Alphaville: The second single from the upcoming album “Eternally Yours” is out now!
“Sounds Like a Melody” is the second single from the new Alphaville album “Eternally Yours”, which Marian Gold recorded together with the arrangers Max Knoth, Christian Lohr and the Babelsberg Film Orchestra.
Not only the new Alphaville album as a whole can be described as the result of a special collaboration. The parallels between the large-scale project and its elementary gears are unmistakable. This seems to be particularly visible in “Sounds like a Melody”, a song written by Gold and his fellow companions exactly 4 months before the release of “Neuromancer“ by William Gibson in July 1984. That is a quite astonishing coincidence considering the song deals in the virtual reality adventure of two young lovers beaming themselves into the Hitchcock universe of the movie “Thieves like us“. The music itself offers a dreamy look behind the curtain and the dance of opposing commonalities. Orchestra and Alphaville, the skating dancers in the original music video, dream and reality, wish and reality.
At the same time, the elegiac orchestration of “Sounds Like a Melody” is like a re-encounter with an old acquaintance: the same voice, the same melody, the familiar arrangement, but a completely new sound body. Already in the original, strings were heard towards the end of the song, giving it a symphonic character. They were arranged by Wolfgang Loos and recorded by an ensemble of the Deutsche Oper Berlin under his direction.
“Sounds like a Melody” directly followed Alphavilles debut hit “Big in Japan” in the same year 1984, in Austria even becoming more successful than its predecessor, and with direct Top 10 entries on the entire continent and South Africa. The song is not only directly related to "Big in Japan" and "Forever Young" in terms of its release - like its two neighbours, it brings its very own timbre to Alphaville's legendary debut album. As a “guilty synth pleasure” of the highest order, the song led Alphaville to a gold record in 1993 and has accompanied the band for almost four decades now.
Marian Gold: "When I do interpretations of songs from way back in the history of Alphaville, my voice already knows them. I don't have to wrestle them from it, my mind just follows instead of leading on. It is a process comparable to the method of automatic writing. My singing results from a subconscious interaction, independant of any constraints or purposes of the mind. That is probably the main reason that the passed 4 decades did not leave a significant trace on my vocal performance."
What became Alphaville's second big hit in the almost 40-year-old original as a beat-driven synth number, takes on an almost urgent immediacy with orchestra. The offbeat snare in the Alphaville sound of the 80s becomes the relentless, never-ending forward motion of the parade drum. The grandioso of the orchestra finds its climax with the beginning of the last chorus, as if in fulfilment of what Marian Gold wrote four decades ago: “Give me more tragedy, more harmony and fantasy, my dear, and set it alight, just starting that satellite. Set it alight!”
'Sounds Like A Melody - Symphonic Version' is available digitally on all music platforms.