Herbert Grönemeyer Announces Release Of New Single 'Mensch'
Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Written by Jon Stickler
When Herbert Grönemeyer’s wife and brother both died of cancer in the same week, Germany’s biggest selling artist disappeared from the public eye, and ended up taking a hiatus from music while he dealt with the trauma and grief that engulfed him.
Four years later, Grönemeyer emerged from the despair with ‘Mensch’. No stranger to the album charts, having years ago held off Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' from the Number 1 spot upon the album’s release, ‘Mensch’ became Grönemeyer’s biggest song to date, topping the charts, while the album of the same name racked up platinum certification three times over/21 times gold.
Now, a decade on, Grönemeyer has teamed up with long time friend Bono for the song’s English language release due on Monday 8th October as a bonus track to his first English language album ‘I Walk’. The pair became close through their humanitarian work - for which Grönemeyer received the accolade of ‘Person Of The Year’ from TIME magazine in 2005 - and their mutual friend, Anton Corbijn, for whom Grönemeyer financed the Ian Curtis biopic Control and scored the 2010 film The American.
When the U2 front man heard that Grönemeyer was to rerecord a collection of songs in English, Bono’s immediate reaction was: “I want to be on the album”. And so the pair recorded the opening track for 'I Walk '(previously dubbed ‘Das English Album’), with Bono lending his vocals to the stadium-filling, powerful and heartfelt ‘Mensch’; testament to love, loss and redemption.
The English meaning of its title? Probably the most difficult word to translate on the entire album – defined as a person of integrity or honour; a human being, comprising all the qualities and characteristics that make us human, prevent us from resigning and help us look forward. An appropriate name then, for the song and subsequent album, that would power Grönemeyer back into the charts after four years grieving for his loss. He himself adds: “The nice thing about all this in the end was that my friends really helped me through that time. And that's what the song is about: life is so beautiful because you're surrounded, if you're lucky, by good friends and life is actually really great again. The whole thing was to say thank you to these people.”
His debut English album 'I Walk' is also released on Monday 8th October, and features further guest appearances from Antony Hegarty and James Dean Bradfield.
Herbert Grönemeyer headlines The Roundhouse, London on Sunday 28th October 2012.
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