All These Questions and Not One of Them About Love

"Why do lily of the valley hang their heads? Why am I always so tired—what holds me here, what keeps me alive, and why?" Balbina asks these questions on Fragen über Fragen—Questions upon Questions—and she isn’t asking rhetorically. She actually goes looking. Not for comfort, not for closure, but for the mechanism inside the mystery, the question that generates the question.

She’s a Berlin-based singer-songwriter who works in a register you don’t hear often: methodical wonder, the precision of someone who spots something strange in a familiar pattern and stops to take notes. She searches for word groups in the alphabet soup. Sends a search party into the moor to track down happiness. The approach sounds naïve until it doesn’t—there’s real craft in the simplicity, a sustained commitment to looking at ordinary things until they stop being ordinary.

Die Regenwolke—The Rain Cloud—is the lead single, and it arrives as a kind of thesis. Balbina does not write love songs. She’ll tell you this directly, with some pride. And yet: there’s a rain cloud tracing down a cheek somewhere in the song, and grief moves through it the way grief moves through things that are technically about something else entirely. She insists it isn’t a love song. You listen and think: sure. Maybe. The distance between what a song declares it’s about and what it makes you feel has always been where the interesting part lives.