The voice is quiet, intense, then suddenly brittle. “People love me / People hate me / I’m not a king / But they treat me as such,” she sings. First you hear the piano, then a drum set comes along. The piece sounds melancholic, warm and also a bit dark. Six thousand users have listened to it so far. This is a piece of cake for Spotify, but still a miracle for Lotte Schubert and Thorsten Drücker. “I’m Not a King” is the first song the two released on the streaming service in June. A few days ago a second one was added, his name is “Commander, Commander”. As a musical duo they call themselves Smilla Zorn & Awesome Universe.
Lotte Schubert, born in 1994, is known in Frankfurt as an actress. She studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and has been part of the Frankfurt Theater ensemble since 2021. She has also been seen more frequently on television recently, in “A Case for Two” and “Tatort”. As a pop musician, however, she is still unknown, an insider tip. She started composing her own pieces at an early age.
Even as a child, she says in the theater canteen, she was constantly humming and singing to herself. The adults found it a bit strange, but she wasn’t intimidated by it. She recorded her first real piece of her own, with piano and English lyrics, when she was fifteen. Her beloved dog had died, and Schubert used the song to cope with the loss. Back then, she remembers listening to Tori Amos’ songs over and over again.
The music, her pieces, it’s not something she plans for a long time. “I can’t control it,” says Schubert: “When something happens to me, when I have a thought, an idea or a feeling, then a text emerges from it.” Her songs are often about “things that you have to process.” of uncomfortable moments, of injuries and insecurities. Ideal world pop, on the other hand, is not their thing. Schubert says that she would otherwise hardly talk about many of the things she sings about in her pieces. But through music she shares her feelings and impressions: “It makes you feel less alone.”
Drücker, with whom Schubert is now producing her pieces, also came to the canteen to talk. The two met at a theater production. The director Sebastian Schug staged Anja Hilling’s play “Liberté oh no no no” about a young woman looking for self-affirmation, the premiere was in January 2022. The multi-instrumentalist Drücker was booked to compose the music for the piece and perform it live to play on stage.
Collaboration using the “ping-pong principle”: Thorsten Drücker is a musician, composer and producer. : Image: Lando Hass
In Kassel, where he still lives today, he provided the music for some theater evenings and has also worked with Schug at other theaters. He now “jammed” with Schubert on the stage of the Kammerspiele. The idea of soon creating music together outside of the theater quickly came up.
Today they mostly work according to the “ping-pong principle”, sending recordings back and forth to each other. Schubert spontaneously records a piece at home, on the piano. Drücker later “tinkers” his sounds around it. But he usually doesn’t intervene too much anyway. “I like the pure, direct nature of Lotte’s pieces,” he says: “We speak the same language.”
2023-10-28 17:43:58
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