DESCRIPTION:
Taken from the album "Sunday mornings" (CD + LP, released in 2012 on Dornbach Records).

Liner notes:

"I wish many of my poems had come as easily as songs ", writes Rolf Dieter Brinkmann in his 1975 poetry collection entitled Westwärts 1 & 2. This fine phrase says a lot about the challenges involved in writing verse -- though it fails to mention that song is actually the more complex genre. For songs are not only 'written' but built: after you compose them, you must set them to music, arrange, produce, and communicate them (with the band, the studio engineer...), in other words: a whole list of further activities, each of which presents new challenges ... It is a miracle that songs even exist which, upon completion of this complicated process, still sound so simple -- "as simple as (...) opening a door leading out of language and definitions" (Brinkmann) -- a miracle that pop music is capable of working. Norb Payr writes, or rather: builds, just these type of songs.

2
If my memory serves me well, Norb Payr's second solo album was going to be a „simple" record. Unassumingly called Demo 1, it first caused my CD player's belly to swell nine months ago. Where it still remains, a pregnancy later -- but Norb's baby has been growing and thriving. Where once only soft vocals and guitar had hinted at the outlines of a skeleton, the next time I listened, I was treated to pedal steel solos (by Roby Colella) and mandoline lines (Ed Schnabl). Soon to be followed by electric guitar, organ, accordion, and other instruments -- the closer the album came to completion, the more miles it put between itself and the spartan instrumentation which I had come to expect. It speaks for Norb Payr as a worker in song that, even with an eleven-piece band, the pieces don't seem overworked, but remain: simple. I press play, and in the room a door opens which doesn't otherwise exist.

3
When I listen to Norb Payr's Sunday Morning (or A Ride On A Train, It Will Take No Time -- and whatever the songs are called), everything I've never experienced comes back to me: the dawn I've never seen, the friend I don't know, the Grand Café in the Perpignan railway station bar that I've never been to ... And then in the train that I've never taken, a girl sits across from me -- with colors in her eyes no one can paint. She is the woman I want, and I will never get her, but when I watch her dreaming I forget that we have never met. I give her a light (that I don't have) -- that's all I have ... Outside, trees rush by, mountains and flowers, a horse gallops through the moonlit night. We're on our way home, wherever that may be. This train will never stop. This song will never end. I wish I could write poems like this.
Andreas Unterweger (writer)