Délage

Interview by Maija Jussila
Photos by Annabel van Royen in Amsterdam, NL

Northern German singer-songwriter Délage caught us off guard with his true blue sounds from a heavy heart. There’s no denying the bleak taste of backwash that comes with stepping into the darker side of infatuation; sometimes a good long stroll through fool’s paradise is what you need to cure a broken state of mind. We sat down with Délage and his band The Togetherness at a classic Amsterdam brown café to talk about the timeless topic of love.

Your latest album, Délage A.K.A. Loverboy Beatface, sounds pretty heartbroken. Are you?

At the time I wrote the album, probably. I always have the feeling that my perspective on how love goes is not confined to how ideal love works. There’s an extremely dark side to love. It makes you into a fool; it’s also extremely narcissistic because it’s about you feeling good. When somebody doesn’t love you, it has a lot to do with acceptance: because you love this person, you still think that this person must love you.

Because you love this person, you still think that this person must love you.

What is ideal love to you?

I think the idea is that your biochemistry goes totally nuts.

What do you think about late night phone calls?

They can be quite desperate, but I guess there’s different kinds. There’s the kind of late night phone call, reminding them how much you love them or how much you’re craving for them. Then there’s these other kind of calls where it’s about regretting something.

You’ve put your phone number out there. Is that an invitation?

Yeah my phone number is on the album cover. The first gig that we played, friends of mine set up a projector toward the wall behind us. They were projecting an iPhone which my sim card was locked to so people could send messages directly from the audience. I think we got 80 messages.

I know that you still love me because in some sense, I love you.

Were they any good?

There was a lot of bollocks, like ‘hey, where are you right now in the crowd?’, but there was also a lot of good stuff, like ‘don’t lose hope’. I think that was quite nice, people reacting to the content of the music.

There’s a song on A.K.A. Loverboy Beatface expressing persistent hope.

Yeah that’s on ‘Loverboy Creation’. Sometimes you still have the thought ‘you must still think about me’, which is sort of narcissistic, and it comes out as: I know that you still love me because in some sense, I love you.

The entire album seems to be a loverboy’s creation.

Yeah, totally. Now that I’ve written this album I have the feeling that I don’t know how I can ever write about anything else but love.