Vexations

It isn't Waits, nor Cave either but he has an enormous talent...

- Q Magazine

(Vexations) is a lyric patchwork. Once I had decided on my topic for the album, I researched it and then put quotes together from the books I was reading around the subject and then I merged my own lyrics into them. That was my concept of writing this album.

- Konstantin Gropper

Vexations marks a leap forward for Gropper, the classically trained singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Berlin. A beautiful work full of imagination with its poetic depth, classical montages and haunting panoramic mood mosaics.

According to Gropper the album is "about the feeling of calmness, after managing vexations, the album isn't about vexation itself, it's about dealing with that vexation." Its title was taken from a piano piece by Erik Satie, first printed in 1949 which becomes a sort of leitmotif on the album.

The idea for the album was inspired by the story of Seneca the Younger, the Roman Stoic philosopher who was ordered to take his own life by Nero. He wrote books entitled On The Shortness Of Life, On Tranquillity Of Mind and On The Happy Life. "They could be the album's subtitles," says Gropper. The track Seneca's Silence itself asks 'what are you thinking? Why are you doing what you are being told'?

The song We Are Free is built around the Stoics' idea of liberation: "You're only free if you can give up the things you love at any moment, that's the price to pay" explains Gropper. "It's a brutal type of freedom, and I tried to think gently about that."

The album also takes inspiration from Sartre's Nausea. "To me," he explains, "losing the sense in everything like Sartre does, that was an image of growing up, of finding your own perspective and losing the one you learned as a child. The sounds of the forest you hear at the beginning of the track Nausea - that forest is behind my parents' house. I used to play there as a child. The album is also about stepping out of the forest metaphorically, about stepping out of that childhood, and of course with that, the problem starts."

On Get Well Soon's debut album, Konstantin played all the instruments himself. It was critically-acclaimed in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK and made the charts in most of those countries, selling around 50,000 copies.

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