively introspective and self-sufficient. The listener encounters the album's title track "Mein blaue Mond" (My Blue Moon) or lyrical pieces like "Kind des Ozeans" (Child of the Ocean) as almost healing. Jochen Arlt, Juror for the German Record Critics' Award For over 40 years, Michael Riehm has been writing songs that are distinguished by their unusual compositions and powerful textual images. The songs are often "bilingual," meaning they combine High German with Saarland lyrics—sometimes the chorus is in Saarland and the main text is in High German, or vice versa. Stylistically, the musically diverse songs range from bossa nova to pop, jazz, classical, folk, and blues. These thoroughly "unusual" songs create poetic, freely associable images that are not immediately obvious, but rather leave room to continually discover something new.
01 Come on, haha
02 Longing
03 Too bad
04 At the Window
05 Planet of the Apes
06 Everything will be fine
07 Child of the Ocean
08 My Blue Moon
09 Wings grow with time
10 So you can blow
