Eloah

ELOAĦ – ‘Proud to Love You’

Elmar “As I have mentioned frequently in interviews, we are not a “soft rock / ballad” band per se. However, romantic love has been, is – and probably will continue to be a very important source of inspiration for me. I am a (helpless?) romantic, and I experience this emotion (which is actually more an umbrella term for a number of different emotions for me) quite strongly. So, I decided to put together an album on that topic choosing from a number of love songs that I had written over the years.

Now, usually love songs tend to be more on the sad side – because when you are happy in love, you enjoy it – why should you write a song about it? But I wanted to do something different: I wanted to create an album about love that was positive without becoming superficial or tacky. I think this is possible because of a number of reasons: First, sometimes the happiness can be the prevailing feeling in an actually bad situation – this is what the song “Proud to Love You” is about – and then what you get is a positive, hopeful song.

Then there is love that you experience to be so fulfilling that next to this fulfilment there is still some “excess” emotion asking you to be cast into song – this is what “My Heart Shall Be Your Fire”, “You Are A Diamond”, “Wonderful Beautiful” and “A Winter’s Tale” are about. Then, of course, there is the (probably) most famous type of love song where you are longing for and dreaming about someone. This can be either purely joyful as in “The Purest You” and “Caterpillar”, or a bit painful as in “Child Within” and “Tuesday Morning”.

Since emotional pain and despair normally accompany romantic love at some point, I chose to put two songs about these emotions with quite self-explanatory titles on the album as well (“How Could I Ever Have Hurt You” and “Why Can’t I Forget You”). Although these songs are about painful emotions, they are clearly a minority. Finally, there is a song I wrote for one of my sons, another kind of love thus, who provided me with most of the lyrics (“King of Winters”, he was about five years old then), and two songs that take the whole topic less seriously, more tongue-in-cheek (“Sugar Refinery” and “Time to Say Goodbye”) to end the album on a both positive and light note.”