Interview with the lovely ALICE ROSE

Yeah, I love music, Of course I enjoy music, I started when I was a kid, with piano, violin along with singing, when I was still in school. I was also a part of school church choirs. I then went onto study music in high school, and I was going to go to the opera academy, later changing my mind and decided to do experimental theatre instead. And then after that I got back into music. 

I've always been passionate about all kinds of art - I went to the art academy and studied media and video art - this was combined with my passion of music. Before I got into music and bands, whilst in Prague, I was really into theatre. I had my own acting agent, and I actually studied this, did some acting jobs like commercial stuff. But I was mainly into experimental theatre such as circus and dance.

For this particular song, I was in a relationship at the time. I was visiting my boyfriend. And then I remember he was kind of escaping, it felt like he was escaping from me, like while I was there, he went to lye under his cushions and his bed, whilst I was standing in the room. So I made the song lyric in my mind (Sings, beautifully may I add) 'You are hiding away from me...But the tear drops on my face couldn't hide away.'

So immediately, this whole little sequence that was happening with us, so I had this image of the tear drops, and the drama of the hiding part under the cushions. And the whole idea of the whole lyric was the image of the stream,the river and the ocean  kind of developed when i worked with my lyric partner Paul. 

I think it is tough being an independent musician. I mean there are lots of options, but it's difficult to have a day job and try to do music full-time. This is because of the DIY movement which is great but it is also very challenging, because a lot of artists are not really business people - not that we can't learn.But I think the business part of the industry is very challenging for someone whose actually a musician or an artist. Actually the album has been completed for a couple of years and I used to have my own label, and I decided that I just don't have the time or skills to do both with full energy. But luckily through my other moniker, Tiger Rose, through that I found my label which I am not releasing on, 'manual music'. And I found that we just had good chemistry which is much more important in this kind of semi-DIY world because I still do a lot of stuff my self. I thought that was very challenging but I am very happy to have a label to work with - I still think labels are very important because it's just people who choose to focus on a different angle of the industry - where I am the creator, they are taking care of the sales, which I think makes perfect sense.

Well, no because I am making music as a single mum, I am also a Dane working in Germany having lived in three different countries, you can call me a citizen of the world, and the whole time I have survived and still done my thing to the full extent. That's my biggest achievement, not giving in and getting a regular job. Keep going!

Well the title, 'Each is a dream' is taken from a quote I once heard - for a while I was doing experimental film and I was cutting up old films from the fifties, and in one of them it said 'Each is a dream in others mind'; and that just kind of resonated with me, like what we project, like i see you, and what I see is what I think I see, my own reflection or projection onto you. It is not really you that I see. Then I did a little bit of research such as the Bible, Shakespeare and other literature have dealt with these issues, of how you see the other person is not necessarily how that other person really is.I think that this is very important to realise that we hold a lot of responsibility to how we see the world and how we conceive others - which aspects of the other person do we really see and get.

Well I did most of the production myself in my own little studio, moved a couple of times throughout the year to different rooms. I did not have chunks of time, where I spend weeks in the studio and have fun, so i ended up doing it over a stretch of time and recorded a lot of stuff in my own studio and then I did a whole lot of stuff with Gabriel Ananda whose a friend of mine. He usually does techno, but he is a very skilled musician who mixed about six of the songs. We also actually have a single coming out this month, Gabriel and I, we also do some electro Pop. He and I met about twelve years ago so we have known each other a long time and done some projects together. And then I wrote to John Parish because I knew he was more accessible than some other famous producers, and he responded straight away saying that he liked my songs so we got some time together - all in all we had like ten days together in the studio. He did some production of some of the songs, my favourite one is ' Each is a dream' where he is singing too and doing the drums.

Okay...let me just check. (Bless her, she actually got her iphone music library out to give me a true picture) I listen to a lot of my own music to work on it, so that's what is what is on it. I have just bought a song, and it is kind of embarrassing..it is Jay Z and Kanye West ...its called N  I and then two stars and and A and S in Paris. I actually bought the song because I walked past a store and I heard the beat and I loved the production in the background. I like hip-hop music production, I don't like rap music with the vocal but I love the production in the background. So I try to get these without the rapper doing their thing on it. I heard it in that shop and I was like what is that? So I bought the album and unfortunately it full of rap, (laughs) there was only one part where you can hear the production part of it. And then the one I listened to before that was Ivana Jovanovic because i bumped into her band here in cologne and they invited me to their concert and I was curious to see what they came up with.