Anastacia reflects on German-inspired ‘Our Songs’.

It’s now 25 years since Anastacia launched her recording career, quickly becoming one of the most distinctive voices in popular music thanks to her multi-platinum hits “I’m Outta Love”, “Paid My Dues” and “Left Outside Alone”. In 2023 she broke a six-year recording hiatus with Our Songs, an album of English-language reimaginings of popular German hits.

It’s a one-off idea from an artist who has never been interested in conforming to industry expectations. “I got my deal at 30. I was so unsignable. They couldn’t say I didn’t have a good voice, but what was my category? I wasn’t pop enough, I wasn’t girly enough, I was not going to wear a skirt, and I didn’t want to take off my glasses because I couldn’t see. The tone of my voice was not out there with the way I looked – I wasn’t urban enough. So it was, ‘This girl is some person that we have no idea what to do with’.” She finally broke through those barriers with an appearance on talent show The Cut, where her maturity was an advantage when it came to dealing with the male judges’ comments about her image. Her glasses seemed to be a particular problem. “I was like, ‘Well, I’m not here to be your little Barbie.’ I can’t change the way I sound; I can’t change that I wear glasses. So I think I was very stuck on that: I knew that I could try to sound like someone else, but it never felt authentic.” The one change she did make was adding a tint to her glasses after one too many creepy comments about her “sexy librarian” look. “I was like, ‘Ugh!’ So I started to put a wash of colour with it, whether it was blue or light orange, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is my jam, I love it’.”

Having waited a long time to get signed, success then came incredibly fast and within a year she was performing with her musical hero, Elton John, on a live recording of “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”. “His records were in my family’s house, and so were Barbara Streisand’s. I liked Barbara’s because she sounded pretty, and I thought she was beautiful. But Elton – I wanted to be him. His music, really authentically I felt it, so I’m really glad that I got to work with him and be his friend.” Anastacia says that the cover for Our Songs was partly inspired by the artwork on his albums. “I really looked into being able to have fun with it.” Rather than record label–approved glamorous photography, Anastacia’s portrait is presented graffiti-style on a brick wall. “I feel like that’s the best album cover I’ve ever done. I think it represents the whole journey I took, where I felt like I was a new artist, because it was such a deep dive into who I was.”

“Once I got into the different way of writing it became more doable to create the phrases, the metaphors, the amount of syllables, enough to keep the song sounding like the song, but also to try and make the message sound English”

— Anastacia

The source material for Our Songs ranges from The Scorpions’ hard rock to The Kelly Family’s folk, through R&B, punk and Schlager; anything that had been a hit in Germany between 1980 and 2020 qualified for inclusion. “I chose all the songs from the melody and how it called to me,” she says, admitting that often she knew nothing about the artist or the meaning of the lyrics at first. “That’s how I start writing music anyway; I start with the melody.” Some of the tracks already existed in English-language versions, such as “Monsoon” by Tokio Hotel and Alphaville’s 1984 synthpop hit “Forever Young”, which Anastacia describes as “Beautiful: the words, everything about it, loved it.”

But there were other songs she really wanted that had only been recorded in German, and Anastacia began to doubt the wisdom of the project, concerned that it could be seen as cultural arrogance. “Like, did they ever go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait until someone sings this hit song in English’?!” The turning point came when Campino, lead vocalist of Die Toten Hosen, offered her “Best Day”, his own translation of their 2012 hit “Tage wie diese”. It was only when she listened to him singing the demo that she realized that the half-English Campino was bilingual. Music industry insiders were surprised at his involvement. “They were like, ‘He gave you a song? Oh wow!’ He just knew if I could do it then it would be great, so it worked out well.”

That experience gave her the confidence to think about translating some songs herself but she soon discovered that it wouldn’t simply be a matter of running them through a translation app. “It was not easy at first. Google did not make it any easier – it made it worse!” But eventually she began to see how she could transform the literal translations into usable lyrics that fitted the melody. “The journey was big, but once I got into the different way of writing it became more doable to create the phrases, the metaphors, the amount of syllables, enough to keep the song sounding like the song, but also to try and make the message sound English.”

As the album developed, it became clear that these would be more than cover versions: the songs were taking her own performance in unexpected directions. On her version of Silbermond’s “Symphony”, she planned to “scream it out”, but it wasn’t working. “I guess that’s why she’s a little girl singing the original song. So then I had to tap into my upper register for that. It was interesting – different songs made me decide to choose something I wouldn’t have done.” In other cases, she was able to take the song exactly where she had intended to: “‘Monsoon’ was great. I did a whole different take on it and made it way more Anastacia rocks. I love where it goes. Like, it’s totally me.” She finds it especially satisfying to have taken a chance on such an unusual project and for it to come together so perfectly. “I couldn’t be happier at this moment, because there’s nothing more exciting than completing something that has never been done. I do feel quite inspired artistically. So I’m happy, I’m feeling good.”

Our Songs is available now. Watch the latest video Now Or Never below.

Author: Rachel Goodyear