Die Kinder an unseren Händen by Nadine Maria Schmidt

"Yes, I know it's a difficult album. But somebody has to write these songs. I can't help it. I just have to."

What Nadine Maria Schmidt writes about her new album "The children on our hands" is not an exaggeration: The songs are literally about life and death (and also about the afterlife). But the 39-year-old songwriter and singer has never made it easy for herself or her listeners - and is loved by her audience precisely for that. Born in Thuringia and raised in the Vogtland region, Nadine Maria Schmidt has recorded three albums with her band Frühmorgens am Meer since 2012 - all financed via crowdfunding. As a musician a late-coming autodidact, as a singer unmistakable, as a lyricist an exceptional talent, she hits a nerve with her very own emotionality and poetry, not only with the audience but also with the critics. Regular placements in the quarterly lists of the German Record Critics' Prize and the 'Förderpreis der Liederbestenliste' 2016 speak a clear language. And so now, after a creative break, also caused by private strokes of fate, the fourth album "Die Kinder an unseren Händen."
After the poem settings of the predecessor "Ich bin der Regen", this time all the lyrics come from Nadine. Thematically, it goes into the nitty-gritty - from very intimate dramas about war and flight to a historical mass suicide in 1945 in Demmin, in the foothills of Pomerania. Yet there is a clear thread - Nadine Maria makes it clear: "The children on our hands as a symbol of love and trust, but also of responsibility for them and that across the generations." It's a good thing that it wasn't "just anyone" who took on these materials, but Nadine Maria Schmidt. She has an unmistakable feeling for the nuances that open doors to deeper truths in these songs. And this is not only true for the lyrics: Once again it is this very own amalgam of chanson and pop, with chamber music sensibilities and sometimes jazz-like finesse, that opens the listener to the stories on "Die Kinder an unseren Händen". Nadine's expressive vocals are framed by arrangements that are free of any genre clichés and instead rich in sound-creating imagination, creating a kaleidoscope of diverse moods. The composer and cellist Christoph Schenker, with whom Nadine Maria Schmidt honed the arrangements of the pieces, has contributed as an important midwife to the fact that this fourth album of Nadine Maria Schmidt & Frühmorgens am Meer will again, in the best sense of the word, make people sit up and take notice.