© Kirstin Tanger, ca. 2001
I don’t use the word »ballad« in the sense of »a slow, solemn song in which the large diva can unleash her full vocal power and lots of lighters are lit in the audience«, but rather as I learned it as a child in German class: ballads are poems that tell a story. And when you sing them, they are still ballads. Thus, this category includes all songs that tell a story – some more clearly than others.
As a writer, I can’t write short stories – short texts don’t work for me. And all the horror and ghost stories that I have loved ever since I had to stand on tiptoe on the toilet seat to reach my father’s horror books collection, which was actually supposed to be out of reach for us children (no one would have ever known, hadn’t I read the stories to my little sister as well …), I could never write them the way I would have liked to – until I realised that I could still turn my unwritten ghost stories into ballads.
From my childhood, I have retained a fondness for all things macabre. Although I don’t show much blood – I regularly helped out with blood donations during my time with the Youth Red Cross, so blood itself doesn’t scare me – there is a lot of death in my ballads. Evil triumphs unless it is thwarted at the last minute by something even more evil, and above it all reigns a laughing Death.
It is these songs that have made me famous in the filk community and, thanks to the band Schattenweber, have earned me the nickname »the bard Thesilée« in the German ren fair and LARP community, even though I myself don’t usually go to ren fairs or participate in LARP. And even though I have tried from time to time to free myself from the image of cheerfully clattering bones, I have to admit that I am glad to be known for something and to have a brand, and this is certainly not the worst. Let me be a hopeless romantic, but when the rat swims ashore at the end of the plague song, I have my audience right where I want them.
In addition to the usual disasters, my favourite motifs include sailing ships (which are welcome to sink), highwaymen with and without tricorn hats, and fairies of all sizes. All in all, my ballads are murder ballads in the tradition of the good old tearjerkers our parents sang with us, and I am sure that lines like »They found her early in the pond / now she is a corpse« have had a significant influence on me.
That’s why songs about novels or films make up only a very small part of my repertoire (unlike songs that were written for my novels) – most of them are independent stories, the shortest stuff I am capable of delivering. And there is a reason why I greeted the audience at my first solo performance with the words »You’ve come to my set – prepare to die«.