Neverheart

The title of Maximilian Hecker's song NEVERHEART does indeed allude to J. M. Barrie's Neverland, i.e. to the island where Peter Pan is living a life in eternal youth. However, Hecker's Neverheart, unlike Barrie's Neverland, is not at all positively connoted, for the tongue-in-cheek neologism has to be be regarded as a Wilhelm Hauff cold or rather: stony heart (see Wilhelm Hauff, "Heart of Stone", 1827) – that sort of stony heart that the protagonist of NEVERHEART, this enigmatic musician with the low falsetto who speaks of "reaching out to rise and yet to fall", of "coming home to reconcile his love" and later of "leaving home forevermore" is confronted with in his exalted lovesickness song. Be it his own Neverheart or that one of the addressee of his whispered words – a lover perhaps, his mother even, or anyone he half-heartedly tries to connect with. Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of his neverheartache by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave NEVERHEART its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the song's lyrical content with a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life".