For me, the line between lied and ballad is often blurred, and there are certainly one or two tracks in this category that would have been equally at home in the other category. I have tried to separate them in such a way that the lyrics with a strong narrative character are found in the ballads, while the monologues and snapshots have ended up in lieder – which does not mean that no stories are told in these songs.
All in all, the lyrics in this section are more personal and emotional. And sometimes, in particularly rare and precious moments, I even manage to write a song that not only shows the listener the dark side of their own soul, but also reveals a little piece of myself. I really can’t write songs like that very often, and that’s a good thing, because otherwise they would wear thin, and I want them to remain special and not bore my listeners by laying bare my soul endlessly in front of them.
But I’m just a crybaby – you wouldn’t believe it when you hear my macabre, cynical stories and see the cheerful twinkle in my eyes – and when sentimental or tragic songs are sung at a filk convention, I’m the first one to start bawling. There’s even a scientific study about it, featuring the »Thesilée Scale« of a song’s cryability – really, I’m not making this up! And when I’m not writing about death, I’m writing about love. Or both, since they often go quite well together.
Ultimately, my lieder deal with the same themes as the great manic-depressive geniuses of days gone by: love, booze, death and vanitas. I could even provide a few scientific treatises to go with them, interpretations of the songs like a book accompanies a film, if I thought anyone would be interested – which I don’t believe they are. Anyway, songs are there to be absorbed, not to be analysed and pondered over.
In the days of Lord Landless, we had a division of labour, and Silva was responsible for everything meaningful and emotional: Now that I have to do everything on my own, I’m all the more delighted when Silva still sings my songs today or even comes to me with suggestions for what I could write next – I can always use ideas, and I’m honoured when someone trusts me to write a song that they themselves have struggled with.
I don’t know how many long ballads I will write in the future, as after the eight-minute excesses of my early years, I now strive to be concise – but there will still be many, many lieder, small, sharp snapshots and fragments of my soul from me in the future.