While Ami Warning served a lottery customer in her kiosk, she received a winning message herself. How? asks one or the other music connoisseur who knows the name Ami Warning from the upscale radio program: Has the young singer with the hoarse voice, the hope of the local pop world, switched to Aunt Emma? No, not even Corona would get her that far, but she is now the proud operator of a corner shop in Laim, at the subway station Friedenheimer Straße, exit Camerloherstraße, together with her mother and her boyfriend Matthew Austin.
How? asks the pop connoisseur, the songwriter Matthew from Manchester, with whom Ami has already given concerts for couples, but never made a duo album, with which it should work when selling fags and coffee? Exactly, that’s how it is, explains Ami, only making music together is complicated, she loves his stuff, he loves hers, but together it “somehow” doesn’t work. Ami Warning’s music is soul songwriting as a one-woman show, sometimes with a backing band.
And what about the profit? Yes, exactly, so the phone rang in her “paper boutique” (that’s what the previous owners say) and a voice said she had it “German Music Author Prize” won. And 10,000 euros. And “congratulations”.
Warning was quite amazed as she had never heard of this award let alone being nominated. “But that sounded real.” And that’s how it is: On March 24, she will fly to Berlin to accept the certificate and check at the Hotel Ritz Carlton, probably in the presence of Federal Minister of Culture Claudia Roth, in a ceremony moderated by Munich colleagues Fiva and Roger Reckless.
The jury consisted of highly valued members
In the meantime she knows that this prize is a well-respected one, and that the jury was also made up of highly esteemed members. For example with fellow songwriter Alin Coen, on whose tour in May Ami Warning will play the opening act. Or with Ebow, the former Munich rapper who performed solo in Vienna and now in Berlin and with the Gaddafi girls has become a force in smart hip-hop.
Ami and Ebow appreciate each other and pursue their careers. Ebow says she is “1000 percent with Ami and all her work” and is very happy that the jury chose her. “She is one of the last of us who stayed in Munich and deserves full support, also as a black artist” and because she “worked her message in”. Warning isn’t a rapper, she’s quite a soul singer, but she tinkers with the flow and the beats and feels very hip-hop.
In any case, she feels understood by the jury, although the category “newcomer” comes quite late for her after eight years and four albums. Better late than never, and the 26-year-old actually reinvents herself with every project. “The award is a confirmation that you can do it completely differently and that it will be seen,” she says. Because just when she switched from English to German in her verses, many people who gave good advice bombarded her, saying she should do it the way German soul is done and try it in songwriting workshops. “But I don’t understand why everything should sound the way it already sounds and I can’t just do my thing.”
Her new album is “a rather non-commercial in-between thing”
Her thing right now is “Near the End of the World”. A new attempt at exploring and expressing yourself, eight tracks recorded “gut feeling” in the living room. Apart from her, only father Wally Warning, himself a reggae pop star, can be heard once on the percussions, and once her boyfriend plays the electric guitar.
Otherwise she immersed herself in a new sound all by herself, it should be “danceable songs”. Are they too, maybe more like when you move stoned behind drawn curtains, to shuffling-beautiful dope beats and magically lurching, enchanted, hallucinogenic sound, like in “Simsalabim”, the father who fell ill a while ago and changed celebrate. It is her most personal album. She calls it “mixtape”, left it very raw during the mixing and only sells it on her website, also as a music cassette. It’s “a rather non-commercial in-between thing,” she says.
It’s worth every price. Although the Gema prize is not for an album, but for the total work of art Ami Warning. And above all for her text poetry with the German language. It sounds casual, seemingly naive. She always crosses out anything that doesn’t feel like she’s going to say it that way.
“Hello children, are you all here? The answer to all your questions is yes. I make the world how I like it,” she sings in the song “Hello Children”. Hardly any other German soul song is more honest. That seems childish, but in the sense of the child that is in everyone and dreams of “Land of Cockaigne” and puts questions into prayer: “Dear God, please help me to understand, did we all just come here to go?” (“It is like it is”). But she not only dreams, she also observes, she does and lets things happen.
Everyone who listens to her likes her
move your texts. She gets emails from afar telling people to learn German with her songs. Various Goethe Institutes, who have invited them to their countries, have noticed this. To Oslo, for example, where she could only stream one concert live because of Corona. She traveled to France personally in December. She met German students for workshops in class, and in the evenings she gave concerts for them in clubs. She played the guitar alone to beats from the Loopstation, her Matthew driving the car and doing the light show. 150 students went along, clapped along and sang along. “I hope that I can convey that German is beautiful.” One immediately gets the impression that Ami Warning is a real ambassador of local culture.
Everyone who listens to her likes her. The reggae pop stars Jamaram asked them to open their 20th band anniversary concert at Backstage (March 17th). The next day she played in the “Brechtbühne unplugged” series with musicians from the Augsburg Philharmonic in the local gasworks, to which she had been invited by Girisha Fernando, director of the “Festival of Cultures”, who wanted to play the electric bass himself. After the summer she wants to go on tour herself. The fees would cover the cost of living. But the 10,000 euros in prize money is just right, “you always have to produce, master, make videos,” she says, “I said straight away that I want to put that into new songs.” A win-win situation for her and her fans.