Felix Kramer

"Oh how beautiful life is"

Kill your idols: With his third album "Oh wie schön das Leben is," Viennese songwriter Felix Kramer has finally broken free. In songs about envy, pressure to succeed, and the meditative renunciation of supposed capitalist constraints, Kramer finds his fulfillment. On the way there, among other things, important: a difficult, deeply personal decision - and a shared room.

"Oh how beautiful life is," Viennese songwriter Felix Kramer has thus called his third album. One briefly senses cynicism, or at least smugness, but he means it just the same: the broad grin Kramer wears on his face on the album's cover is just as sincere as the pink cotton candy he's holding while standing in front of the Prater. This album is a declaration of love to life in the firm knowledge of its dark sides and abysses. Metaphorically speaking, Kramer has climbed a peak here after a grueling hike through the deep valley, and musically the same is true.

Let's start where "Oh wie schön das Leben is" began. If you turn the cover of the album around (or just click through the gallery), you get a glimpse of a rather chaotic room, in which a guitar and a laptop are standing, a few microphone stands and a recording booth made by hanging a blanket under the ceiling. It is Felix Kramer's former room in a shared flat, where he recorded "Oh wie schön das Leben is" together with multi-instrumentalist and producer Max Wintersperger.

You could also say: this room is the place where the 28-year-old finally found his artistic identity. After the inspiration on the previous Kramer albums "Wahrnehmungssache" (2018) and "Alles gut" (2020) still audibly came from the classics, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Jacques Brel have served their time as an obvious influence for now.

On "Oh wie schön das Leben is" you can definitely feel that the studied guitarist Kramer has gone through the classical songwriter school, that he has also studied composition and therefore knows pretty well what he is doing, but he translates the knowledge gained in such a way extremely original and individual. Kramer has left all too obvious choruses behind, he combines folk guitars with drum machines and influences of musicians like Mac Miller, mixes chanting with sung passages.

"I wanted to clear the air for once and get out everything that doesn't fit into this classic image," he says. "As a result, many facets of my personality have emerged that I couldn't really live out before." That includes the fact that Felix Kramer mustered the courage to come out as bisexual in 2022, still not a given for some.

"Since then, I feel so much better and more liberated," he says. "It seems almost funny to me from today's perspective that I didn't dare for so long. I also believed for a long time that I had to fulfill such an image of being such a classic folk songwriter. So I held back some aspects of my personality for fear that it wouldn't be understood.

Felix Kramer has freed himself with "Oh wie schön das Leben is" - and you can hear that. He doesn't get into his themes so much through the lyrical I, doesn't take on any roles, isn't a fictional character, but rather he stands there now with cotton candy in front of the Prater, wears colorful shoes and sings about the things that really occupy and interest him. "I've also had more fun with music since then," he says.

"Oh wie schön das Leben is" is always about finding the beauty in the gloom, no matter how hidden it is. Kramer doesn't negate any dark sides or tensions in the process, but pulls them right into the heart of his songs, though without weighing them down any further. Kramer's Viennese Schmäh gives these songs a lightness that suits them exceedingly well, because he has a natural way with it. The Viennese accent is unmistakably there, but it is not overstylized or deliberately turned in the direction of Austropop cliché.

The album opens with "Deine Gründe," a wonderful, smug look at linear life plans and the conformity to capitalism in the biographies of many supposedly rebellious hipsters who do something with media: "You have your reasons for everything/And it's not so easy/And ma can't have everything/And you find that it's enough," he sings. Kramer finds this sad, and you can hear that, but he also sings it with sincere empathy. His special gift is not to settle for cheap mockery, but to articulate compassion for the inner turmoil that life's constraints sometimes force upon us. So when he ponders man's need for control in a world that cannot be controlled, he always means himself.

Kramer is a precise observer who does not take himself out of the equation, who recognizes and exposes life's lies, including his own. "Ich bleib sitzen" atmospherically describes Viennese everyday observations, "Alles gesagt" is a wistful breakup song, "Donau" a life-philosophical consideration, in whose lyrics he, as everywhere, writes the dialect right along: "Was ma am besten kann, ist nicht immer das, was ma liebt/Am Ende muss ma das machen, wo dir wer Geld dafür gibt."

"I think everyone deep down just wants to be important," he says. "Once you get rid of that, you feel a lot better right away." He hasn't quite gotten rid of it himself, of course, which is what "Oh wie schön das Leben is" is about. "The album is also about the compulsion to have to earn money every now and then, not just in this song," Kramer says. "That's really become more important to me myself, too. I'm sure it has something to do with the uncertainty during the pandemic."

At the time, his second album, "Alles gut," had been released - and, like many others, had been slowed down by the pandemic. Kramer sat at home in Vienna, couldn't go on tour and earn money, had fears about the future. It was during this time that songs like the beautifully wistful "Sie" were written. "I really wanted to say something about this carrot of the capitalist system that we're all chasing," he says. "If you just try hard enough, eventually you'll be famous or happy or rich and then everything will be fine. That hollow promise we're all chasing keeps the system going."

As you listen to these songs, you could almost overhear what virtuosity and musical finesse they are of, so smoothly do they glide along. This music is of an exquisitely unobtrusive virtuosity rarely heard. The timing of the trumpet, the bass brilliant in an unobtrusive way, and then the guitars. There are five or six solos on the album that you don't really hear because they don't show off their dexterity. No gimmickry, no superfluous glitter, just the songs take center stage.

Until it was so far, Felix Kramer has reduced these songs more and more, "boiled down" to the most necessary, as he calls it. Sometimes over years. Only when the songs were really as far as he wanted them to be, did Kramer take them on again with Max Wintersperger. In addition to the producer, the other musicians in his band now came to Kramer's shared room; they recorded only a bit of drums and a few strings in the studio. Kramer calls "Oh wie schön das Leben is" his "MacGyver record."

"I'm pretty slow," Kramer says. "I keep boiling lines down, keep asking myself, 'What do I really want to say?' Eventually I'll have a distillate like that, sometimes just one sentence that I really like, and then from that sentence I try to come up with a story." That's what happened with "Deine Gründe." Essentially, the song describes an encounter that he experienced that way and wrote down directly. "But of course I couldn't take it as reality delivered it, that first had to be reduced to the core and transformed until it really expressed my feelings."

Whether in "Er sagt, dass er sich bemüht" - a cheerfully dialogic gender war stomper with juvenile horns - he mocks the spasmodic concrete-damaged clinging of so-called old white men to their privileged world of yesterday, continues the title song of his debut album with "Wahrnehmungssache 4" or moves from the individual to the universal in "Ganz langsam": Felix Kramer always relates to the world in these songs with strong emotional, personal coloring.

It's about envy, pressure to succeed, the meditative turning away from supposed capitalist constraints. "Mir ham schon viele gscheite Leute schon viele gscheite Dinge geraten/And vieles kamma aktiv machen, aber hauptsächlich muss ma warten", he sings in "Ganz langsam", finally: "ganz langsam wird's leichter".

On the way there, "Oh wie schön das Leben is" helps, a declaration of love to life, people and everything in between. When Felix Kramer speaks, his smile is hesitant and skeptical. But it is genuine.