Christmas is around the corner. So with a safe distance. But it will come, and that’s nice, then you can put on Claudia Koreck’s “Christmas record” again. This is the Traunstein singer-songwriter’s most gifted album to date (from 2018), full of heartbreak, candlelight and the scent of a Nordmann needle. Koreck is a self-confessed tinsel romantic, and so you can look forward to next December with her. Especially since a song will come from her as surely as the Christ Child – as the conclusion of her “Calendar” project, which started in January.
It’s like an advent calendar, only with a longer duration. Every month a digital door opens and sweetens the time with a song and a video. If you were quick, you could order a real wall calendar with drawings by the singer – so that people have something in their hands, she says, they would have to wait until October for the CD. And she just likes to paint.
In any case, this richly illustrated soundtrack of a year is Koreck’s most elaborate and intensive work to date, she calls it her “multimedia monster project”. She had had the idea for the song calendar for a long time, but then a hit came up. 14 years after her breakthrough with “Fliang” she recorded a version of Nena’s “Somehow, somewhere, sometime” for the ZDF series “Der Bergdoktor” in 2021, which was well received, and the record giant Universal asked her for a whole one Cover album entitled “Pearl Diver”. She was blocked, but she already knew her calendar was taking up a lot of time. And she wanted width, not a narrow Corona plate.
January 2022 was icy. Once she stepped outside the front door into the snow-covered fields when the music started up again. “The first thing about the project was this beautiful melody in my head,” she says, “that was liberating, I felt why I was doing the whole thing at all, at that moment I felt like writing again.”
That’s also what “January” is about, the piece she released exactly one year later: “And suddenly the world is as white as a neis Bladdl paper again,” she sings in her softly woven Bavarian. That sounds longingly beautiful, if a bit cliché at first, but with the 36-year-old, such a line digs deeper and deeper. It’s about being allowed to change and renew, not having to stay as restricted as the others like you to be. And that’s what the “forgiving” start of the year, January, stands for, with its rough nights, good spirits and magic – so in the video she trudges her line in untouched snow with the guitar on her back, looks into the distance from a shaky high seat over the frozen Weitsee (nomen es omen), on which skaters have shoveled out rectangles – one can see this as an invitation for the listener to create their own open spaces: space for notes on themselves.
There was not much time from the idea to the finished package: going for a walk in nature, mostly alone with the fuzzy family dog, being inspired by favorite places that change with the seasons, writing, recording in the studio, shooting video material, strictly speaking, it had to be in the happen same month. After all, there is still a whole year left until the release with cut and polish, a lot is still in progress, the listener is right in the middle. Everything has to mesh, be planned, clocked, that’s not how she actually works, says Claudia Koreck. How good that she has her Gunnar. As always, her husband Gunnar Graewert is there as a producer, as a fellow musician and as the closest advisor in the family business “Honu Lani Records”. But this time he is challenged even more.
“It’s our joint project,” says Claudia Koreck, so it’s only logical that her husband Gunnar Graewert can also be seen on the posters for the duo tour.
(Photo: Honu Lani Records)
You can see this particularly well in the video for “February in Paris”. There is “the best man”, as she writes on Instagram, also as “cameraman, squeezing player and actor in one”. The couple plays – which is obviously easy – a couple in love in Paris, with coquettish looks, dancing on the bridges of the Seine to a chocolaty gypsy swing, and under a silly moustache, the musician who otherwise plays in the background self-confidently flirts in his duet part: ” This girl is hot, once I know her name I’ll take her home.” This German chanson is frivolous, self-ironic and charming, as you might otherwise know from text flâneur Frank Ramond (with whom Graewert worked as well as with Hannes Ringlstetter, Annett Louisan and Helene Fischer).
Claudia Koreck found inspiration for her calendar songs at her favorite places in nature around Traunstein.
(Photo: Honu Lani Records)
They traveled together throughout the year, filming under a Greek waterfall while on vacation in Thailand after their guest performance at the Expo in the Dubai desert. “I want to see everything like Venice, first of all the beauty, not the mold on the wall,” she will sing in July. They are now going on the first part of the tour together, for the first time as a multi-instrumental duo, officially with Graewert on the poster. “The Gunnar doesn’t cost anything,” she jokes, “then we can afford the band again later.” The loyal musicians should also be mixed in with some powerful pieces in the summer – “if it slides”.
Most of it is in place, but everything is still in flux until it is completed in December: “Hey, December, tell me what’s wrong”, she will sing in English and about the fact that she doesn’t want a white Christmas, but that the earth is better again.
Claudia Koreck, calendar tour, start on March 9th in Bad Endorf, other dates include: 10.3. Nuremberg, 11.3. Erding, 19.4. Munich, Lustspielhaus