And then everything falls out of him. The pain. The sadness. Daniel Fahrländer is on the big stage at the “Sound of Munich Now” festival. He has just strapped on the electric guitar, played a cutting solo, all the burden has to go, all the oppression. “I would like to cry again, but I don’t know how to do it anymore. Where do tears come from,” he sings. It’s a touching song, very smartly packaged in electro-pop. And it is one of the most moving moments of the festival.
“Crying” is the name of the song Driving landlike the previous one Youth Okay-Singer Daniel Fahrländer calls his solo project. In his songs he focuses primarily on the topic of “mental health”. Sometimes it makes it easier to use pop music to draw attention to this topic and how society deals with it. “My songs should cast a certain view of the world through my experiences,” Daniel Fahrländer once said in an SZ interview. He knows the pain, the sadness, and also the feeling of not being able to cry, for example when his mother died, which is what this song is about. Pure goosebumps.
The “Sound of Munich Now” festival took a break for three years due to the pandemic and transformed itself into a successful digital festival. Last fall, the organizers returned to the live idea – more precisely, the two types of festival were combined because they no longer wanted to do without videos. Thanks to the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Munich and the Jugendkulturwerk, the Ideal Entertainment video crew will once again be in action at the show in November; the performances of the 20 bands will be filmed with six cameras. One song is selected, edited and mastered – from then on a video is played every two weeks.
Daniel Fahrländer is a perfectionist, which is not the only reason why he was recently voted band of the year by the SZ’s Young People page. Everything is in order, like his pair of slippers, which stand neatly next to each other in his rehearsal room at the Fat Cat. He weighed every word, every line of his song “Weinen” until everything was right. Until he feels everything. The pain. The sadness. “It pulls the skin under the salt, tears open the wounds. Write these lines on a piece of paper, spend hours. And when I send the letter to you, I know it will come back again. I know it will get better. I I hope it gets better.”
You can feel the relief, the hope. The audience bobs cautiously to the beat. Even if everyone in the audience feels at this moment that some blows of fate are difficult to overcome.