CASPER: The DIY thought is hope and passion.
CASPER‘s new album “Hinterland” will be out on September 27th.
Two years ago you released “XOXO”, which was a huge success, now you are back with your new album “Hinterland”. What happened in this time for you as a person and as a musician?
To be honest there are no big changes on the private side. I still live in the same commune and I still live the same low life. I think people who meet me and don’t know me, they surely think that I’m a student.
But can you still walk through the streets without getting bothered by fans?
Well, it works pretty well. In small cities it happens that people say “no…it’s not him” and here in Berlin or other big cities it is like “aaah yeah”. But what happend and this goes together with your first question, we did a huge tour with tons of shows. I think it was the best we did, since we had to find ourselves as band. When the record was done, the band doesn’t write the songs but perform it live…I mean they are absolutely more than live musicians since we are very good friends…we also feel as a band. So I’d say CASPER is a band. But at the end I go together with producers to the studio and write and record songs with them. And the band has to learn these songs then. So we had to find together as band, which was a process. But all in all we toured for about two years, released a live DVD in between, played the last show in late September 2012 and not even one week later I was already in Spain with the producers to start working on the new album.
I had this sexy thought from the “Sound City” Documentary (Dave Grohl)…they came back from tour, went directly into the studio and back on tour again. And I thought I should totally do it like this, too. And then in March/April I really felt tired and down. But at this point we had huge pressure since the album was already terminated and a lot of things were already planned and going in the back. So I’m really surprised that the album now sounds like it sounds. I wanted to have a loose sound and songs that sound uplifting…but in the end “Hinterland” became an album with pretty dark lyrics. At least when you compare it to what I had in mind before. And it’s really crazy that we didn’t fall into depression while working on the album, because the mood was really more than grey at some point.