Berlin, Ohio by IMustBe Leonardo

The story of "Berlin, Ohio" begins one morning in February 2022.
Ten years had passed since I moved to Berlin, and that day I looked out the living room window and thought about some of the people I had met here, and who had left the city and the rooms they used to call home.
Berlin appeared to me as a sort of unstoppable vortex made up of figures who arrived with their aspirations or who left because their future was now somewhere else. Those who remained had only two states of mind available: that of those who are making their dreams come true and that of those who are giving up.
I thought I should tell the stories of those empty rooms, and of the ones who had left them.

I wondered what I would pack, leaving my flat, and the first thing that came to mind was my kitchen knife. Then I told myself that I would surely make countless lists, as I had done every time I left one of the many flats I had lived in - and I laughed at my lists and my plans for the future (often formulated as ultimatums addressed to myself), always written with the firm belief that everything would come true.

A few weeks later, on February 24, 2022, the "special military operation" of the Russian army in Ukraine began.
In addition to those who had freely decided to come here in pursuit of their own aspirations, I now also saw those who, over the years, had come to Berlin fleeing war, terror and poverty. How many of them stayed? How many left?
The largest reception center for Ukrainian refugees was set up in my neighborhood, Reinickendorf, and so they began to come along the lakeside near the building where I live. They came here to chat or smoke in a place that gave them a sense of peace, or to sit alone on a bench and spend hours looking at the lake, staring at the water, the sky, the swans, without being able to erase the image of the places they had to leave behind.

At the end of March, Elvia and I went to Paris for a couple of days. She had some business appointments and I was temporarily unemployed.
As I sat looking at the Seine, I thought about Wenders' film “Paris, Texas”. Travis, the protagonist, had bought a piece of land in Paris, a town in Texas, believing that he and his family would be happy there. Perhaps my friends who were leaving Berlin, as well as the refugees who came and went, were also looking for their own Paris, Texas – or for an even smaller town, like Berlin, Ohio.
The album I wanted to compose and write had found its title.

Over the next two months I recorded dozens of demos.
On June 1st, I started a new job, and I thought that waiting a few months before listening to those fragments again would help me choose the tunes to work on more easily.
In the fall, I sifted through the recordings until I had put together what seemed to me to be a handful of good songs waiting for lyrics.

Since I could work remotely for a few months of the year, I decided to record the album in Montreal, at Hotel2Tango, with Howard Bilerman. In addition to putting Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” on tape and working with Leonard Cohen, Weather Station, and other artists I like, Howard had recorded the last two Vic Chesnutt's albums.
I was positive he would help me find what I was looking for.
In early December, I booked the studio for March. Over the next three months, I wrote the lyrics to the songs.
On March 10th, I went into the studio. I told Howard the story of the record, and I said I wanted ​these songs to sound as played by a person alone in an empty room.

With the exception of two tracks that were recorded by Peter Deimel at the Black Box studio in France, and some vocals recorded at my place in Berlin, the album is the one that left Hotel2Tango in April 2023, and it is made only of sounds that have traveled the road from the microphones to the console and from the console to the tape.

"Berlin, Ohio" is a 36-minute album. It contains imperfections, smudges, wrinkles, flaws, and it is a work made with all the honesty, dedication and seriousness that Howard, Peter and I have been capable of.
I am proud of this record, I am happy that it exists thanks to me, and I am bold enough to say that this work belongs to the present, to the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century - because many of the stories and thoughts it is made of could not have existed before now.
It is right and proper, therefore, to ask those who want to listen to it to dedicate 36 minutes of their time to it. Those who want to have the opportunity to love it or hate it, trash it or appreciate it, will have to decide to do so, by inserting a CD into a player or coming here on Bandcamp. They won't find it in their ears by chance, because they've outsourced their musical choices to the owners of some streaming platforms, or because years ago, they decided to follow me on Spotify and don't even remember (and anyway, my works are no longer on Spotify).
If it's true that in our era, the rules of the game for those who make music and try to reach their audience may seem inescapable (but when didn't they seem so?), it's equally true that an author can decide whether to accept them or not, whether to beg (or pay) for a few seconds of distracted attention, or make it so that an act of will on the part of a conscious and sentient human being is still required to listen to - or avoid listening to - a record.

Ever since I was in the studio in Montreal, I wanted every copy of this album to contain a piece of an object used to record it.
I can't – and I don't want to – tear apart my Telecaster, but I could tear to pieces its strings, the ones I composed and recorded this album with. So each one of the 100 CDs will come with one piece of string (numbered and classified: each string was divided into 16 or 17 fragments).

The fragments of the strings are ONLY on the CDs (not on the postcards).

For any information, doubt or question (purchasing multiple copies, shipping to different addresses, hand deliveries, payments via bank transfers, etc.), please write to imustbeleonardo@gmail.com

Thank you for the time and consideration,
Leonardo

IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter.

Since 2016, he has composed, recorded and played songs around Europe and America.

Truly cool indie radios and magazines worldwide spent amazing words about his music, and called him "hugely talented" (making him hugely happy).

His new album "Berlin, Ohio" was released on January 6th, 2025.

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