Hello everyone, or today rather Hallo zusammen,
yeah, it's a special one today. As some of you know or have read in our bio, I am a child of two harbour cities separated by a sea, and yeah that's in part where the name of the band comes from. Those cities are Helsinki, Finland and Hamburg, Germany and while I live in Helsinki I feel like part of me will forever live in Hamburg where my father is from. That's just what it's like when you're born into a multicultural family. You're never really at home anywhere in particular except for the world as a whole. And I'm not complaining! People like me are born with an incurable itch to go, move, do something, find something different. So I'm really happy to be able to do this today and share 'StarWars' by Pohlmann. with you.
I thought long and hard about which song to cover by a German artist who'd have close ties to Hamburg. There's a LOT of them. And such stellar artists and songs too. But I just couldn't make my mind up. So for some reason I thought back to the summer almost two years ago when I was in Hamburg with my daughter just having one of those slow, sun-doused Sunday breakfasts with the local radio station playing in the background and us making plans on which park to hit first. You know those memories of situations that feel almost like a postcard, things you remember so vividly that when you close your eyes you're right back at that breakfast table on that slow Sunday morning? Well, when this song came on in the background, that moment turned into one of those postcards. And that's exactly the kind of emotion I associate with Hamburg where I spent so many summers of a wonderful youth. Obviously that suddenly felt like exactly the right thing to try and recreate here.
So there I sat again with the lyrics in front of me trying to work out how the song went without listening back to the original (because those are the rules for the 'A Sea of Heroes' covers!). I couldn't remember how the song started, how it ended or how exactly it was structured, but I knew I wanted my version to kick ass from the get-go so out of nowhere I started playing the riff you hear – well, basically in the parts of the song that I had no recollection of, haha... It just all magically fell into place right there and then. I thought for a long time that I must've nicked the riff from somewhere because it just sounds so familiar in a way. But I haven't been able to find any song with that riff in it. It sounds like a cross between Foo Fighters' 'In Your Honor' and Smashing Pumpkins' '1979' which is...not exactly bad, so I'll take it, haha!
Now I know I haven't actually talked a whole lot about the song or Pohlmann. himself, but I think the feelings that I described earlier, that he was able to conjure up in me in that moment speak volumes more than some simple praiseful diction. Some songs just simply are life. In it's most simplest, in it's most wonderful, and in it's most memorable form. So this is my 'StarWars'. I hope you like it as much as I do.
-Jon
P.S. Here's the original: