Photo Credit: Klaus Polkowski www.klaus-polkowski.de
What better way to travel than a few days’ layover at home. Well, at least home country. The Exchange finished its commitment in Australia and flew to Germany by way of DC where we performed at an event we did 2 years prior. I got to see my sister for the New York Minute we were there, and off we flew again. Strangely, being on the road so much, I actually get the chance to visit friends and relatives often. So despite chronic jet lag, I’m calling it a win.
Arriving in Germany, home of the recent World Cup, we stayed at a house hotel in Rust where we chilled and pushed through jet lag while the EP hotels were getting ready. It was hot, and with no A/C we all hustled for the basement rooms. Over the last year or so of coming to Europa Park, we have made some close friends, and we had them over for a “good to be back” party.
My sister and her hubby
We spent a lot of our days prepping for the Radio Regenbogen show with Anastasia as the headliner. In the evenings we’d spend our time hanging out with Alex and Thomas and some of our other friends. At one point they even set up a beer pong table at the ice rink after the park closed. We played poker with the park’s performers and grabbed a drink or two with some fans we made on the Backstreet Boys tour this past spring.
With our rooms finally ready we settled into the artists’ guest house called Hotel Rolando. It is very different from the resorts on the other side of the park, with no lobby, food, or wifi to be found. NBD, but this is gonna take some getting used to 🙂
So we found the best place to get online was the hallway, but the lights were on a timed sensor, so every 5 minutes or so you’d have to stand up and wave your arms to switch them on again. It makes for a funny Skype call. For breakfast we’d jump on the train or take the van around the park to El Andaluz…usually sleeping too late to make it ;). Basically we spent a few of our chill days prepping for our shows.
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Breakfast at Europa Park
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Talent Academy
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Radio Regenbogen Interview
July 25, 2014 – The first event in Germany was a corporate show for Ystral with the heavy metal group FORK. It was a huge warehouse that took us forever to find. I guess the GPS has 2 Ballrechten-
Dottingens? It took us to a construction site about 3 miles away, and the construction workers certainly had no idea where we were trying to go. Anyway we got there finally, did a big fat soundcheck, and it sounded great. Chris and I climbed up to the roof and kicked back in the German summer sun.
We settled in to our dressing rooms and hung out with FORK before surprising the people coming in with a pop-up performance. Then we hit the stage, where, somewhere between soundcheck and show, the sound dramatically changed. We suspect that the mics were overdriven to accommodate FORK’s heavy metal sound. Even as we walked down the stairs from the dressing rooms, the microphones cried out in a heinous feedback loop. At one point we turned the mics off, sang acoustic, left the stage, came back, sang more, then finally called it. It was the worst sound fiasco we’ve ever had, and we’ve had a few. Frustrated, we rolled back to the park.
July 30, 2014 – The next show up was ZMF, one of the biggest music festivals in Germany. It’s basically a classier Woodstock that has been going strong for years, and we were part of a vocal night. The dressing rooms were series of tents and trailers, and we all used the hairdryer that apparently was used by James Brown. #famous. They really took care of us, put us up in the Hotel Stadt in Freiburg, and brought a ton of great food. The concert itself consisted of a few a cappella groups, and by the end of the night, the crowd had had their fill of vocals. We sold CDs, signed ’em, took pics, then rounded up our guys.
August 4-8, 2014 – Next up was an excursion to Mallorca to meet up with Angelo. He had helped us tremendously on our Backstreet Boys tour, and now we traveled to the Spanish island to discuss a management deal. We stayed in the Sol Wave House in Magaluf. It’s basically the Cancun side of town. Angelo’s beautiful house with two pools, an elevator, and lots of food was on the other 🙂
We slept in and made the cross-island drive, not knowing what to expect. We chatted and discussed, and most importantly got to know each other better. Then we’d swim for hours and throw the football around with Jenny and their son. He brought some of his industry friends over to meet us where we showed our videos and performed. Then we went off to a big dinner and out to see the Zone Sisters, and incredible rock trio that we actually did a song with. They’d become much closer friends in the few days we spent in Mallorca.
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I Love My Orca
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HOFA Studios
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Max the beatboxer
Paul and I got the chance to take the jet ski around the waters as Angelo had rented it for his colleagues in town and they inexplicably didn’t use it. Let’s just say, if there’s a jet ski available, I’m on it. We, overall, were hesitant to sign a big contract right then and there, and we departed Mallorca after our short stay, grateful for the generous hospitality.
August 8, 2014 – Katja had just finished the Talent Academy so she let us use the big dance room to rehearse, and in exchange we held a workshop for her students (and some of our fans). We got the chance to hang out with Max, Alex’s son. Alex is a friend of Thomas Mack, and a friend of Thomas is a friend of ours. His son, it turns out, is a talented beatboxer. That was also the kickoff to Christopher’s birthday, seemingly always in Germany!
Matthias, one of the most crucial players in our Radio Regenbogen show had us up to his new crib 20 minutes from the park. He grilled as we learned how to DJ on his new turntables and played Heads Up for hours. The highlight of the night was introducing Katja and Lisa to What So Not’s “Jaguar Drop” and doing “The Bernie” to the drop.
August 9, 2014 – On the night of the Radio Regenbogen show, we got ourselves readied and hung out in the back of the giant circus tent. We’d performed here before, but the dressing rooms this time were directly back stage, and it was a hot night. Our good friend Tina had made her way to Rust on her summer trip to Berlin to see the show, and we got to step out and say hi to her, Shel, and her parents. We scrambled a bit to manage the comp tickets to the event and then hit the stage.
After the show we signed autographs then all packed into the Salla Bianca where they turned a calm wedding hall into a bumping dance floor. I am a pretty bad dancer but that doesn’t stop me! I jumped around and danced for hours with our crew before calling it a night. It’s gonna take a few days to recover 🙂
FORK at Ystral in Germany
The next few days were devoted to a special project. We were asked to write and record the main song for Europa Park’s Halloween show, Spook Me. Working directly with Hendrik Schwarzer, the Park’s composer. This project proved to be the most challenging collaboration to date. They had called us in to take the song and make it more radio-ready. The song itself, however, was heavily influenced by a classical and 90s rock background…the producers on the project.
We had a number of disagreements between our perspectives and spent the day at HOFA, one of the nicest studios in Germany to record our parts. The engineer had a crazy notion to use 7 different microphones in the room, leaving us with 7 different tracks for EACH take. If you spend the time tripling the parts, that’s at least 105 tracks. -_- I call “not editing” on this one.
The day dragged on as we wrote vocal parts on the spot, disagreed back and forth about the direction of the song, and ultimately left things unfinished. That seems to be a theme on this trip.
We scheduled a dinner with the producers to discuss the dissonance on the direction of the song. We came to the conclusion that we’d record our own parts at home, send them via email, and if they liked it, they could use it. Otherwise we’d have to let them do their own thing. I produced a demo, and here it is:
With a few very important things to take care of, we flew back to the states, our homework waiting.