A collection of songs recorded between 2018 and 2021, Daniel Balthasar’s eighth studio album is a work that flows effortlessly. Somebody’s Somebody carries the listener from the full-blown guitar pop of the title track to the stripped-down acoustic of penultimate track Little Red Blinking Lights before culminating in the melancholic Shadow, backed by lushly orchestrated strings (there is also a hidden final track, more of which later).
But the lyrics also reveal a narrative that Daniel says he discovered almost by accident. “When I start to write songs, I don't really think about what they are about,” he explains. “But I discovered this narrative of a person who starts out with lots of energy, and then he makes one mistake after another and at the end is just a shadow of himself.”
Fitting the story into an album required Daniel to ditch several songs that he had worked on before the pandemic. Was it painful to shelve half an album’s worth of songs? “I don't think it’s that hard for me to do. They just didn’t fit, and I will release the songs at one point later on.”
The new album is a stark contrast to Daniel’s lockdown album, The Lost Art Of Getting Lost, which he recorded inside a giant cardboard box in his family home. “That came from the instant feeling of being trapped and being cornered, in fact, so it’s much more immediate,” he says. “This one is really much more, I would say, like a movie, where every little detail is thought of and put into perspective and changed and moved around. And so, it’s really not spontaneous.”
Watch the video to Shadow directed by Lefteris Parasyris.
Indeed, the process also involved the tricky task of getting guest musicians from abroad to record their contributions, often in the face of difficult lockdown circumstances.
Daniel says he was thrilled that acclaimed Texas-based singer-songwriter Ben Kweller agreed to play and sing on one of the album’s highlights, Summer, Slowly Fading Daylight. He has been a fan of Kweller’s since seeing him play in Strasbourg in 2002, but only contacted him some 15 years later to suggest they collaborate. Daniel heard nothing for three years, then suddenly out of the blue Ben sent a message and they began to talk. “I sent him demos of some unfinished stuff and he said, ‘yeah, Summer, that's the song. I would love to play guitar solo in it on it.’ And it took for ages because he was isolated in Texas in the countryside outside Austin, so he had practically no internet.”
Other guests were easier to get on board. Encouraged by Kweller’s response, Daniel reached out to another musician he admired, Liverpudlian Mercury nominee Kathryn Williams, to sing a duet on Hotel Bar. She replied within half an hour. “It was very easy. I sent her everything and she recorded at home. I love her voice so much. She has this very angelic voice that fits really well.”
Local rising star Jana Bahrich from Francis Of Delirium, who remains uncredited, also provides vocals on “We Were Not Meant To Be Alone” and contributed plenty of ideas for the song, says Daniel. And K’s Choice songwriter Gert Bettens, who Daniel has known for years, can be found on “With This World”.
The ten songs of the narrative are all new, but the eleventh hidden track, One Second Of Silence, is a song that Daniel recorded over 20 years ago. “In fact, the vocals you hear are me as a 19-year-old. I isolated the vocals and recorded new instruments on top of it.” Its lo-fi self-reflection is a perfect way to end the album.
Somebody’s Somebody can be ordered on vinyl and CD from the Daniel Balthasar website and is also available on streaming service Spotify.