With her debut album "Be Your Own Prince“ (Kreisler/
Akkerbouw Records), Berlin actress Sandra Hüller offers us an opportunity to use our ears over our eyes, luring us into the molded and emotionalized realities of an experimental singer-songwriter.
Let us try to forget what we know about one of the most forceful German actresses of the last decade and take a look at the fact that Hüller simply enjoys singing. This is nothing new, or a role she is playing, but a passion that has been with her forever. What has changed is her decision to let us listen.
So who is it exactly that we are lending our ears to?
Possibly a woman telling her stories about encounters, tumultuous love, conflicting emotions, dreams, doubts, “Champaigner”, and her personal relationship to pornography. Among her subtly orchestrated “nature painted” narratives she stays willingly indecisive between lo-fi acoustic dream sequences and a harshly melodized up-tempo reality. Just like in her acting work, she moves back and forth through a range of expressions. Faced with the quiet sounds of a kalimba in “In The Trees” or the clanking brass ensemble in “My Love (Last Breath)”, the listener has no trouble discerning when they are invited into Hüller's dreamscape or when they are just a bystander to her hurling defiant statements at an undisclosed other. As randomly strung together as they seem at first listen, the seven songs of her ephemeral debut album have one significant element in common: they all originated from a musical passion that is used to musicalize genuinely felt sentiments.
Let us forget about the actress Hüller for a moment longer. This album has us searching in vain for the artist to introduce herself, instead we find ourselves in the middle of a mysterious mix of feelings and emotions.
“So why don’t you build your own castle? Why don’t you be your own prince? Cause I can tell you this is not where the story begins.”
Where is she going with her songs? In the midst of disparate stories, the listener remains perplexed if they are only meant to be a witness or if Hüller is addressing them directly.
Please listen to me, but learn to take care of yourself, seems to be an underlying message. But perhaps it is not really the intent of the singer-songwriter Hüller to tell us truths with her music. Instead, she seems to want us to partake in her emotional world. Or the songs might just attempt to communicate an expressionistic oeuvre in a typical Prog-Pop manner, pointing out her influences and admiration for progressive pop-women like Kim Gordon, Björk, or Kate Bush.
In an interview with a German cultural network, Hüller – down-to-earth and humble – described herself as an actress who happened to release music. Not with the aim of a musical career but to follow a youthful passion and finally build a space for song ideas that have existed in her for a long time. As she goes on in the interview, she mentions that instead of hiding that impulse, she wanted to give it a try, be honest, and invite everybody into this special room of hers. To do so, and with the help of her friend and producer Daniel Freitag, she built her own intimate castle and opened its doors to the listener's ears. Now it is on us to give it a try and follow her words and melodies while focusing on our own resonances – to be our own prince. Through its dreamy humbleness, the music might achieve the potential to lift us into the middle of a story and to reflect on our own personal molded and emotionalized realities. It’s definitely worth a try.
by Johannes Böttge, an art historian, creative producer, and curator from Berlin, currently based in Toronto. The intersections of aesthetics, popular culture and music have played a large part in Böttge's professional and personal life, be it in his musical upbringing as a member of the St. Thomas Boys Choir, work within the music industry, or his academic education in musicology. 
