Michael Weisshaupt

Michael Weisshaupt, the former Singer and Guitarist of an Indie-Folk-Band from Stuttgart, has been pursuing his solo career since 2002. His music can most likely be labelled “Contemporary Indie Folk” as the songs contain current stylistic elements, but also traditional melodies and instrumentation. To this extent the result is both a time-less and contemporary mixture of different styles. The lyrics, which are of no less sig-nificance to the songs, emerge in both German and English. What started off as a relaxing project without great ambitions and with a pleasure for music, has turned out to be an exciting story. While the desire to experiment with samples, loops and various guitar sounds was the greater focus on the first album “Disconnect” and therefor providing the record with a – for the singer/songwriter - unusual, more experimental sound which seems to make the songs stand out. The sec-ond album “Schön ist es” had a surprising effect with its more homogeneous song collection and production. Precise guitar lines and arrangements, concise voices and reduced drums, shape this record, being stylistically categorised somewhere between Folk and Indie. The album “Sag mir wohin”, which was released in 2010, was the most complete album up to that point. “Stadt ohne Himmel” or “Sag mir wohin” are quite simply successful songs with recognition value. “Out of Season” was released in 2012 as a “concept al-bum” being structured around a beautiful string arrangement. Therefore not only are there only pure string passages in each of the ten songs, they more or less cover the keyboard features. The strings, featured in “Out of Season” shape the core of each in-dividual piece, surrounded by the other instruments. Therefore the songs sound more diverse and the wonderful melodies are presented with astonishing depth and warmth. In 2015 the fifth record “Auf Sicht” followed. Another piece closer the roots: Hand-made singer/songwriter music with a vintage vibe, meaning it contains many interest-ing retro instruments and the matching songs. Sometimes forceful, rhythmic (“Melan-choly”), sometimes firm-snappy (“Die leeren Tage) or just reduced to the basics (“Time to go”). A lot of experience and things from the last years have influenced this beauti-ful, mature record which seems notably calm and relaxed despite the high-end pro-duction. Therefore it maybe marks the end- or starting point –depending on how one looks at it- of a musical development which began ten years ago. In 2018 Michael Weisshaupt released his sixth album to date, „Random Karma“. What immediately stands out in “Random Karma” in comparison to the previous albums is the significantly reduced use of acoustic guitars. They had to make room to distorted vintage crunch guitars of various colours and find themselves only in the song "Rain-maker". With the dominate electric guitars, the sound accordingly it is much more straight and rougher than in the previous albums. Also noteworthy, and a novelty in the discography of Michael Weisshaupt, is the fact that all the lyrics on "Random Kar-ma" are in English. While the previous albums offered a more or less varied lyrical mix of German and English lyrics (the first two records even contain two songs in French), there is a deliberate reduction and limitation also in linguistic terms on this album. In combination with the likewise reduced instrumentation (mainly guitars, drums, bass and vocals), a highly compact and dense listening experience is created, that can be heard both quietly and loud turned up.