I have sort of fallen in love with an 18-year-old girl (don't worry, it's not that kind of love, it's rather a serious case of "I'd sooooo much like to have a little sister like that" affection
) from Germany called Lena Meyer-Landrut.
Until some weeks ago she was just a perfectly normal girl in the business of finishing school, until she sang in a German TV casting show. Now I know what you think at this point: Casting shows are crap and, musically speaking, no-go area. You are right and this is what I've always thought too. However, this show was different as it was deliberately planned to be some kind of "Anti-casting-show"-Casting-Show. The guys running it were serious musicians and producers, they promised there would be no cheap humiliation, no tearjerker background home stories, no judgments based on clothes or looks, no vocal or dance coaches forcing candidates into line. People would be allowed to perform "come as you are", to sing their own songs, to choose their own music. It would be just about music, and nothing else. And so it was.
Still, I didn't expect nothing and actually watched the first show only in order to make fun of it - like, I guess, many people did. Well, the candidates were decent, but not spectacular, until, as the very last candidate, this girl walked up on stage - rather clumsily, shaky, visibly nervous, hardly able to breathe. You had to be really afraid for her in that moment if you were looking. (I wasn't.) Then the bandleader counted in, and suddenly this girl rocked the stage like a pro, and I looked up and thought "What - the - f.....?!
Who is this?" As soon as the song was over she turned back into a little girl again, half dying from nervousness and excitement, literally screaming and jumping up and down out of joy and bliss. I don't think I have ever seen such a moment of utmost sincerity on TV. That's when I (and, as it turned out, half the nation) fell in love with her.What's even more remarkable is that she sang a song by British songer/songwriter Adele ("My Same"), who is not a household name in Germany, so few people knew the song. (You know the kind of charts fodder people usually perform in that kind of show.) And she kept on doing this. She sang songs by Kate Nash, then by a completely unknown American jazzpop band called The Bird and the Bee, by Jason Mraz, and by Australian singer/songwriter Lisa Mitchell whom few people in Germany had heard of before either. What happened in all of these cases was that, the very next day, every song performed by her, no matter how obscure, would shoot up the German single charts.
If you'd like to see that first performance of hers, you can do that here:
http://www.unser-star-fuer-oslo.de/videos/player/index.html?contentId=57482&initialTab=related
Sorry, I cannot point you to youtube because the TV production company keeps deleting any vid uploaded to YT. There's a short commercial spot here at first, after that, the real video begins. She starts singing at around 1:00. Don't miss her rejoicing after the song is over, it's magic.
What is most remarkable about her is her imperfection. Yes, she is cute, pretty, smart, well-educated, and funny (and rather foul-mouthed, by the way). In a word, completely lovable. But she has no stage experience, never had any lessons, her voice is completely untrained, it's all intuition, no technique, so she makes mistakes, sometimes she doesn't hit the notes right. Half of the people despise her for not singing "properly", not dancing "properly", not behaving "properly". But the other half, me among them, love her to bits and pieces for the sheer naturalness and truthfulness with which she literally lives through the songs she sings. If you'd like to listen to one more example, here's her performing "Mr Curiosity" by Jason Mraz, the only ballad she ever sang. I must admit that it drove tears to my eyes when I first listened to it, precisely because it is not faultless:
http://www.unser-star-fuer-oslo.de/videos/player/index.html?contentId=62452&initialTab=sendung&showId=1448-01
So that's Lena! The funniest thing is that the whole point of that casting show was to pick the German representative for a thing called the Eurovision Song Contest - the Europeans will know what I'm talking about, for the others be it enough to say that it is an age-old, very strange sort of pop song competition which has in the last two decades degenerated into a trash fest in which, furthermore, the Germans usually finish last. The idea was to find someone who could restore our dignity in that field. The result is, now that the nation has found Lena Meyer Landrut, everybody's so happy to have her that nobody gives a damn about the competition anymore.
Ah, so sorry for ranting...
(All of her performances: http://www.unser-star-fuer-oslo.de/kandidaten/)
