Konstantin Wecker

Singer/songwriter Konstantin Wecker has long stood at the leading edge of Germany’s Liedermacher movement, a musically sophisticated scene whose lyrics confront social questions, by blending jazz, rock, folk, and classical influences. An only child whose father worked as an opera singer, he entered the world in Munich in 1947. At six he began piano studies, and shortly afterward his curiosity turned toward the humanities and philosophy. After finishing college in 1970 he issued his debut album, Die Sadopoetischen Gesänge des Konstantin Amadeus Wecker, two years later. Reviewers commended the sophistication of his lyrics, and with each successive release he steadily enlarged his audience. Breakthrough arrived in 1977 via the album Genug Ist Nicht Genug and its popular title track, whose lyric declared, “enough is not enough.” That motto encapsulated Wecker’s personal outlook, yet over time the German public grew more familiar with his excesses than with his recordings. Although a devoted following remained, headlines increasingly centered on his struggle with cocaine addiction. In 1993 he published the novel Uferlos, whose stories drew on his own encounters with illegal substances. Two years afterward authorities arrested him for possession, initiating a protracted sequence of postponed proceedings and further detentions that ended in 2000 with a one-year-and-eight-month prison term. Freed in late 2001, Wecker has avoided further drug-related offenses while continuing to stir controversy through outspoken criticism of the German government, organized religion, and global social injustice. He has also turned to composing musicals shaped by the cabaret repertoire of the Weimar Republic and by his idol, Bertolt Brecht. In 2007 the Bear Family label honored him with two expansive boxed sets: the seven-CD Zwischenräume die Studio compiled every studio recording from 1972-1987, and the ten-CD Alle Lust Will Ewigkeit gathered live performances from 1975-1987.