Max Mutzke celebrates his 40th birthday on May 21st. In an interview, the singer tells us whether the number is bothering him.
Singer Max Mutzke (“Can’t Wait Until Tonight”) will be 40 years old on May 21st – and will give himself a song entitled “Wishlessly addicted” for his birthday. The musician from the Black Forest revealed what it is all about and how he will spend the day in an interview with the news agency spot on news. He also explains why he will only sing in German on his new album.
You will be 40 years old on May 21st, congratulations. How are you with the number, does 4 bother you?
Max Mutzke: Thank you very much! I read yesterday: To be 40 years old means to be 21, with just 19 years of experience. That also applies to it quite well, only that I’m more like 25 with 15 years of experience. I was 25 when I started my family and was already really independent with music and stood on my own two feet as an adult. I already knew exactly what I wanted in life. Somehow it actually still feels the same. I am still unwaveringly optimistic about my life. I wake up in a very good mood every morning. I feel totally fit and I still feel “I am so indestructible” in a positive way. It’s a really nice feeling of basic trust in my life situation.
A milestone birthday is often an occasion to take stock. How do you look back on your career so far? What were your biggest highs and lows?
Mutzke: Both in your career and in your private life, there are always ups and downs. You can also find this dynamic wave movement in love or on the account balance. But the same is true in the appointment calendar and in body weight. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. I would describe the career a bit like a hike through a diverse, very varied nature. You have the opportunity to go up the mountain. That is then the upswing of the career. Sometimes it’s a very steep and long path that takes a lot of perseverance. When things go well, you stand up there with a wonderful view and enjoy it a lot. Those are the peaks in a career.
What I have now discovered is that these peaks are really just peaks and not the new level that you are now at. For example, you often have a peak when promoting an album. Then you have a lot of invitations from talk shows and a lot of media interest. You quickly become almost self-centered and you have to be careful not to lose your grip on the ground. Peaks then also mean going back down the mountain and then aiming for the next mountain. It is important to have the focus on the next mountain. That is why I find the ups and downs in a career natural and imperative in order to have and keep our feet on the ground.
How are you going to celebrate your birthday – now that things have been eased again?
Mutzke: At first I will celebrate my birthday without my family because it was important to me to celebrate with my team. For a long time I saw myself as a native of the Black Forest who was allowed to travel the country as a singer. In the meantime I see myself rather the other way around as a singer who is lucky enough to come from the Black Forest. That’s why my team and the media partners also play a very large part in my life. So I will first spend my birthday in Berlin with my record company Universal Music and then leave home at night to be able to celebrate with my family the next day – subject to compliance, of course.
How did you experience the corona pandemic as a family? How do your children deal with it?
Mutzke: I am very fortunate to be able to live in the Black Forest, where we are at 1,000 meters in a house that is already far away from everything. Social distancing is quite normal for us because we live in a less densely populated area. My children are younger than my career, which means that I’ve never been able to spend as much time with them as in the current situation. Because they couldn’t go to school either, we had an enormous amount of quality time that I definitely wouldn’t want to miss. You then inevitably ask yourself whether, when everything goes back to normal, you would still want to be on your own for around 220 days a year. But of course I am still very aware that I live in a very privileged situation.
Their new single is called “Desirelessly addicted”. What are you absolutely addicted to?
Mutzke: Desirably addicting is a nice play on words that I haven’t heard anywhere. In short, it’s like walking in a forest. You run up the mountain and suddenly you stand in a clearing and look 1,000 kilometers down into the landscape and think: Awesome, I didn’t expect that, this is an awesome moment. So it’s about having arrived without having forced it beforehand. This feeling can affect many things. It can be a friendship or the relationship with your love partner. But it can also affect a moment that describes your psyche or your career. It is the achievement of a thing that I actually would not have wished for or dreamed of. But now I have it and I realize what an incredible value it has to me.
Your new album will have the same title. What can you already reveal about it?
Mutzke: It’s a purely German-language album, which is a premiere for me. They are also all my own songs, so there is no cover number on them, which is also rare for me. They’re all stories of their own, so it’s very autobiographical. And what I find very interesting and only now noticed after listening to all the songs: It also has a lot of political statements. While writing the album, I noticed that the pandemic had opened up an incredible number of topics: the division in the population or the lateral thinker situation. People who now have to rediscover the content of their life because so many activities have ceased to exist. I also have the feeling that a large part of the population looks for this information on the Internet without it being properly processed, reflected or filled with human values. It really got me to write about it.
How did it come about that you only sing in German on the album?
Mutzke: Before that, I mostly made music in English because I just didn’t feel so comfortable with the German language at the time. I had German songs too, but I just thought English was cooler. I would not have done justice to this significant moment, which “Desirably addicted” describes, as well as our current time full of upheavals and significant insights, because I cannot identify myself in English. I had to say all of this in German because I wanted people to understand what I was saying. I wanted people to listen to me and for me to be able to position myself instead of just getting a nice, English R&B number. It works much better with the mother tongue.