I’m a few thousand meters above the ground right now. I’m really hungover and longing for my own bed. I hate the people on this plane with me right now. I hate that I’ll be facing the cold Berlin night in about an hour. But what I hate most is that my apartment will be cold and dark when I will finally get there.
I left the fridge pretty much empty and turned the heating down to a minimum when I left it a few days ago. You don’t want food to go to waste and you don’t want to burn money on heating. Since I moved in three years I ago, I haven’t gotten round to installing ceiling lighting (quite a sad fact to admit but I blame the high ceilings). So all I’ll have will be a beer or two that I’m going to pick up from the shop around the corner (it’s a Sunday night, so thank god I’m living in Berlin), a few desk lamps that I spread across my living- and bedroom, and the stale light coming from my laptop- or tv-screen to keep me company.
There won’t be a warm meal (the last thing I ate was a bag of crisps at Manchester airport) on the table or someone who’ll ask how I’m feeling. No one to ask how the last few days have been. And definitely no one waiting for me in my bedroom. It’s moments and times like these when living in a big city becomes quite a miserable experience. Some turn to cheesy movies (been there, done that) and ice cream (it’s close to winter for fucks sake). Some would crack open a bottle of wine and get the whiskey out (would be an option). Myself though, I turn to music.
‚It’s been cold when i was dreaming‚ hums Hannes Neunhoeffer in Another Chapter and I can feel his words. The gentle songs his band A Tale of Golden Keys wrote and recorded in a secluded house in the Franconian remoteness is a soothing soundtrack for autumn and the looming winter. Drips of piano fall onto songs like raindrops on my leaky window (Another Chapter) or the last warm rays of sunlight on a foggy October morning (as in the brilliant opener All of This). Every so often colorful beauty and harmony are shattered by little storms of noisy guitars and thundering drums (listen to the guitars on Waves which Brian Molko would be proud of). The vocals are gentle, at times almost timid, but always warm and embracing. In a time when every band is sounding more generic and synthetic than ever, a band with such an organic sound as A Tale of Golden Keys, evokes more emotions in me than most of the rest.
My mind keeps wandering off in the last hour. I’m back in the arms of a girl I so badly want to be together with. I’m thinking of the girls that got away (everybody has them, for me there’s two I keep thinking of recently). Every song takes me some place else. So while my plane is approaching Berlin, I’m feeling a little better. Your mind can be a wonderful thing. If you trigger the right memories it can heal every wound. And there is no better trigger than music. About an hour later I’m sitting on the train from the airport to my apartment. I press play again. And watch the city lights fly by in the cold and dark night.
Everything Went Down as Planned by A Tale of Golden Keys is out now via the great Berlin label Trickser Tonträger. You can pick up a copy here.
