Clemens Rehiben y Philipp Daush, de Milky Chance
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Clemens Rehbein, singer, guitarist and songwriter for Milky Chance, assured Tlam that “it is healthy to be realistic and to know that such a big success will never happen again” as ‘Stolen Dance’, the worldwide hit with which they broke in 2012, and that “when you try to be creative you should not try to meet people’s expectations or try to achieve the same success.”
They hold back: “Creating music for us means expressing ourselves”
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“Creating music for us means expressing ourselves: that was and continues to be the main reason we are doing this”, supported the musician from Berlin, where he lives as well as his partner, the bassist and percussionist Philipp Dausch, with whom he met again last year to shape the new musical horizon of German indie-folk do., “immersed in the creative process, because it was all we can do.”
“The music business has changed a lot over the last decade and it seems that through the enormous growth of social media, digital platforms and streaming, it’s all up to artists to promote themselves and bring their music to the people.””
Rehbein confirmed that the group with billions of views on digital platforms will return to the stage by the end of the year when a tour of the United States is underway and announced the release of a fourth album for the next few months: “We want to keep releasing new music, so when the tour happens again, we may already have some new songs to play live on stage.”.
Tlam: How much has the artistic connection between you been reformulated from this world context that ended up freeing you from other commitments?
Clemens Rehbein: We realized that it almost felt like the beginning when we recorded the first album (Sadnecessary). The entire world was forced to take a break and there was much more space compared to the time before the pandemic. We had a lot of time to immerse ourselves in the creative process and try new things and also to work together with other people.
Milky Chance “Colorado”
T: Is it true that “Colorado”, the last single released recently, was written and recorded in a flash of inspiration?
CR: We were in a study session with two other guys who call themselves Decco. We were improvising and suddenly Philipp (Dausch) had this riff on the guitar, I started singing muttering. With “Colorado” in my mind, within minutes we had the first line written. We were building the instrumental at the same time, so I would tell you that 80 percent of the song was born in less than an hour and a half.
T: Why did you decide to create the Muggelig Records label, the platform for this latest release, to embark on a new path as independent artists?
CR: The music business has changed a lot over the last decade and it seems that through the enormous growth of social media, digital platforms and streaming, everything depends on artists to promote themselves and bring their music to the people. It seems that more and more artists are suddenly growing a lot because kids were using their tracks on social media making videos. I’m not saying you don’t need a label or at least a team to run the music business in the long run, but it seems that artists have a lot more power and freedom to promote their music without being signed to a label. But now everyone is extremely dependent on social media, so there seems to be another hold on the big companies that run the world. I believe that whatever path you are taking, it has advantages and disadvantages and also many obstacles that must be overcome. Sometimes it feels like the grass may look the greenest on the other side, but right now it feels good and with the power to be independent and that’s what we’re here for.
At the end of the year they will go on a tour of the United States
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T: Have you ever declared that a hit like “Stolen Dance” won’t happen again. They always had it clear or at some point did it mean some kind of pressure due to the expectation they had generated?
CR: Having a song as great as “Stolen Dance” doesn’t happen very often. I think it’s healthy to be realistic about it and know that it will never happen that way again, although it doesn’t mean that maybe it will one day. But the pressure to keep going is there, of course. When we released our first album and started touring around the world for almost three years, we enjoyed a lot of attention, but then you start to realize that all these people will expect something new from you after a while. That’s the biggest difference between your first pitch and all subsequent ones. But when you’re trying to be creative, you shouldn’t try to meet people’s expectations or try to achieve the same success as our first releases, because there is no recipe for writing a hit single and no way to meet everyone’s expectations.
“Stolen dance”
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